Here’s a controversial take on Disney’s new live-action remake of The little Mermaid: Despite all the complainingthe CG animals actually don’t look that bad.
Make no mistake, I don’t like them Good, especially when compared to the original film. Far from it! But they don’t look as obnoxious in the actual movie as they do in some of the trailers. Most of the clips released for promotional purposes focused on recreating scenes from the animated classic as closely as possible, meaning realistic-looking fish, Sebastian the crab, and other creatures are inserted into moments where they usually respond to humans ( and mermaid) characters. And realistically rendered animals just don’t have the same evocative expressions as their cartoon counterparts.
Watching a plain, realistic crab respond to a longing song isn’t as visually interesting. But watching a realistic crab skitter try to keep up with people walking, while frantically flailing his tiny claws to get Ariel’s attention – that’s actually hilarious on screen. The 2023 Little Mermaid feels like it is close to to being self-conscious about how funny it looks when a real human talks to a crab or a fish and expects an answer. When director Rob Marshall and the animation team lean into that absurdity and embrace how ridiculous their sea creatures look, it works surprisingly well.
The movie works because of those interactions. Some of the bigger set pieces, like the performance of “Under the Sea,” don’t land as well as the more comedic moments, because the focus is on a bunch of animals dancing around without any expression to indicate they’re enjoying it, so their behavior comes stilted and forced about. In this version of the story, the big musical number resembles a high school biology class about the parts of a cell. Turns out when sea creatures don’t have expressive faces, they look something like this organelles.
That’s the reason for the live action Lion King looked so bad: it was all CG animals, with nothing to play against for contrast. Seeing their stilted, expressionless animal faces as they went through tremendous tragedy and revival felt like watching a nature documentary with a Donald Glover voiceover. But pairing those animals with humans is actually comic gold.
It is not clear whether those scenes in The little Mermaid being intentionally hilarious or if it’s just a side effect of the photorealistic animals. But the realism is played enough for a laugh that it feels like the former. Javier Bardem’s Triton leaning in to be seriously heart-to-heart with a crab is awesome. So is the scene where Flounder gasps and plops onto the deck of a ship trying to tell Ariel something, until Sebastian, who has no time to watch over another wayward young person, just pushes him off the boat and back into the water. Scuttle has her moments too, making loud, annoying seagull noises and just fluttering around and getting in the way, like seagulls do.
Somehow it all works in its own weird way. The live-action version doesn’t contain the beautiful artwork of the 1989 original. And the animals aren’t as expressive as modern audiences would expect from an animated film – or even from live-action movies like Sonic the Hedgehog or Alvin and the Squirrels, where the animal friends are more on the cartoonish side and thus capable of big, expressive emotions. But rather than chasing that kind of look, the filmmakers are behind the new Little Mermaid came up with their own way of doing talking animal friends. As with so many things, their approach isn’t actually as catastrophic as the vocal backlash on the internet makes it seem.
The little Mermaid is out now.