The Little Mermaid

4 outta 5

As the seemingly inevitable Disney Live Action remake parade continues, it is now time for The Little Mermaid. Disney is probably remaking all its animated classics just so people will stay on the Disney Plus app for related content after watching a remake. Surprisingly, this turned out pretty good even if this Little Mermaid’s best moments are basically recreations of the best moments from the 1989 animated film. And it is a bit weird why this film is a full 50 minutes longer than the 1989 film when it’s essentially the same. There are some new songs that aren’t anywhere near as iconic as the original although one of the best new musical moments is an incredibly weird rap digression that gets points for being goofy. Is this remake ultimately pointless? Probably, but it looks good and at times it soars.

Ariel (Halle Bailey) is a mermaid princess living under the sea with her father, King Triton (Javier Bardem). With her companions, Sebastian the Crab (Daveed Diggs), Flounder the fish (Jacob Tremblay) and Scuttle the seabird (Awkwafina), Ariel constantly talks about the surface world and loves collecting trinkets from above. One day she rescues Prince Eric (Jonah Hauer-King) from a shipwreck but vanishes before Eric realizes who she is. When her father discovers Ariel was travelling to the surface world, he destroys her collection of human trinkets and tells her never to visit again. Into Ariel’s life comes the sea witch Ursula (Melissa McCarthy), who offers Ariel a deal: she will turn Ariel human for three days but take away her voice. If Ariel can get a kiss of true love will Ariel get her voice back and remain human, or else she will become property of Ursula. Now human but silent, Ariel meets Eric but their courtship may not be as easy as it seems, especially when Ursula tries to take matters in her own tentacles.  

The film is going for a sort of photorealism with the sea creatures, very similar to the 2019 Lion King CGI remake (which I reposted my review here). It sort of makes sense to attempt realism because the CGI sea animals perform aside real humans (who are also CGI enhanced as well, obviously because they couldn’t cast real mermaids). The CGI animals should look like they’re “real” but unfortunately, some of the designs are odd. The very expressive animated Sebastian from the original has been replaced with a somewhat disconcerting halfway cartoony yet halfway real crab. The vocal performance of Diggs as Sebastian makes up for it as he is bombastic as Sebastian should. Flounder is smaller than the animated version and therefore even more useless to the story. At least Flounder in the animated film could help move Ariel around, this one is just a tiny little squeaking fish with a chipper Tremblay’s vocal performance. Awkafina’s Scuttle basically just looks like a regular bird, and thankfully the mouth opens and closes like a beak instead of trying to emulate talking, and most of the emoting is from body movement and Awkafina’s bombastic vocal performance. At least the CGI characters in Little Mermaid are more expressive than the Lion King remake where the characters barely emoted because it strived to look “real”.  

The original songs are recreated here very faithfully with some minor tweaks and omissions. Although one of the best bits from the animated film during the “Under the Sea” was the line “Guess who end up on the plate” with a shot of a singing fish on a plate, but here the “plate” line is just delivered with a somewhat unsettling closeup of Sebastian. Sebastian’s confrontation with the French chef from the original film is completely absent, however clipping that scene makes sense because it was very much a divergence where the film became a Looney Tunes cartoon for five minutes. There are three new songs which aren’t as good. Eric gets a song to himself and its standard hero song stuff, while silent Ariel gets to sing entirely in her mind, but it lets Bailey show off more of her impressive pipes. The new song that lands in a fun way is a rap between Scuttle and Sebastian called “Scuttlebutt”, it’s completely jarring tonally to the film’s classical musical style, but it works for being random.

Bailey as Ariel sticks very close to the animated version of Ariel with her vocals and physical acting. But it’s a good performance that requires big singing and wordless emoting. Bardem takes a break from his baddie psycho roles like No Country for Old Men or Skyfall and plays a good guy for once, but even his King Triton goes dark and destroys his daughter’s cache of surface trinkets. He even gets one of the movie’s more emotional bits when Triton realizes he must let his daughter go. There’s a lot more backstory about Prince Eric but more Prince Eric isn’t what one wants from a Little Mermaid film. As Ursula, McCarthy puts in an entertaining performance and emulates the original animation closely.

The best stuff in The Little Mermaid is when it unabashedly sticks close to the original. But by transporting to a mostly CGI domain with some bits of human torsos on CGI Mermaid tails, it’s almost as if the film is still animated anyway. This may be a superfluous remake, but it looks and sounds great.