THE LITTLE MERMAID (2023) - Mark Reviews Movies

The Little Mermaid (2023), Walt Disney Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 25, 2023

The issue isn't necessarily the desire to remake animated movies as live-action pieces with a lot of visual effects, as the most successful parts of The Little Mermaid show. No, the problem, as becomes clearer and clearer with the more of these remakes that we get, seems to be the desire to "improve" upon those existing films and stories.

As for what that broad concept of improvement actually means to filmmakers, that's a matter of individual preference and, more than likely, studio-dictated suggestions or guidelines. A few basics, though, seem to keep popping up in these movies. These remakes need to be bigger than the source material. They need to be more realistic. They have to expand upon the narrative in terms of plotting, characterization, and some general sense of scope.

Obviously, that means these remakes lose much of the appeal of the original films, such as how the 1989 animated The Little Mermaid is such a great film because it shows so much imagination despite and likely because of how focused its narrative is. That film, after all, is the one that's credited with bringing about the so-called Disney Renaissance era of the decade that followed its release, and it's probably the best of those films of that period, as well as one of the studio's best animated offerings in general.

It doesn't need "improvement," in other words, but that idea is still present in director Rob Marshall's remake, which is certainly bigger and more realistic and more expansive in what it attempts to do with this story, these characters, and the general scope of the material. When Marshall and screenwriter David Magee simply take what exists from the original film, this new version almost works—not in a better way than the source material, of course, but in a different way. This raises a more fundamental question about the existence of these remakes in the first place, but let's at least give their existence the benefit of the doubt.

One of the concepts that is appearing to be lost as the studio churns out more and more of these remakes is the notion of re-interpretation. It's possible, obviously, to tell the same story in a slightly or significantly different way and still succeed, as long as the spirit of the original remains intact. With too much tinkering, though, that spirit is going to become overwhelmed by what's perceived as the new and improved elements of the remake.

Unfortunately, that becomes the case with Marshall's movie, which does enough well that it's almost tempting to forgive the project of its more apparent flaws. One of the most obvious successes is the casting, particularly that of its star Halle Bailey, a relatively young actor and singer who instantly makes the mermaid Ariel her own.

There's a good reason Marshall adds a couple beats more than necessary after Ariel sings "Part of Your World," one of the signature tunes from the '89 film, in the editing equivalent of an applause hold. She's such an expressive singer that it almost seems as if some new songs for Ariel, styled as inner monologues after the character gives up her voice, were crafted just because Bailey plays the role (Lin-Manuel Miranda provides some new lyrics, to go along with Alan Menken's music and the late Howard Ashman's original words). It undermines how expressive she is an actor, even in the silence of the second half or so of the plot, but again, things must be "improved," even if the results are far from improvements.

It's probably unnecessary to go through the plot in much details, as it remains the same. The youthfully naïve and rebellious Ariel goes behind the back of her father King Triton (Javier Bardem) to leave the sea for the land—at first because she's fascinated by it and later on account of falling for Eric (Jonah Hauer-King), the prince of a nearby island kingdom. Making a deal with the wicked witch Ursula (Melissa McCarthy, convincing and just shy of hammy as the villain), Ariel has three days to kiss Eric in an act of true love, or else, she'll return to mermaid form and become the witch's prisoner.

The act of more or less copying the scenes, songs, and plot developments of the original work for the most part. A major caveat is that the move toward some kind of realism dulls a lot of the wonder—Triton's kingdom just becoming some rock formation overgrown with algae and the underwater effects being matters of lighting—and sense of personality—especially with Ariel's animal sidekicks Sebastian (voiced by a boisterous Daveed Diggs), Scuttle (voice of Awkwafina), and Flounder (voice of Jacob Tremblay) looking like, well, expressionless digital animals—that came with the animated film.

The strength of the original story, as well as these performances, helps to mitigate those self-imposed shortcomings, but to deny their existence would be a mistake. The Little Mermaid rises above the less-successful examples in Disney's current trend of remaking the studio's animated movies, if only because it trusts and respects the source material to enough of a degree to simply re-interpret that film in a different medium. Too much of the specific choices within those scenes, though, are questionable, and yes, expanding the narrative means this version loses just enough of the magic of fairy-tale simplicity.

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