Short review of ‘The Little Mermaid’.

The Little Mermaid: A Game-Changing Movie

You could make an argument that The Little Mermaid—the original from 1989, not the remake released this weekend—is the most significant movie made in the past 35 years. It changed the course of motion pictures by establishing a market for animated features that had never really existed before.

Decades after its release, The Little Mermaid remains a game-changer in the world of cinema. It revived the Walt Disney Company, which had been making mediocre movies for two decades following Walt’s death in 1966. The movie’s dazzling musical numbers proved to be the secret weapon that launched Disney animation into the stratosphere, with follow-on pictures Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast demonstrating the power of an indelible score.

The Birth of a New Era

Thanks to The Little Mermaid, the animated motion picture has become the most reliable box office performer the cinema has ever seen. Disney, Pixar, Dreamworks, and Illumination have all followed in its footsteps, making animated features that have captured the hearts of audiences worldwide. By 2019, Disney had become the dominant force in American popular culture and the most powerful movie studio since MGM’s heyday in the 1940s.

The Power of Music

What made people see the original over and over again were the songs and how they were visualized. The movie’s five short songs, including the showstoppers given to a secondary character, Sebastian the Jamaican-accented crab, were unforgettable.

• Ariel, the central character, has one solo.
• Eric, her love interest, doesn’t sing at all.

But no one remembers the lulls or the opening 10 minutes. What they remember is Ariel’s longing to be human, her teenage struggles with her loving but tyrannical father, and how Ursula the sea-witch plays on those struggles.

The New Version

The new version of The Little Mermaid runs 2 hours and 15 minutes, which is a mistake. While it’s easily the best of the studio’s efforts to turn its musical cartoons into live-action pictures, it still falls short. The Will Smith Aladdin was just awful, and the Emma Watson Beauty and the Beast was maybe worse. The sequences of ships in trouble at sea are beautifully conceived, and the special effects work is far better than expected. But everything added beyond the original 82 minutes is ultimately superfluous.

Still, the wondrous Daveed Diggs as the voice of Sebastian knocks “Under the Sea” out of the park, even though the number as a whole can’t compare to the hilarity of the 1989 version.

The Little Mermaid is a fairy tale for children about a mermaid with daddy issues who goes to a sea-witch to become human. Nobody cares about Eric and what he’s like; there’s no drama when it comes to Ariel and Eric, just as there never is any drama about a princess and her true love. Everything added here, every minute beyond 82 minutes, is ultimately superfluous.

It’s my favorite moment in the original movie. There’s no “yeah” in the new movie. There, right there, is everything that’s wrong with The Little Mermaid in a nutshell. It has reduced one of the key movies in history to a creditable but kind of boring piece of work.