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The nostalgia is heavy with this one for me. Coming out in winter 1989, I was two-years-old and this was the first movie I saw in theaters. Apparently, the opening shark attack frightened me so that I refused to leave my mother’s lap until the appearance of Scuttle, at which point I had calmed down enough to sit on my own, and was completely enraptured by the viewing experience. I’ve since watched the film dozens and dozens of times, knowing practically every piece of dialog and song lyric.
What made me happy about this viewing experience, and it’s been a few years since I last watched it, was how The Little Mermaid still works. The jokes still land, the songs are memorable, Ursula is a glorious villain, Prince Eric an impossibly handsome prince, and Ariel the first of the new Disney princesses. The Little Mermaid signaled a, pardon the unintentional pun, sea change for the studio. Ushering in the Renaissance, it was a return to the big Broadway-style musicals from the studio, transforming beloved fairy tales into glossy family entertainment.
After the “just good enough” Oliver and Company, Disney lavished more time, money, and effort upon this feature. The why is easy enough to figure out, the major players working on the film knew they had something major on their hands and lobbied for more time and money. Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, the best things to enter the Disney studios in some time, pushed hard for greatness in their work, turning in a collection of songs that have become staples of the Disney songbook. The quality of these songs pushed the directors to lobby for more breathing room and effort, for a return to the quality of the Silver Era. Thank god they held out.
While The Little Mermaid is not perfect, some of the animation is not as lush as follow-ups, some of the backgrounds not as detailed, but it’s a quantum leap in effort from the prior era. This is a seismic change, and one watches the film with the feeling that something was happening within, as though a sleeping giant was awakening. Later films like Beauty and the Beast proved this feeling to be true, and The Little Mermaid holds its own nicely.
Granted, like many other prior adaptations, The Little Mermaid smooths over some of the darker edges of the story, transplants a happy ending in place of the tragedy of the original, and does put some effort into making its princess more lively and spunky. Ariel’s central romance is still weird, but her clear preference is the human world, a obsession that the film hints as being a life-long one. She treats Prince Eric as her tourist guide to wild world of humanity, seemingly uninterested in any romance, until a romantic boat ride accompanied by Sebastian serenading them with “Kiss the Girl.” It’s not the only story-telling problem that the film encounters.
For all of her personality, Ariel goes weirdly flat in the final act. Her agency, scheming, and smarts tossed aside so that Eric and King Triton can take on Ursula, leaving her cast off to the sidelines. For all of mold-breaking she did in the first two acts, she returns to the mute, helpless damsel-in-distress of the previous eras princesses. The Little Mermaid wanted to both change-up the formula, and return to it for revitalizing powers. Enough of it leans hard on shaking things up that these weird moments of problematic story structures can be forgiven.
And then there’s Ursula. If for no other reason, watch The Little Mermaid for it’s the grand bitch diva Ursula. A corpulent sea witch, whose bottom half is that of a black squid and top half based on Divine, she’s one of the greatest and most memorable of villains in the Disney canon. Her diva tantrums know no limits, and her penchant for quips and fabulous shade placed the germ for my love of drag queens.
If The Little Mermaid isn't as perfect as Sleeping Beauty, that doesn't mean it isn't one of the great benchmarks in the studio's output. Think of how beloved it is, and how it so clearly earns that reputation. Sure, it's outclassed by later films in the Renaissance, but it comes the closest to the Golden or Silver Era magic for the first time in roughly twenty years. It's a return to the lively musicals the studio used to put out with regularity, and just different enough from the set formula to points towards the later films in the Renaissance and beyond.
