The slow reveal of Disney’s live-action remake of the underwater classic has uncovered a frightening world of digitised horror
ears and years of bitter experience has taught us not to expect too much from Disney’s live-action remakes of its old animated features. Since Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella limply beat us all around the head almost a decade ago, we’ve been treated to a litany of disappointing slop. Tim Burton’s Dumbo fused boneheaded storytelling with genuinely nightmarish character design. Jon Favreau’s The Lion King stripped all its characters of personality in favour of dreary photorealistic animation.
However, you sense that Disney is just as aware of its diminishing returns as everyone else, which might explain why it is throwing everything at this month’s remake of The Little Mermaid. If Disney gets its way, this one is destined to be remembered forever. Lin-Manuel Miranda has written some new songs for it. Halle Bailey has already taken on and beaten a legion of obnoxious YouTube downvoters who were furious that she isn’t a white redhead like in the cartoon.
Not that it will land just right, of course, because as things stand, the only legacy that The Little Mermaid will leave is as the ugliest goddamned film of all time. We knew this might be the case, of course, after last month’shinted at the atrocities to come. The film’s animals, the ones you remember from your childhood, all looked flat and lifeless. Not quite real, but also not exactly full of life.
But MTV has released a clip of the movie and, well, seeing the characters in motion has only made it worse. It’s a clip of Kiss the Girl, a song from the original movie. In it, Bailey’s Ariel sits in a boat with Jonah Hauer-King’s Prince Eric, and the pair of them share a moment of romantic tension.
That said, you could give it a pass, because the crab was hand-animated and heavily anthropomorphised. As such, he was able to express a number of subtle human characteristics that just about kept the song friendly, as opposed to freakishly perverted. The remake, however, cannot achieve this, because it has leant on Favreau’s style of photorealism. So when a fish suddenly lurches out of the water to implore Eric to kiss Ariel, that’s exactly what you’re seeing. A fish.
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