Film Review: The Little Mermaid – Review

The Little Mermaid  is on general release, certificate PG.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

Disney’s penchant for creating live action remakes of its animated intellectual property has seen variable quality results, from mediocre to terrible. And so the announcement that The Little Mermaid was next on the list was met with some trepidation.

Part of that is due to the place of the 1989 animated movie version in Disney history. The animation side of the company’s business had been in the doldrums for some years, although the box office success of the low-budget The Great Mouse Detective had convinced new Disney chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg to consider more animated features.

It was bringing in Howard Ashman to assist with story duties on the adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s tale that changed everything. He transformed the story to give it a Broadway-style musical structure, bringing in his songwriting partner Alan Menken, with whom he had worked on The Little Shop of Horrors.

The rest is history: with the release of this film, what has become known as the Disney Renaissance had begun, and a slew of animated musicals followed in its wake.

So The Little Mermaid occupies a special place both in Disney’s timeline, and in the hearts of fans. It was important, then, that the transformation from animation to live action – or as close to live action that movie involving mythical merfolk and talking sea creatures could be – worked.

That it does is due in no small part to the wise decision to hire Rob Marshall as the new film’s director. No stranger to musicals, he has five Tony nominations to his credit, and has directed the movie adaptations of Chicago, Nine and Into the Woods, as well as 2018’s Mary Poppins Returns. He thus brings with him the knowledge, and more importantly the desire, to see that The Little Mermaid succeeds as a musical.

One of the biggest ways in which Marshall keeps things rolling is by largely retaining the structure of the 1989 film. We first encounter the world of the sea through a sailing ship under the command of Jonah Hauer-King’s Prince Eric, while fathoms below Halle Bailey’s Ariel is fascinated with the world above.

Apart from a few small changes (Ariel is now late for a conference with her father, King Triton, and sisters rather than a concert) matters progress much as one would expect. Extra back story is delivered, at times clunky, for some of the supporting players. Eric is an adopted foundling, whose yearning to explore the oceans mirrors Ariel’s own quest for discovery; Ursula the Sea Witch (Melissa McCarthy), meanwhile, is explicitly Triton’s younger sister.

Much like The Jungle Book and The Lion King remakes, a lot of what is seen, especially in the underwater sequences, is largely computer generated. It’s all beautifully rendered, although some of the compositing of merpeople into the action does become noticeably ropy in places.

In major supporting roles, Daveed Diggs takes on the role of Sebastian the crab, with Awkwafina gaining an enlarged role for bird-brained seabird Scuttle. Both creatures exemplify the “uncanny valley” aesthetic where CG-generated creatures neither feel complete realistic nor completely animated. But they are certainly improvements on some of Disney’s previous attempts, and that’s helped by voice performances that are warm and engaging.

But ultimately, it’s the musical numbers that will concern most people. Alan Menken has returned to composition duties, and while Howard Ashman’s remain largely intact, Lin-Manuel Miranda has stepped in to act as Menken’s lyricist.

The most noticeable changes – apart from omissions of ‘Daughters of Triton’ and ‘Les Poissons’ – are three new songs. Sadly, these are largely forgettable. Hauer-King’s Eric gets his own solo, ‘Wild Uncharted Waters’, that feels as insipid as the cartoon version of the character, unbecoming for a performance that doesn’t need it. Awkwafina and Diggs get a fun duet, ‘The Scuttlebutt’, which matches their characters. Unfortunately, musically it sticks out as very unlike the rest of the score, its fast-paced semi-rap very much more in Miranda’s style than Menken and Ashman’s.

More successful is Bailey’s ‘For the First Time’, a number which Ariel sings to herself after she has surrendered her voice to walk on land. It offers an opportunity for the character to express her complex thoughts and emotions at a point in the musical where otherwise she can just facial expressions, and works well. It fills a hole in the second half of the movie (always where the gaps between songs seem the largest). Menken and Miranda miss a trick in giving a big solo to King Triton, whose anguish over losing his daughter begs for one – but with Javier Bardem in the role, perhaps that’s a blessing.

The other point in the number’s favour is Bailey herself, whose Ariel is wonderful company throughout. Whether speaking or singing, Bailey epitomises everything that a Disney princess should be, especially in this more modern era. Her Ariel is independent and spirited in all the right ways, and what success this movie has is fundamentally down to her.

Served less well by time and casting is Ursula, the Sea Witch. McCarthy is as scenery-chewing as you’d want from a big, camp villain. Much of her dialogue, particularly early in the movie, hews closely to Pat Carroll’s in the animated movie. New additions to the character reveal her to be the younger sister of Ariel’s father Triton, lending her desire to usurp the king an extra twang of godly authenticity. The same cannot be said of her makeup, however – while her CG lower half is an engaging mass of cephalopod tentacles, her eye make up is resolutely 2D; to call it basic would be doing it a kindness.

And the denoument as Ursula seems to be about to win has a piquancy thanks to that family connection. For a moment, it appears that The Little Mermaid has learned the lesson of so many recent action movies. But no, alas, sooner rather than later the personal dynamics give way to another hulking CGI monstrosity, robbing Ursula, and McCarthy, of the death scene they rightly deserve.

The Little Mermaid concludes with an ending that keeps the door open for more adventures with Ariel and Eric. One hopes that, if they do indeed happen, they are of high quality than Disney’s direct-to-video animated sequels. For while this live-action remake never quite reaches the heights of the original, it is at least far from the worst crime that Disney has perpetrated on Andersen’s sea creature.

Scott Matthewman