This was the beginning.
Besides being a poetic and simple image that nicely sums up the soul of the 1989 film, and a remarkably subtle ad campaign for a kids’ movie in a time when subtlety just wasn’t done, it was also the start of the Second Golden Age Of Animation…which is still going strong today!
You can take a pencil and draw a straight line from this “surprise” Disney hit – when animation as a mainstream genre was all but dead and buried – to Beauty And The Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, Toy Story, Wall-E, Finding Nemo, Up, Frozen, you name it. From traditional cell animation to computer animation, from musical to non-, from fairy tales to more adult-leaning stories and back to fairy tales again. It was all a creative journey made possible by The Little Mermaid.
I don’t think it’s overstating things to say that if it had bombed on its initial release, perhaps none of those titles – and so many more – would have ever happened.
Pixar itself may not have happened.
That’s how fragile the whole art form was at the time. But after TLM’s critical and commercial success, people in the industry saw, for the first time in decades, the potential for real feature-length entertainment in “cartoons”. And that the movies needn’t be ONLY for kids. Mediocre, cloying, frantic. They could be richer and deeper than that. They could actually make adults laugh too…and cry…and think – all of it, there were no limits if the storytelling was strong enough.
It may also be my favorite animated movie of all time.
It just works on pretty much every level from start to finish. The music by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman is a large part of its success. The talented duo brought Broadway-quality songs back to Disney, songs that are still catchy 26 years later. While that stage-musical format would eventually go through many changes, it created a tighter three-act structure that became the foundation for all modern animated films (watch the old ones and see how slack and static they feel, often with barely any plot) and you see in the mega-hit Frozen that songs can still play an enormous role.
The screenwriters, the directors, the animators, the voice actors, the musicians, live-action models (including Sherri Stoner as Ariel), all did spectacular work to bring this story to life, and it stands today as an absolute classic.
On top of everything else, Ariel is probably the cutest sexiest Disney princess of them all.
I’m a sucker for the redheads.
And clam-shell bras.
–RR
