Ever since roughly 2016, when Disney company man Jon Favreau helmed the live-action remake of The Jungle Book, the question on my mind has been, “Why?” What, exactly, is the point of trying to redo masterpieces from the golden age of Disney animation with modern CGI tech? A live-action Cinderella that uses the 2,000-year-old fairy tale as a jumping off point, sure. Go for it. But no audience ever said, “The problem with Dumbo is that the elephants weren’t realistic enough.”
The real answer is that executives who are terminally infested with late-stage capitalist brain worms want to reuse these free intellectual properties Walt Disney appropriated from the public domain because they have a whole lot of capital invested in theme park attractions based on these stories. They want the goose to lay some more golden eggs without properly feeding the goose with new stories.
But just because you’re bringing new film technology to bear on an old story doesn’t mean that the results are going to look better. Look no further than Flounder, the best friend of Ariel in The Little Mermaid. In the 1989 Disney animated film, Flounder is a pretty simple yellow and blue fish with a friendly, humanlike face that fits his bubbly middle-schooler personality. In the 2023 version of The Little Mermaid, Flounder is an actual fish. His colors are now silver on black. His face is as impassive and free of human emotion as, well, a flounder. When he is scooped from the ocean by a passing fishing boat along with Ariel (Halle Bailey), he flops around on deck like an actual fish out of water. There’s nothing young kids like more than watching the character they’re supposed to identify with suffocate slowly!
Did the suits at Disney who have been shepherding this $250-million behemoth since 2017 think the “kids these days” don’t like hand-drawn animation? Anime is all the kids want to talk about! Disney would have been better off poaching some Japanese animators from one of Tokyo’s notoriously thrifty anime houses and turning them loose on the story of the mermaid princess who lives “Under the Sea” and wants to be “Part of Your World.” Instead, we got something that cost as much as Avatar: The Way of Water but looks like crap.
It’s a shame because Halle Bailey, half of a pop duo with her sister Chloe, gives 100 percent to the role of Ariel. She’s got vocal chops, passion, and a love for the material that shines through the crowded frames she shares with swarming sea life. But when she climbs up on a rock to recreate the poster image of “Part of Your World,” the epic wave that’s supposed to add an exclamation point to the climax evaporates like sea spray. It’s a metaphor for the entire production.
The film’s other bright spot is Melissa McCarthy as Ursula the Sea Witch. Like Bailey, she clearly understands the assignment better than her director. Her rendition of “Poor Unfortunate Souls” is the kind of camp romp you want from an over-the-top Disney villain.
Too bad director Rob Marshall treats The Little Mermaid’s music like he’s embarrassed of it. Did you think “Under the Sea,” the showstopper that earned Samuel E. Wright an Academy Award, was a little too edgy? You’re in luck, because Hamilton’s Daveed Diggs sucks all the life out of it. The new songs from Lin-Manuel Miranda, particularly the hip-hop flavored “The Scuttlebutt,” flop like a fish out of water.
The 1989 original is 83 minutes long; this one is 135 minutes long, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out what they did with the extra time. Marshall and screenwriter David Magee could have explored the tragic implications of Hans Christian Andersen’s original story of lovers trapped between worlds, which ends with Ariel sacrificing herself because she refuses the Sea Witch’s order to kill her Above World paramour Eric. Nope. Disney’s regressive ending, which celebrates Ariel’s decision to change everything that’s unique about herself to please a man, remains more or less intact.
Like The Jungle Book and The Lion King before it, this flabby, dull remake of The Little Mermaid will be forgotten by this time next year — just in time for the live action remake of Moana.
The Little Mermaid
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