Meet Simea, Moana's little sister and a feisty addition to Moana 2 (exclusive)

Moana is officially a wayfinder, but she's also now a big sister.

Moana 2, which hits theaters on Nov. 27, introduces a host of fresh faces, but perhaps the most important one of all is a sibling who ties Moana (Auli'i Cravalho) back to home more strongly than ever before.

In the sequel, animators introduce Simea (Khaleesi Lambert-Tsuda,) a rambunctious 3-and-a-half-year-old who wants to be just like her big sister. Simea has always been a key part of continuing Moana's story and is a character who's been part of the mix as far back as the early days of development on a Moana Disney+ series, which was then redirected to become this film.

"Simea is Moana's mini," says Lambert-Tsuda, introducing her character to Entertainment Weekly. "She is cute and energetic, so I wanted to be cute and energetic when I was saying my lines."

Co-director David Derrick Jr. was inspired to create Simea by his own family life (he has a young daughter, Samea) and the age gap between his kids. During the pandemic lockdown, his daughter, now 21, spent a lot of time with his son, now 7 — and their bond was tested when his daughter was able to venture out into the world again. "He would grab her and he's like, 'Samea, when are we going to live together forever again?'" Derrick recalls. "It was so hard, but I was seeing things that we all have to go through as you grow up. It's beautiful and it's difficult."

From those interactions, he helped shape Simea and the ways in which she draws Moana back to her people and her island. When Moana receives a mysterious call, she realizes she must venture further than she ever has before (this time with a crew backing her up) to try to find other communities across the sea. But she's not aching to leave as much as she was in the 2016 film, in part because she knows it could be months, if not years, until she sees her sister again.

Kevin Webb, one of the head animators, wanted to lean into the ways in which Moana is more than just a sibling in Simea's life. "The relationship between Simea and Moana was the most important thing to try to decode and unravel," he explains of the two, who didn't grow up together given their age difference. "So Moana is not only her big sister, she is a guardian and a leader to her, but she has this unique relationship where she's the only one who can speak to Simea as a peer and get to the core of her."

In animating Simea, Webb was tasked with creating much of Simea's personality, especially those aspects expressed through her physicality. When he first started on the project, his own daughter was 3 years old, and she provided plenty of inspiration. But so did Moana herself.

"When we were developing Simea's personality, a lot of it came from, 'What would it be like to grow up with a big sister as cool and badass as Moana?'" he says. "Simea is going to be just as scrappy and fiery as Moana was when she was little. So, we tried to come up with a strong enough personality for her that we could match Moana's energy on screen, which is a really fun alchemy to play with when you have this 3-and-a-half-year-old version of a character that is very unique in their own way, but is still connected to Moana."

Lambert-Tsuda also found that same sense of awe and love in Simea while voicing her. "I don't have a sibling in real life so it was cool to pretend I have one," she says. "And it's Moana, the coolest big sis ever! I wish I could meet her in real life!"

Webb wasn't only inspired by his daughter's personality, but also by a physical trait he shares: his teeth. "One of the things that I tapped into immediately with the design of Simea was that she has these glorious buck teeth that I love," Webb adds. "I grew into my teeth at a very late age. My daughter has the same thing, and it's something that I find very charming and endearing. We are celebrating her wonderful buck teeth, which are the cutest kind of part of her."

Additionally, Webb studied videos of his daughter running at that age and tried to employ that sense of a slightly restrained whirling dervish in the ways that Simea moves through space. "As adults, we gain this dexterity and this ability to be precise with our movements," he explains. "But kids are chaos when they're running. They're not so much running, but stopping themselves from falling over at a very high speed. She's almost tripping over her feet. That makes her very specifically feel of that age."

With those specific physical characteristics nailed down, animators then focused on conveying how Simea's courage and personality that's as big as (if not more than) Moana's. "When I think of Moana, I think of her unflappable optimism and her confidence," Webb notes. "We have that with Simea as well. Younger kids haven't built up the filtration system that we as adults have where they know when to hold their tongue. So, she's got this fiery energy of being Moana's little sister, but she hasn't learned when to hold her tongue. And I love her for that."

Which we see on full display when Simea learns Moana will be setting out on a journey of unknown length, without her. "She's a kindred spirit to Moana," Derrick says. "She's not okay with [her sister leaving], but then she knows she's Moana and she has to go. So, she still gives her that drive."

But Webb and animators also didn't want to subvert Simea's role in the plot by leaning too hard into the more obvious signifiers of young childhood. "Simea becomes such an emotional fulcrum of the story," he adds. "She needs to carry with her a lot of gravity for Moana. A lot of people might lean into what I would call symbols of emotions when they're acting, but that doesn't feel truthful when you put it onto a child. They experience these things in a very visceral but complex way, where anger can easily mix with sadness."

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"You get this really interesting alchemy of those two emotions coming out," Webb continues. "They don't know how to process. Kids, they don't just get pouty or something, they feel things so strongly — and it can really fire out of them quickly. There's no games they play. It's all right there."