Call it a purple patch or call it the halcyon days, but in 1989, Disney kicked off a creative renaissance.
For the two decades prior, the formidable studio had a run of well-liked but forgettable movies and none which really permeated the culture in the way that almost everything it released for the next 10 years would.
It was The Little Mermaid that shepherded the spree of successes that would follow. Throughout the 1990s, you couldn’t turn your head without looking into the eyes of kid obsessing over a Disney princess.
This makes The Little Mermaid a particularly daunting animation to remake into live action. The heady combination of the soaring songs, the love story and the wide-eyed, red-headed Ariel is why it remains many people’s favourite Disney movie – and that’s a lot of expectations to contend with.
“They’re big shoes to fill, right? But we all love the original,” Melissa McCarthy told news.com.au. “So many people claim it as their own because everybody has a different memory from it. Just slightly giving it a more modern interpretation was a way to do an homage to the original but also bring it up to the modern day.”
The broad strokes of this new version of The Little Mermaid remain faithful to the 1989 version and the updates to the story are small but significant. With an extra 50 minutes, there is a deepening of the characters, and tweaks according to a 2023 lens.
Even with its modern sensibilities, it was actually Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 fairytale that provided the hook for director Rob Marshall.
“I saw this incredibly contemporary story about a young girl who feels displaced, who feels she doesn’t belong and people don’t understand her,” he said. “She embarks on this journey of self-discovery, and wanting to reach another world, and learns to not be afraid of people that are different to her.
“She breaks down the barriers between worlds. That felt very timely to me about not being afraid of who’s on the other side of the wall. Maybe they’re like us. It felt like an antidote to our times. It felt like a reason to do this movie.”
Marshall, who’d previously made for Disney Mary Poppins Returns, Into The Woods and Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, almost didn’t take on the project.
“How do you do an underwater musical, it’s never been done before. It’s so technically complicated,” he said.
But he knew that if the team could nail the story and the characters, everything else including the CGI and the music, would follow.
“There has to be an emotional connection to it. That was my mantra the whole time I was working on the movie. Do not let the technical aspects of the film lead it, it has to be about the story and it has to be about character.”
The heart of the film is, of course, Ariel, now embodied by Halle Bailey, a singer-songwriter-actor who auditioned for the role when she was 18. Marshall has often talked about how Bailey was the first actor to audition for the role, and when she sang, everyone in the room was crying.
Bailey recalled that first audition, “I was nervous. I was scared for my life. I was excited to be walking in there, and to be given this opportunity, but with anything this massive, you’re just going to be filled with nervousness.”
When Bailey’s casting was first announced, it sparked a racist backlash from certain segments that took umbrage at a black actor playing Ariel. Marshall said he was surprised it had happened. “I mean, this seems so archaic to me,” he said.
The director said there was no agenda to cast a woman of colour and that he saw contenders of every ethnicity for the role, “looking for the best Ariel”.
McCarthy, who portrays the dastardly Ursula to Bailey’s Ariel, said she can’t imagine anyone else being Ariel, reserving particular praise for how Bailey blends strength and vulnerability.
“[Bailey’s Ariel] is not just about ‘Oh, I want something different’, it’s about ‘I want the life I want to lead’.
“It’s watching her carve out the life she wants. It’s asking, taking and claiming the life she wants as opposed to just being assigned to something.
“I have two daughters and I was really excited for my girls to see her playing this character that we all love, but in such a strong new way.”
Bailey too was drawn to the character’s strength. She said, “She is freaking strong, and she does not take no for an answer, and she knows what she wants. That’s like us, women in general. It’s a great reflection of who we are today.”
Updating Ariel’s characterisation to be more led by her inner strength and a desire for a bigger life than just falling in love with a prince necessitated an evolution of Eric as well. Portrayed by Jonah Hauer-King, Eric manages to be more than just an attractive guy who Ariel saves. This iteration of the character shares Ariel’s thirst for discovery.
He too has his own version of her grotto – a library filled with objects and artefacts he’s collected from his travels.
Marshall explained the live action format gave the filmmakers the opportunity to create a deeper, more emotional bond between the characters.
“Why do they connect? Who are they? Why do they share something deeper than, ‘Isn’t he attractive?’ They meet as kindred spirits, and they’re both interested in something more than what their lives are. They have a sense of adventure, and they want to reach past the world they’re currently in, to other cultures.”
That commitment to expanding the character also extended to Ursula, one of the most iconic villains in Disney’s lore, in part because she was so unequivocally a delicious scoundrel. But you don’t hire someone of McCarthy’s calibre and talent for nuance, and hem her in to a one-dimensional character.
“I don’t think anyone is just a baddie,” McCarthy said. “Like anyone else, you act out and you make terrible decisions. Why? What are you scared of? What are your vulnerabilities? I thought a lot about her damage and her isolation.”
McCarthy pointed to the change made in which Ursula and Triton are now siblings, with the added family dynamics fuelling the resentment at her exile.
“Your family has ostracised you. It made me think about her mental health and all of these things. And finally, she’s so complicated, in a wonderful way. It’s what attracts me to any humans I love.
“We fall in love with people for their weird quirks and oddities. If someone’s like, ‘Oh, they’re incredibly boring, I love them,’ that doesn’t happen a lot. It’s like when you introduce a friend to a new group and you say, ‘They’re a lot but they’re great, you just have to get to know them.’
“And that’s what happened with Ursula. I slowly, but surely, had compassion and fell in love with her in a whole new way.”
Five years on from when Bailey first auditioned for the role and set the bar so high that no one could meet it, her rendition of Part Of Your World is still provoking tears.
Bailey said when she recorded the song for the first time in front of a 100-piece orchestra, she was sobbing. And the tears seem to be infectious.
McCarthy admitted she can’t listen to Bailey’s rendition of the tune, so full of grit and longing, without crying.
“Vocally, it’s perfection, but other people can sing perfectly too. But Halle is a storyteller and you feel her heart, which is so big, and you feel her strength, which is so impactful,” McCarthy said. “It made that beautiful song suddenly mean so much more.
“I have not gone through it once yet [without crying]. Every time it starts, I’m a sea of tears and I can’t talk myself out of it. Every time, I cry at the exact same spot in that song.”
The Little Mermaid is in cinemas on Thursday, May 25