Fairy tales do not typically stand up to a lot of scrutiny. One does not hear the story of Sleeping Beauty and think, Well, that all seems logical. These gauzy fables function because they only vaguely resemble reality, a condition that makes them perfect as subjects of Disney cartoons. But that also makes them terrible as subjects of Disney “live-action” remakes, which have been a scourge on pop culture for more than a decade now; beloved children’s classics are blown out to epic proportions for the sake of completely capitalistic nostalgia. The latest to wash up on Hollywood’s shores is The Little Mermaid, which takes the charming 1989 film that began Disney’s animated “renaissance” and turns it into an aquarium of naturalistic fishy horror.
One of the most baffling patterns of these “live-action” remakes (I put the term in quotes only because these films rely on oodles of CGI) is the choice to transmogrify every cartoon animal into something scientifically accurate. The Jungle Book saw a fully realized orangutan speak with Christopher Walken’s voice; The Lion King resembled a David Attenborough documentary that was occasionally interrupted by Elton John songs. The Little Mermaid, of course, has more fantasy elements, given that it focuses on a world of underwater mer-people. Still, that hasn’t stopped the director, Rob Marshall, and his team of visual-effects wizards from rendering Sebastian the crab (voiced by Daveed Diggs) as something you might pluck out of the tank at a supermarket.
What have Disney’s shareholders wrought? Why does poor Ariel (played by Halle Bailey), the fish-tailed sea princess, have to carry out whole conversations with a vacant-looking damselfish and a beady-eyed northern gannet? She’s a mermaid, for Pete’s sake, whose father, Triton (Javier Bardem), wields a magic trident and runs a royal court where his second-in-command is an orchestra-conducting crab. Plus, the entire film is a musical, a genre in which ecstatic artistic truth is far more important than aquatic anatomy. Nothing about this needs to be realistic!
Disney and Marshall clearly disagree, and they have some reason to, because these projects (which also include Alice in Wonderland, Maleficent, and Aladdin) tend to do very well at the box office, coasting on joint appeal to young audiences and to their parents, who grew up with the originals. But the entire endeavor is double-edged: When the remakes dutifully copy their predecessors, they seem embarrassingly rote, but any small changes or additional songs come across like lazy bits of padding. The new Little Mermaid is somehow 135 minutes long, a whopping 52 more than the lean animated version, but it adds almost nothing of note to the mix, largely spending that extra time on stretched-out action sequences and slightly more plot context.
The story is the same familiar tale, loosely inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s far darker short story. Ariel longs to live on the surface and pines for the dashing Prince Eric (Jonah Hauer-King). Against her father’s wishes, she makes a pact with the conniving sea witch Ursula (a lively Melissa McCarthy) to gain a pair of legs at the cost of her voice, then tries with the help of her fishy friends to win Eric over. There’s a dash more character development thrown Eric’s way in a largely unsuccessful effort to make him more than a one-dimensional hunk; Ursula is clarified as being Triton’s spurned sister, giving her some motivation beyond pure villainy (though her villainy remains quite straightforward).
The film’s biggest asset is Bailey, who does a wonderful job with the score’s biggest hit, “Part of Your World.” Everyone else attempts to stand out amongst the CGI goop and dingy undersea lighting, but they often seem to be acting against nothing. The movie lacks all of the verve and bright colors of the 1989 version. The would-be showstopper “Under the Sea” is a particular crime; Sebastian’s ode to ocean life is filled with detailed depictions of sea creatures wobbling around, but they’re not allowed to sing along with him or do anything remotely cute or silly. In the original, when Sebastian brags of his “hot crustacean band,” the film cuts to a group of fish playing instruments. Here, viewers are served a procession of faceless starfish wafting by. I can think of nothing more apt for this whole bleak affair.
