Walt Disney’s Century: The Little Mermaid (2023)

This year, The Walt Disney Company turns 100 years old. For good or ill, no other company has been more influential in the history of film. Walt Disney’s Century is a monthly feature in which Ken Lowe revisits the landmark entries in Disney’s filmography to reflect on what they meant for the Mouse House—and how they changed cinema. You can read all the entries here.

Art exists despite the miserable toil that is the price of our subsistence—in defiance of the grueling winter, the empty bank account, the sanctimonious scolds among us. There is no day-to-day reason the cave dwellers at the dawn of humanity needed to paint representations of themselves hunting herd animals. There is no immediate material benefit, and often an associated punishment, to a kid in algebra class scribbling stick figures in the margins of his textbook so that when you flip the pages, the stick figures look like they’re doing kung fu on each other. Shut up and hunt the mammoth, cut the firewood, learn what an asymptote is, you lazy ingrate! Stop dreaming and produce. Your landlord is hungry.

But they do want art, the taskmasters and busybodies. Patronage of the arts—paying our dreamers so they don’t starve or get yelled at too much while they’re dreaming—has always been a trade-off for the dreamers: You can’t say anything bad about the Medicis if they’re paying you. Where that trade-off ceases to be worth it is something paid artists ask themselves every day.

Disney’s 2023 “live-action remake” (what is that term?) of The Little Mermaid is a movie that makes me think of these things, mostly because there is nothing in the movie itself worth thinking about too deeply. Disney, maybe more than any other entity in our early century, is emblematic of what words like “art” even mean in this disastrous era of ours. 

As their century of patronizing artists comes to a close, Disney the company has grown into a cultural and financial behemoth, its primary means of growth being acquisitions: Marvel Comics and their associated properties, former animation competitor Pixar, freaking Star Wars. I made a conscious choice to keep my monthly columns about strictly Disney properties, not any of their acquisitions, despite the fact that this really cuts out some of the most significant things the company has done in the past 20 years—The Force Awakens and The Avengers are foundational parts of the entertainment landscape (whether or not you think of them as part of the cinematic landscape, like Fantasia or Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs inarguably were).

Exclude them, and this is what we’re left with. I really can’t help that The Little Mermaid (2023) is the film I need to end this column on. If you are impatient with how I’m choosing to talk about this movie, well, I am impatient with audiences for continuing to give money to Disney so that they keep making these things, thus obliging me to keep writing about them. Nobody is blameless here.

The original The Little Mermaid (1989) looks familiar if you’ve watched Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella or Alice in Wonderland, but it was also something new, a readjustment in the same way Tangled was. Ariel was a new princess, one who set the template that Disney’s leading women are still following: Disney princesses want to be who they were meant to be.

This is at the root of The Little Mermaid’s two darkest scenes: Ariel’s father wrecking her stuff, and Ursula trading for her soul. I want to talk about those two scenes, and how they look in both of these movies, and then, if it’s alright with you guys, I never want to talk about The Little Mermaid: Scuttlebutt Rap Edition again.

Ariel is a mermaid who has the hots for a human guy. Don’t ask how old they are. Her father, King Triton, gets mad at her insistence on mixing the races and explodes her stuff. In the cartoon, it is a moment of savage patriarchal violence, with Ariel begging him to stop. Listen to Jodi Benson’s voice:

The 2023 version is also dark, in the sense that you can barely discern the surroundings. Halle Bailey—whom Paste’s Tara Bennett rightly called the highlight of the movie—is doing the best she can. It’s just clear that she’s on some green screen somewhere, reacting to something off-camera, we presume. There is so much work going on in this scene: Javier Bardem’s costume, the effects associated with the actors’ hair, the explosions that displace water. None of it looks as good or hits with the raw emotion of the original.

There are a million little differences, little sandings down of edges. In the new version, the statue Triton nukes is not explicitly one of Prince Eric, so we’re spared the low-key horniness of a teen girl fantasizing about the object of her romance. The deep-seated issues inherent in a situation where a father figure forbids a daughter her sexual agency by violently destroying a facsimile of her love object are wholesale avoided in this new scene: We do not want to deal with them in 2023, I guess. For this reason, it is the same scene when you distill it down to a PowerPoint, but it doesn’t mean the same thing.

Next, Ariel is lured to the lair of Ursula the sea witch. She promises Ariel a chance at being with her man. She must surrender her voice, and agree that if she can’t seal the deal in three days, her soul belongs to Ursula. In the ’89 version, it’s a dynamic, lyrically complex musical number. “Poor Unfortunate Souls” remains one of Disney’s mightiest musical numbers—I have called it one of Disney’s best villain ballads and see no reason to reassess my claim.

In the 2023 version, Melissa McCarthy steps in for Pat Carroll as Ursula. She knows her way around a character like Ursula. What’s different, again, are the visuals. The numbers Howard Ashman and Alan Menken composed during the Disney Renaissance that began with The Little Mermaid are infectiously dynamic pieces with intricacies to their lyrics that Disney animators delighted in making literal. But you can’t do that in CGI, I guess:

In the 2023 version, pay particular attention to the parts of the song where Ursula is explaining her whole deal: “This one longing to be thinner / that one wants to get the girl” or “Now it’s happened once or twice / someone couldn’t pay the price.” In the original, the visuals matched these lines, really communicating to the kids that Ursula lures her victims in with promises of witchcraft and then turns the tables on them. 

In the new version, you can imagine why they couldn’t commit to that: McCarthy is a human on a green screen set who is probably lip-synching to a vocal performance she cut months prior. Even though so much of her costume and physique are achieved through computer imagery, she still doesn’t have the cartoon elasticity that the original Ursula had. It’s not easy to draw 120 or so frames of miserable worm people by hand to achieve that visual in traditional animation, but it probably requires an even greater expenditure to achieve the same thing with computerized special effects, matching them all up to McCarthy’s performance. Better to just go with a prop skull that McCarthy can interact with there on stage.

I can go on about the other baffling or meaningless choices director Rob Marshall and the other creators of the 2023 version made, but all of them boil down, more or less, to those two scenes. They boil down to what sort of choices are even being made in these live-action remakes, which have become Disney’s signature type of feature in recent years, to their own detriment.

If you are going to adapt a work, what are you adding to it? What, artistically, are you adding to the conversation? Make no mistake, there is plenty to talk about when it comes to something like The Little Mermaid, a movie that is ultimately about getting your father’s approval before you’re able to go off and be exactly what a man wants you to be. Please, remake it.

I went on a whole tear about what art is at the beginning because, faced with the challenge of such an adaptation, an artist would ask questions like “If, in this live-action framework, it isn’t easy to make an anthropomorphic, expressive crab who doesn’t sound like Daveed Diggs reading off cue cards, should we have him at all?” or “If we’re going to change the setting to explicitly be the Caribbean Sea during what looks like the late 18th or early 19th century, should Eric be a “prince,” since this is, you know, the New World, probably after the various wars of independence that were going on during that time period?”

Disney is not, in this instance, handing dreamers some spending money and letting them explore possibilities—letting them take risks to find a new hit. It is paying contractors to recreate a product so that it superficially looks like another product, in the way car manufacturers are talking about having fake manual transmissions in electric cars.

The Walt Disney Company, from its inception in 1923 under the humble Missouri cartoonist Walter E. Disney, has always been a moneymaking enterprise, and it’s always been an adaptation machine—read my past columns this year. But even in light of that, its stock in trade has ostensibly always been just what the cold winter and the dirty dishes and the squalling baby and the boss who doesn’t understand boundaries would love for you to forget about: Dreams. Walt Disney, the man, talked about them constantly. He couched his aspirations in terms of dreams and wishes and magic. Art of all kinds is the language of dreams, and the artist that language’s imperfect interpreter. The Walt Disney Company calls its creative corps “Imagineers,” perhaps the most explicit proof that this is supposed to be the company’s mission. For this yearlong retrospective on the company’s century, I’ve focused on their most vivid visions, their bold if imperfect steps forward, and even their canny attempts to cash in on new media that resulted in everybody talking like what we now think pirates talked like.

Here in 2023, at the end of the century Walt Disney began when he and his brother Roy founded the company, it’s becoming harder and harder to see that spark, that burning ambition that grows during those unbearable hours when you must hit those books, chop those vegetables, make that paper. The Little Mermaid 2023 wasn’t anybody’s dream, but just look at that realistic underwater hair! It wasn’t anybody’s dream, but it sure was a lot of people’s toil.

Kenneth Lowe wants to be where the people are. You can follow him on Twitter @IllusiveKen until it collapses, on Bluesky @illusiveken.bsky.social, and read more at his blog.