The Little Mermaid

Disney can’t really be relied upon to get the whole story right; this is something with which any person who views their movies must deal right off the bat. The Little Mermaid is a prime example of this. In the original Hans Christian Anderson story the little mermaid who fell in love with a prince did not have a happy ever after. She lost her prince to some other girl and ended up turning into sea foam. This is as far as I remember anyway, but Disney couldn’t keep this tragic ending, for obvious reasons. There’s something else that viewers can learn from this Disney version of a classic tale; just because they change something doesn’t mean they make it worse. The Little Mermaid may not be better than the original story, but it’s not worse, it just has different strong qualities. While the original had a very dramatic finale, the movie has fantastic musical numbers. The original may have been performed as a beautiful ballet, but the new one features some of the most beautiful animation to grace the screen. They’re different but both good. I am not reviewing the original though, I’m reviewing the new one so I’ll talk about that now and leave the original for another time. The story is pretty simple; the seventh daughter of the sea king Triton, Ariel, is sixteen years old and a curious-to-the-point-of-rebellious teenager. She longs to be part of the human world and she collects every little human related thing she can get her hands on. One day she is drawn to the surface by the presence of a ship. She sees through the railings the prince, Eric, and she falls madly in love with him. He falls too, but into the sea when a violent storm comes upon the ship. Ariel saves him by pulling him to land and she sings to him on the beach while he is regaining consciousness. She flees the scene as Eric becomes fully awake, leaving him with just the image of a beautiful girl singing to him. Eric becomes obsessed with finding this girl much to the chagrin of his supervisor who wishes for the prince to pick a wife already. Triton finds out of Ariel’s visit to the surface and, enraged, destroys her trove of human objects. This devastates Ariel and her desperation leads her to seek help from Ursula, the sea witch who was banished from the kingdom. Ursula makes her a deal that she can have human legs in exchange for her voice, and if she cannot get Eric to kiss her by the sunset of the third day on land, Ariel will become a captive of Ursula. This is the setup and from there the story unfolds as Ariel tries to get Eric’s love without having the voice he loved so much. In the meantime Ursula does everything she can stop their union because if she can obtain Ariel as a captive she can trade the young mermaid for the soul of Triton. As I’ve already said, the ending is happy, so I’ll leave it to you to guess what the final outcome is. This isn’t the most important part of the movie though; way more than half of the fun is getting there. I saw this movie long ago but it was stolen in a robbery and I never got around to watching it again for ten years. It was just released on Disney DVD and when I saw the preview I had a moment of surreal recollection that took me back to my childhood and prompted me to, on complete impulse, buy the two disc special remastered edition. It was on sale and I remembered liking the soundtrack so I bought it and watched it thinking that at very least I would feel like a kid again. Well I didn’t feel like a kid at all because you know what, I didn’t remember it like it was at all. I never realized how good of a movie it was. I mentioned the animation before but I’ll mention it again. Never has the digital remastering of a movie been so refreshing, the comparisons between the original and redone picture are crazy. It looks like the first one was seen through smoked glass. The whole environment of under the sea is brilliantly done and the contrast between all the soft greens or blues and Ariel’s red hair is very much enhanced. It doesn’t look enhanced though; it just looks like we are seeing right into the animator’s brain. The sound quality is spectacular as well. The sound effects, the marvelous songs, and the Oscar winning score are grand to behold. The whole movie is improved and upon finishing it I was both glad, that it had been so long that I could enjoy the improvements, and sad, at not having realized what I was missing out on for all these years. I love this movie, it is one of Disney’s best and even if you think you know it you might give it another chance; it may not be the movie you remember. It may be something quite spectacular.

A-