The Little Mermaid (2023)

The Little Mermaid is the 13th time Disney has taken one of their beloved animated films and remade it in "live action" through a straight up "copy" style, not only telling the same story but hitting the original's plot points and even dialogue pretty much beat for beat with only minor alterations. Unlike more "spin off" takes like the recent Cruella or Christopher Robin, which take ideas from the earlier films and extrapolate new stories, these films stick close to the scripts of their source materials, basically giving audiences the same thing they got in traditional animation but this time with live actors and CGI! 

This sort of exercise has never done much for me. The problem is we've seen the film before and if we want to rewatch it there is nothing stopping us from rewatching the original. Therefore to work a remake needs to offer us something new (and I don't just mean an extra song) like a new way of understanding the story and characters. But the approach Disney uses to tell these stories is to eschew that and instead focus on playing into nostalgia, throwing big stars into the roles, and recreating the moments we are familiar with through dazzling special effects. But what this often accomplishes is the new film missing out on what made the original magical in the first place. Because what makes animated films special is that they can tell stories in ways that so called "live action" cannot. They are not just "drawn" versions of stories, they have a different language for how to tell a story, and much is lost in translation when it is worked back into a live action production.

For example, the problem with photorealism came to light with The Lion King take. Watching real looking animals sing and dance and generally behave anthropomorphically doesn't really work. Flounder, Scuttle, and Sebastian all look terrible and their behaviours all feel just feel off. But it is a problem for the almost-human characters too. Ariel's design is pretty good but both Ursula and King Triton feel far less grand and threatening. They don't fit well into a real world setting. They look like they'd fit better into a David Cronenberg film and I'm not sure that accomplishes what this story needs. 

The original The Little Mermaid's song score is one of film's greatest so that gives this film a huge head start but also a lot of live up to. The new songs truly pale in comparison and I'm not sure any of the covers live up to the original. Digg's Under the Sea almost feels sad and while I thought McCarthy's take on Ursula was noble, her version of Poor Unfortunate Souls just doesn't capture all the grandeur that Pat Carrol's did, a song that managed to be a banger while also moving the plot forward and explaining so much to the audience. 

Speaking of McCarthy, she does what she can with the role, channelling Divine (the original inspiration for the classic villain) but so much of her strength is in riffing on screen and this film doesn't allow her to do that. She sticks to the script which almost wastes her potential. I like what she did with some of her phrasing, inflections, and her amazing eyes. But it did feel like watching a hostage sometimes, hoping for subtle messages to come through. Awkwafina got a little but more leeway playing Scuttle but most of the cast, from John Hauer-King's saccharine Prince Eric Javier Bardem's innocuous Triton fell flat on the screen. The one exception was Bailey who is luminescent in the role. She also sticks to the script, even mimicking Jodi Benson's voice style but making it her own. She also feels constrained by the film's desire to box it all in but yet she still shines. 

I'll point out that the film is a full 52 minutes longer than the original movie yet tells pretty much the same story without adding much in terms of plot. It really just takes longer to tell the same thing. And it feels like it. It drags. Shots take longer. There is more filler. Whatever happened to "less is more"?

So like The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast before it, The Little Mermaid is a faded facsimile of a greater piece of art. Once again it isn't terrible and I likely prefer it to those two I mentioned. But not by much. 

The Little Mermaid

Starring: Halle Bailey, Melissa McCarthy, Javier Bardem, Jonah Hauer-King, Daveed Diggs, Jacob Tremblay, Awkwafina, Jodi Benson

Director: Rob Marshall

Writer: David Magee