Colourful and fun; watchable and quite enjoyable for adults but really not layered well enough for my money

Rating: Null/10 (27 March 2005)

King Triton rules the underwater world with his four daughter  all respectful and musical beauties, except youngest daughter Ariel, who has an unhealthy obsession with the world outside of the ocean. To try and make sure she cuts this out, Triton assigns his trusted aide Sebastian to keep an eye on her. However when Ariel visits the surface of the ocean she spots a beautiful prince on board a ship  minutes before the ship sinks and she is forced to rescue him. Naturally she falls in love with him from that moment on  much to the anger of her father. With his words still stinging her, Ariel accepts the offer of sea-hag Ursula to become human for three days and either a) make the prince love her and thus stay human or b) fail and return to the ocean and belong to Ursula.
Being quite a cynical, acerbic person I must admit that I prefer modern animated films that deliver lots of adult humour along with a good emotional story and often I struggle to enjoy films that take the more traditional Disney route. However, having greatly enjoyed Beauty and the Beast the other night, I decided to give this film a try as well but must admit that I didn't take to it as much as I had hoped. The story is good enough to provide a narrative flow but I didn't buy into it emotionally as much as I had expected. The story didn't quite have enough of a sense of maturity or wonder as I needed and I didn't find enough else to distract from me. I was never bored you understand, but it was more that I could watch it with kids rather than really enjoy it and get something from it on my level.
The songs are quite good and featured one or two that are pretty catchy and stuck in my mind. The animation is good but is very big and colourful, full of soft edges and non-threatening shapes; this results in the film having feel that it is really for kids rather than adults  an impression not really helped by the story that never goes deep enough into the emotional aspect for adults. The voice work is reasonably good and doesn't feature many famous voices  a practice that is not so common now but maybe helps from distracting from the material by spotting the stars. Benson is quite nice, Mars is firm and warm, Wright is good and the choice of accent in this film but it was quite nice. None of them are that distinctive and it is only really the late Buddy Hackett that stuck in my mind.
Overall this is a colourful and enjoyable film but one that didn't do enough in terms of material and emotional content to really engage me. The film will be great for kids and provide more than basic laughs and I did enjoy it for what it did well but I did want it to do more  perhaps watching it in the same week as the much classier Beauty and the Beast was a mistake but this is a good film, not a great one.