Movie Thoughts: The Little Mermaid (1989)

• Released: 17 November 1989
• Directed by: Ron Clements, John Musker
• Running time: 1 h 23 min
• Rating 4/5

Synopsis

A mermaid princess falls in love with the human world and trades her voice for legs to a sea witch in order to explore it.

My Thoughts

Sweet, sweet Disney renaissance. The package films-era and Disney dark ages were quite a chore to get through sometimes, but now that finally seems to be over! For now, at least. Enter The Little Mermaid.

This is not a Disney movie I grew up with. I mostly only watched the animal-centric ones when I was younger, so obviously this one was out of the question. However, I've watched it a few times in recent years and honestly, I quite like it.

Okay, it's not my favorite Disney movie there is, but it is miles above some of the movies in the dark ages. I think it's quite a strong start to the Disney renaissance. It has pretty much all the ingredients for a good movie: amazing animation and other visuals, a kickass villain, a good soundtrack, comic relief characters that aren't overly annoying, a likable main character and a strong climax.

Honestly, I don't have many complaints here. I mean, I do have a few, but the good outweighs the not-so-good by far. So, my complaints: first of all, Triton. He made me really uncomfortable. Like, he clearly hates humans, but the reasons for that aren't really made clear. Ariel has no mother, so it'd make sense if maybe they'd killed her mother that made him so overly protective and hateful, but that's never brought up. The closest we get is "they eat fish". Yeah, so do sharks and other carnivorous sea animals, and you seem okay with having those in your sea. So I don't get what the big deal is. Also: the humans clearly don't know that these fish are sentient.

That aside, the scene where Triton destroys literally everything Ariel is passionate about was hard to watch. No amount of hate for humans puts him in the right of destroying his daughter's stuff like that. Comes across as borderline abusive to me.

Second, the character of the prince. I like him, but I do think he was very, very bland. He does have more of a presence than some other Disney princes in the past, but they somehow forgot to attach a personality to him other than generic nice guy. 

Third, the weird line that is drawn as to what animals are and aren't sentient and whether or not the humans can hear the animals talk. The first is somewhat awkward because we see almost all animals capable of speech (the fish, Scuttle, Sebastian, etc.), but then somehow Eric's dog is completely non-sentient and cannot talk. As for the second aspect, at first I thought only Ariel could talk to the animals. I mean, it makes sense, she's a creature of the sea. But then in the romantic boat scene Eric seems to be able to understand Sebastian somehow. I don't know, I don't hate this or anything, but I feel like they should've drawn a more clearer line as to what these animals can and cannot do.

And fourth, I don't really see why Ariel, while having lost her voice, just doesn't write down her messages. She movie establishes that the mermaids write in English as well, and Ariel can write, so there's no language barrier when writing down stuff. I don't know why nobody thought of that.

However, these are mostly just nitpicks in a movie that's otherwise really good. I have some gripes, but it in no way limits my enjoyment of the movie.