The Little Mermaid—the one from 1989—opens with life and music: cawing seagulls, playful dolphins, a majestic Alan Menken fanfare that sets the stage for an enchanting fable. 36 years later, director Rob Marshall opts instead to begin his 2023 remake of the Disney classic with rolling waves and a gloomy epigraph straight from Hans Christian Anderson’s original fairy tale. “A mermaid has no tears,” it reads, “and therefore she suffers so much more.”
With a kickoff like that, you’d expect Marshall’s take to diverge wildly from its source material—to be a subversive but family-friendly version of The Northman, maybe, more Roald Dahl (or at least Tim Burton) than Walt Disney. I’m devastated to report that this is not the case. Instead, the new Little Mermaid is a lot like the new Beauty and the Beast, and the new Aladdin, and especially the new Lion King: an uneasy mix of carbon copy and superfluous added material, presented in “live-action” that looks and feels (and is) as artificial as Lightning McQueen. It’s diverting for an hour and a half, until you realize that there are 40 minutes of movie left.
The film’s heart, at least, is in the right place. It’s reimagined the seven daughters of King Triton (a stilted Javier Bardem) as members of an oceanic United Nations who hate how humans are always throwing their garbage into the sea. The home island of hunky Prince Eric (Jonah Hauer-King) is rendered as a vibrant Caribbean kingdom. And it’s also cast Halle Bailey in the title role, a decision that instantly inspired a racist, reactionary outcry from the worst corners of the internet.
Bailey doesn’t deserve the vitriol, not only because nobody would but also because she’s a natural Ariel: open, expressive, with wide-set eyes that make her look otherworldly even when peering across dry land. Seeing her in the role, you understand why Marshall and his team were driven to give Ariel a pair of new songs (written by Menken and Disney vet Lin-Manuel Miranda); it’s a shame to go so long without hearing Bailey’s beautiful voice.
Like so many of the remake’s changes, though, those songs seem intended to fix problems that never really existed. Does it matter that Ariel doesn’t talk for half of the movie, after making a deal with wicked Ursula (Melissa McCarthy)? Not if the entire story is done and dusted in 83 minutes. Was anyone in 1989 really driven to distraction wondering why Ariel didn’t just write Eric a letter explaining her whole situation? The new movie takes pains to avoid this “plot hole” by not having Ariel sign a contract with Ursula, and adding a silly extra parameter to Ursula’s spell. Who cares about Eric’s backstory, or his family? The new Little Mermaid, apparently, which gives him both (his mother, the queen, is played by the always great Noma Dumezweni), plus a moody solo on a windswept beach—like “Agony,” from Marshall’s 2014 Disney adaptation of Into the Woods, but played straight.
Even Ursula has been softened to some extent, given a wisp of extra motivation (she’s Triton’s resentful sister now, rather than some random tentacled malcontent) and deprived of the most wicked verse Howard Ashman wrote for “Poor Unfortunate Souls.” Allegedly, the lyrics were cut for being too sexist. (Never mind that Ursula “is clearly manipulating Ariel to give up her voice” when she insists that human men hate a mouthy woman, as Menken pointed out to VF in March.) Happily, those minor tweaks don’t defang the character: McCarthy’s sly, amoral performance is far and away the best part of the film. Every time she’s onscreen, the movie finally seems, well, animated.
The same can’t be said for the rest of Marshall’s underwater sequences, which are technically precise but emotionally vapid. The original “Under the Sea” was a dazzling spectacle that brought hand-drawn films to new heights; the remake’s is longer and less bewitching, despite kinetic sea creatures whose moves were apparently choreographed with assistance from the Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation. To call it screensaver-esque would be a dig against some of the better screensavers. It comes as a relief when Ariel trades her hoarder cave for Eric’s beach; the film finds its legs only when its heroine does, after an hour of setup.
