Nice Story/Great Music

Rating: 9/10 (1 December 2016)

This is a masterwork for Disney Studios. The story alone would be enough to carry this. We have great undersea characters whose level of knowledge is restricted to their environment, naturally. We have a nasty villain, Ursula, who is jealous and pained by her own appearance and awful voice. We have a longing for something that is not easily understood by the other characters. Take a really neat plot and throw in some amazing songs. I mean Broadway songs. Animation has become its own Broadway with very little tweaking. Ariel is a fully developed character with wants and needs. She is a strong "woman." One may find the need for a man a bit sexist at times, but it is more of a longing. We then have a willingness to give up everything (her voice in particular) to experience what it would be like to be a woman. Looking back on this film, we see the die is cast for success after success with some of the best pop music ever written.