Disney's defibrillator

Rating: 9/10 (7 May 2008)

In 1979, while Disney's unremarkable Bambi-retread The Fox and the Hound was under production, Don Bluth quit his job in righteous indignation at the then 37-year slump in Disney's animated features and, with eleven talented young animators in tow, hared off to MGM and created a near-masterpiece, The Secret of NIMH, in little over two years. Although the movie-going public ignored the film at the time, Bluth's subsequent films, An American Tail and the marginally superior The Land Before Time both broke box-office records for animation and routed Disney competition.
In 1989, Bluth's fourth, All Dogs Go to Heaven, was released on the same weekend as Disney's latest, The Little Mermaid, a musical in the style of the Golden Age cartoons. Bluth's new film boasted an interesting and original premise, whilst Disney's was yet another sweetened fairy tale. Bluth and his cohorts could hardly be blamed to maybe shoot for fifty million this time around, and Disney fans would have been either in denial or omniscient to expect The Little Mermaid to be other than lackluster.
The Little Mermaid raked in $84,000,000. People tell you that the business a film does doesn't matter, but it does: it matters a helluva lot to the films a studio makes after it. Without The Little Mermaid's extravagant success, the resurgence in American animation might never have taken place, and we have audiences' uncharacteristic discernment to thank.
Above all, what is important about The Little Mermaid is what a superlative film it is. A penny saved might well be a penny earned, but a few billion pennies spent wisely can be millions and millions of dollars earned. This is The Little Mermaid's approach, and but one of many ways in which it returned to the Disney philosophy of the Thirties and Forties, when art was exalted above immediate financial gain, when no expense was spared in the pursuit of excellence, and when animation was considered a medium and not a genre, when an animated film was more than a 'kiddie movie'.
Computers eased the burden on the animators and the studio's pockets, making the sort of dazzling imagery that characterized the early Disney films practical again, also enabling certain wildly impressive sequences to be brought to the screen in a manner that would have had Uncle Walt selling his multi-plane camera for scrap.
And then there was the duo of Howard Ashman and Alan Menken. The pair made The Little Mermaid's score Disney's best since Dumbo, and truly animated Broadway for the first time. The songs are longer, better placed and more important to the plot than ever before, and not a dud among them. "Part of Your World" is the obligatory ballad, but, refreshingly, it's not a love song--even more refreshingly, The Little Mermaid doesn't really have one of those; "Kiss the Girl" is far too witty and entertaining to be one, and is more concerned with making out than love anyway. "Poor Unfortunate Souls" is deliciously wicked, and "Under the Sea" is pure entertainment, a showcase for Samuel E. Wright's magnificent crab, Sebastian, and a virtuoso display of animated choreography. The use of song might seem unsubtle as compared to the great animated films of the Nineties, like The Iron Giant and the Toy Story films, but it is never less than enjoyable. And by the way, it was co-producer Ashman's idea to make Sebastian a Jamaican-vizier-crab as opposed to an English-butler-crab. Masterstroke, that.
Remember how scary Pinocchio was? (The movie, not the puppet.) While The Little Mermaid does not quite plumb those depths, it is bold in its occasional darkness: Ursula's grisly garden and many forms, the seriousness of Ariel's situation and the despair that accompanies it, ensure that, for all its humor, the film never suffers from the childlike levity that Disney films, for time out of mind, had been trying to make adults take seriously. When it means to be funny, the film is funny; when not, not.
Certainly Disney's finest villain since Cruella De Vil, and perhaps even before, Ursula, a half-octopus half-purple-human, voiced by Pat Carroll, is darkly funny while never letting one forget that she cannot be trifled with. Ursula, like most of the great Disney villains, manages to be funny as well as intimidating by being rather aristocratic in her manner, a la Cruella, Shere Khan and Scar.
Another unprecedented quality of The Little Mermaid was the presence of an excellent main character as well as an excellent villain. Ariel, voice of Jodi Benson, remains the studio's most endearing heroine. Rebellious and often foolhardy, she thinks for herself and makes mistakes--she is no passenger. She is, in fact, the catalyst for the events of the film instead of the antagonist. She is also funny and makes you want to actually listen when she speaks, which Disney had always seemed to think could never work in a main character.
Even Prince Eric isn't relegated to automaton status--for a Disney movie, the central conflict seems to almost have an excess of character. A rather frustrating love interest he may be, but he is, at least, a character, and always a likable one. Kenneth Mars' King Triton is another excellent supporting character, and Buddy Hackett steals the show entirely as worldly seagull Scuttle.
I need say no more than that the film is about a mermaid princess who falls in love with a human and strikes a deal with a witch for a pair of legs. The Disney version of The Little Mermaid is so different from Hans Christian Andersen's tortuously Christian parable as to be an entirely different story that happens to share some plot points with the fairy tale. Disney's version is better. I state this without compunction, and do not feel the need to list my reasons. Read the story, then watch this film, and tell me which you like better.
Or don't read it. But do watch the film. It is a remarkable experience.