The Little Mermaid

Year of release: 2023 Directed by Rob Marshall.             Starring Halle Bailey, Jacob Tremblay, Daveed Diggs, Awkwafina, Jonah Hauer-King, Javier Bardem, and Melissa McCarthy.

When the first teaser for Disney’s live action remake of The Little Mermaid dropped, the soundwaves surrounding it quickly became dominated by racist morons complaining that Ariel was no longer white with red hair. A part of me can’t believes I had to type that sentence in 2023, but here we are. What that toxic discourse covered up was how bad the teaser looked. I’m cynical enough to think Disney would not be above starting such racist bullshit as a marketing ploy, but regardless, the first focus on the film was the casting of Halle Bailey.

For the record, she is phenomenal and probably the best live action Disney princess to date. She’s substantially better than Emma Watson as Belle in the Beauty and the Beast remake, partially because her singing isn’t autotuned into oblivion, and partially because she captures the longing of a teenage mermaid for the unknown human world quite well. I look forward to seeing her in the adaptation of The Color Purple musical in December. It is also very nice to see a Disney princess and mythological creature portrayed as a person of color, and Disney and Rob Marshall deserve credit for her casting.

What Disney does not deserve credit for is the ableist rewriting of Howard Ashman’s lyrics. (Also the straightening of them, but more on that later.) In “Kiss the Girl” Lin-Manuel Miranda provides some “sanitized” words that stand out like a sore thumb, because apparently Disney executives correctly realized it was predatory to kiss a girl who can’t consent, but erroneously decided Ariel couldn’t consent because she can’t speak at that moment.

I’m very sorry to hear that executive at Disney are so out of touch with reality that they are unaware that sign language, gesturing, writing, and other forms of non-verbal communication exist. And that they seem to think that people who cannot speak are broken, inferior beings who can’t fall in love or express that. To make matters worse, Ursula erases Ariel’s memory so she doesn’t realize she needs to share true love’s kiss with Eric before three days or she reverts to a mermaid. For the supposed awareness around consent, that deviation from the original makes Sebastian, Flounder, and Scuttle’s forcing of the romance far more cringeworthy than anything in Ashman’s original lyrics.

As to why that deviation from the original film was added to a movie that mostly adheres to the original slavishly, I don’t know. It might be explained by the bloat that permeates the entire movie. Rob Marshall’s overriding attitude seemed to be “Why do something in two minutes, if you can do it in eight?” The only thing Ursula’s memory erasure does is add extra dialogue making the on-land romance between Ariel and Eric take longer.

At just over two hours, the movie is unquestionably too long. The first hour of it moves along passably, with “Under the Sea” being the one scene that doesn’t look like it was shot by a camera with a black nylon stocking over it. It is the best song in the score, and it deservedly won Menken and Ashman their first Oscar in 1990. Daveed Diggs was a fantastic choice to play Sebastian, and he delivers it beautifully. Marshall’s cutting to a school of dolphins for “down here all the fish is happy” was a bizarre choice, as the emphasis on the word “fish” with the imagery of dolphins took me right out of the song, but Diggs pulled me back in quickly, in spite of some other visual choices on Marshall’s part that make no sense.

Excuse me, but I need to get this out of the way.

THEY CUT THE BEST VERSE OF “POOR UNFORTUNATE SOULS!!!!!!!!” LIKE, WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK WERE THEY THINKING WITH THAT??????

Okay, now on to the moment where the movie really began to derail. Melissa McCarthy is fine as Ursula. She’s no where near as menacing or flamboyantly queer as Pat Carroll’s Sea Witch was, but I really don’t think that’s her fault. Her first two scenes before her big number are almost verbatim quotes of Carroll’s lines, which pales for anyone who enjoyed Carroll’s delivery.

More problematically, Marshall’s odd visual choices really came to a head in “Poor Unfortunate Souls.” When Ursula sings “Now it’s happened once or twice, someone couldn’t pay the price” she shows two merfolk being punished in the animated film. Here she holds up eight skulls of merfolk, which is substantially more than once or twice. The relentlessly dark palette of the film is probably most offensive in this song, with the dark blue being punctuated by bursts of orange, which is so uninspired color-wise that it’s depressing.

Even more problematically, the missing verse is the one about communicating without words and saying women are better silent anyway. Apparently the filmmakers decided a villain giving villainous advice was a problem, so they stripped the villain of some of her most iconic lines, which contribute to “Poor Unfortunate Souls” being the best Disney villain song. (Yes, I will die on that hill. Don’t argue that with me.) The other problem with omitting that verse is that the lyric and dramatic foil that Ashman set up between “Poor Unfortunate Souls” and Ariel’s wish in “Part of Your World” is gone too.

Ariel sings, “Bet you on land they understand, bet they don’t reprimand their daughters.” When Ursula sings, “Yes, on land it’s much preferred for ladies not to say a word, after all, dear, what is idle prattle for?” it not only shows the Sea Witch is subverting Ariel’s dreams while pretending to answer them, but it also forms a dramatic development through the song lyrics. Cutting that was honestly unforgivable.

One of the best aspects of the Disney renaissance was the way almost all the villains resurrected the queer coding of the 1940s and ‘50s. Pat Carroll’s butch, drag queen-inspired Sea Witch, has obvious lesbian undertones, of which McCarthy’s Ursula only has a faint reminiscence. The new revelation that Ursula is King Triton’s sister contributes to the straightening of the character by making her an evil aunt of the protagonist and not the flamboyant outsider she was in the 1989 film. The makeup copies the animated character, so the queerness is still there minimally, but the desire to control and manipulate a young woman is gone along with the missing verse of the villain song. This Ursula is only a power-hungry witch willing to use her niece as a pawn; the predatory and sexual undertones are eradicated.

Releasing The Little Mermaid on the last weekend before Pride Month, with its cuts and alterations to the lyrics of an iconic gay song-writer who died from AIDS was certainly a choice. That his song-writing partner had to write new songs that drastically pale in comparison to the work that largely started the Disney renaissance adds insult to injury.

For the record, I will also die on the hill that Alan Menken has never partnered with a lyricist as great as Howard Ashman. Steven Schwartz came close, but everyone else Menken has worked with is a notable step down. Menken and Miranda have written three new songs for this version of The Little Mermaid. Eric’s solo, “Wild Uncharted Waters,” is fine, even if it garners a deserved eyeroll for its introduction of on-the-nose similarities between Eric and Ariel by making them both rebellious teenagers from their opposite sex parents.

“The Scuttlebutt” is a fifth-rate Hamilton remix and an affront to humanity that is so jarringly different from the rest of the score that it feels like a painful slap in the face reminding us that Ashman died and Miranda does not even have half of his talent.

Ariel has one new solo, “For the First Time,” which makes no freaking sense at all. I am willing to overlook giving Ariel a song after she loses her voice and is supposed to be mute until she breaks Ursula’s necklace, since she can obviously still think. However, the lyrics are all about adapting to life on land, how difficult it is to walk because of gravity, how hard it is to wear a corset, and how uncomfortable shoes are. I’m sorry, but if Ariel still thinks a fork is a dinglehopper and you use it to style your hair, how the hell does she know what gravity, corsets, and shoes are, and how could she be singing about them? It would be as if Eliza Doolittle, after mastering the speech inflections of a British lady, sang a song about attending a ball and how wonderful it was without ever having been to a ball.

“Part of Your World” was an I want song that was largely responsible for launching the Disney renaissance. “Under the Sea” cemented it as a fabulous show-stopper, and “Poor Unfortunate Souls” made a clichéd villain a menacing, three-dimensional character while giving representation to the LGBTQ+ community at the height of AIDS. Nowadays Disney is largely devoid of original ideas, and while their desperate cash grabs usually have enough great material from their source to be watchable, they’re a far cry from the original that many people loved.

For the record, I never loved The Little Mermaid. I adore the score and might argue it’s the best work Menken and Ashman did for Disney—it’s really close between that and Beauty and the Beast—but the absurd happy ending that contradicts Hans Christen Andersen’s tragic fairy tale of longing for unattainable love was a weak point for me as soon as I was aware of it. There was a brief moment in the 2023 Little Mermaid when I thought a quasi-tragic ending might actually occur. (If it had occurred, I’d have written a very different review.) Unfortunately, Disney is afraid to take any risks and do anything that would alter the products they built their name on.

Around half-way through this movie, I felt bad for Halle Bailey. She was cast as a Disney princess, gave it her very, very good all, only to be stuck in a lifeless cash grab that bastardized the best aspects of the original film. I even felt a little bad for Rob Marshall, because most of the lousy creative decisions obviously came from higher up executives.

Ultimately, I was angry and sad to watch an iconic queer-coded character neutered, to watch a famous gay lyricist have his lyrics likewise neutered, and to watch yet another bloated, soulless remake from Disney that neuters the story of a gay author writing about his forbidden love who married a woman leaving him alone. If Disney wants to neuter anything as a force for good, perhaps they could neuter the careers of racist and homophobic fascists like Ron DeSantis and Trump instead of churning out remakes like this.

Personal Recommendation: D