Must See Movie Monday - The Little Mermaid

Film: The Little Mermaid
Released: 1989
Directors: Ron Clements and John Musker
Rating: G
Short Summary: Mermaid princess, Ariel, makes a dangerous deal with a sea witch in order to gain the chance to meet a human prince on land.

Why It's A Must See Movie

I wanted to pick an animated movie this week. I went with a personal favorite of mine, Disney's The Little Mermaid. I'm pretty sure this was the first Disney movie my parents ever took me to in the theater. Thus, the movie hold a very special place in my heart. As a kid I not only had the VHS of the movie, but a couple of collections of the TV cartoon as well. I had all the songs memorized and had probably watched it a crazy amount of times. I seriously think this is one of the movies that made me want to learn to sing.

While we are on the thought of music. The music in The Little Mermaid rocks! Alan Manken created all the great music in the film along with many other Disney soundtracks. I like to say that he is probably richest composer in the world for that reason, but he deserves every penny for being us tunes like Part of Your World. The melodies for the songs are all so memorable. Every one of the them sets the mood for the scene in which they are placed. The song writing contains such creative ways to use unusual words and word play. A thing that a song writer like myself can appreciate.

The music isn't the only great thing about The Little Mermaid. Most of the beauty comes from the creation of life like and emotionally accessible animated characters. The really picked the perfect voices for all the characters. In addition the animators did a beautiful job at making the animations act like real people. I found out by watching the Blue-ray extras for the movie, that the reason the animation is so good, is that they based the movements of the characters on improvisations of actors chosen for movement study. They also used the same technique to get the correct camera movements.

When I view the film as an adult, I have to say that the best thing about the movie is that they made the Hans Christian Anderson story not quite so depressing. Why Anderson's stories are all so darn depressing? Thank you Disney for adding a touch of happy Hollywood to this tale. The original fairy-tale makes me so sad. The prince ends up breaking the mermaid's heart by marrying another princess and the mermaid basically turns into sea-foam. Bummer! There are many other sad things in the fairy-tale, but I don't want to bring you down. Let's keep our feelings up with the memory of Ariel and Prince Eric's wedding in the movie shall we? Yes, that is a good idea indeed.

So I hope you watch or re-watch The Little Mermaid. I just found out I can probably watch the sequels to this movie on YouTube somewhere. Finally! Why didn't I think of the that before?! Sorry for the fan girl moment. If you think that is a fan girl moment you can't imagine the happy dance/freak out I did when I found out The Little Mermaid was coming out on Blue-ray. Hilarious! Ariel is at the top of my favorite Disney princess list. Her and Belle are pretty much tied at the top of the list. So you can guess that at some point I'll be talking about Beauty and the Beast as well.