Halle Bailey as Ariel in The Little Mermaid. Photo / Disney
OPINION:
The creatures of the sea are coming for the Princess of Wales. Reports have surfaced of a sly dig at the expense of Catherine, Princess of Wales, smuggled into Disney’s new live-action remake of The Little Mermaid. Subaquatic shade is thrown when Ariel, the eponymous mermaid, is introduced to dashing Prince Eric. Attempting to guess her name, he first lands on Diana – and then Catherine. At the latter, Ariel pulls a face. “Ok, definitely not Catherine,” Eric says.
This admittedly low-key insult is sure to generate negative comments – something this leaky US$200 million (NZ$320m) juggernaut really does not need. Since first announced by Disney in 2016, the project has been buffeted by controversies, fake and real. Some are nothing more than the internet doing what it does best and being racist.
Others speak to a broader unease with Disney’s ongoing project to turn its most beloved animated properties into flesh-and-blood features. And then there is the third category, represented by the Princess of Wales gag. These must be filed under: what were they thinking?
The Little Mermaid is a cartoon but also so much more. Disney was at an all-time low when the original was released in November 1989. It was coming off a run of flops, the most humiliating of which was 1988′s Oliver & Company – a retelling of Oliver Twist featuring a “group of street dogs”.
It’s a sure sign rock-bottom is looming when a beloved studio is reduced to giving Dickens a doggy makeover. At that point, Disney faced creative bankruptcy. And then in splashed The Little Mermaid, with its winning songbook by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken – and, just like that, the Magic Kingdom rediscovered its mojo. Among Disney diehards, no film is more adored.
With the remake, though, it is not clear that those now in charge of Disney appreciate the delicate undersea sorcery of the original. First, there was the casting merry-go-round over a potential Ariel (voiced in the original by Jodi Benson). Lindsay Lohan’s name was floated, as was Ariana Grande’s (the choice of many fans). Euphoria’s Zendaya was reportedly in the frame – though she insisted this was “just a rumour”.
In 2019 came the official announcement that Halle Bailey, one half of the pop duo Chloe x Halle, would portray Ariel. For racists on the internet – it turns out there are quite a few – this was a blood-in-the-water moment. A great howl of fake outrage went up, and the first teaser trailer attracted 1.5 million dislikes. Next came multiple petitions demanding Disney “honour” the tale’s Hans Christian Andersen roots by casting a white actress (never mind the original cartoon shamelessly bowdlerised the source material).
“The Little Mermaid is Danish!” began one petition. “I feel that Disney is using the changing of race of Ariel as a political tool,” said another. One Ariel “fan” with too much time on his hands created a deep-fake trailer replacing Bailey with a CGI white actress.
The fans were in a flap all over again when it emerged that lyrics from the original had been altered to reflect “changing cultural attitudes towards consent”. Songs Kiss the Girl, and Poor Unfortunate Souls had been overhauled, said Alan Menken, who has been scoring the new film with Hamilton’s Lin-Manuel Miranda.
“There are some lyric changes in Kiss the Girl because people have gotten very sensitive about the idea that [Prince Eric] would, in any way, force himself on [Ariel],” Menken told Vanity Fair.
All of these controversies, fake or otherwise, could have been hand-waved away had the trailers wowed audiences. But teasers for the film have veered from underwhelming to terrifying. Dark and muddy, they compare poorly with the under-sea wonders James Cameron conjured recently in Avatar: The Way of Water. And then there is the most recent trailer with its “can’t be unseen” CGI talking fish and its horrific Sebastian the crab.
Sebastian is a mouthy mollusc in the cartoon. However, the live-action format requires Disney to make a “realistic crab” – much as it did with the wildlife in Jon Favreau’s Lion King. And so we get the David Cronenberg-esque apparition of a clicking-clacking crab telling Ariel to kiss her one true love. It will cause your innards to squirm and your soul to freeze.
I don't want to be one of these reactionary Disney guys or whatever but Sebastian the horrid crab in the new Little Mermaid is an abomination that must be destroyed pic.twitter.com/qLNggqnoQq
— Rob (@robrousseau) May 18, 2023
As The Little Mermaid continues to generate negative headlines, the question is why Disney ever wanted to redo it in the first place. The obvious answer is that remaking classic cartoons has proved incredibly lucrative, with Lion King 2.0 grossing US$1.6 billion and Guy Ritchie’s Aladdin north of US$1b.
Yet for every hit, there are those remakes that fall short – such as Tim Burton’s lamentable Dumbo (an underwhelming US$350m at the box office which meant Disney just about broke even on it) and last year’s hollowed-out Robert Zemeckis retelling of Pinocchio, which starred Tom Hanks as a doddery Geppetto and earned terrible reviews. “Pinocchio prompts one to wish upon a star that Disney would stop diluting the legacy of its beloved animated features with these soulless knock-offs,” said the LA Times.
Judging by the trailers, “soulless knock-off” is a term equally applicable to the new Little Mermaid. By all accounts, Bailey is a revelation; if nothing else, the film stands as a vindication for her casting. But otherwise, early feedback suggests it is a wishy-washy disappointment. Having put so much into it – and gone to the trouble of that royal punchline – Disney will hope desperately it doesn’t sink without a trace.
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