If you’re wondering who the 2023 The Little Mermaid remake is for, it’s for me.
And by “me,” I specifically mean millennials who were children during Disney’s late-’80s, early-’90s heyday, when it was just cranking out the animated hits. Consider the astonishing run of The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992) and The Lion King (1994), which all came out within years of each other.
Back then, movies stayed in the movie theatre for months, imprinting themselves on our brains, before arriving on VHS some years later and then retreating into the “Disney vault,” which was honestly the biggest scam of our childhoods.
Halle Bailey as Ariel in ‘The Little Mermaid.’ (Disney)
And these movies were formative. We spent summers pretending we were mermaids, and then we imagined we were lion cubs, tussling on snow forts at recess. I was absolutely jacked that there was a brown-haired Disney princess who loved books in the form of Belle, and I dreamed of having a pet tiger like Jasmine.
Many of those kids have kids of their own now, who understandably also want to see themselves reflected in these stories — especially if they never really could before. It’s beautiful that Black girls can now readily, easily see themselves as Ariel; all those viral reaction videos to The Little Mermaid trailer revealing Halle Bailey’s casting were a serious source of serotonin.
But, for the love of god, can we please have some new movies? Not remakes of old movies. Not new entries in the ever-expanding Marvel Cinematic Universe. New stories. New characters to fall in love with. We need producers to start green-lighting new intellectual property because you know it’s out there.
The past several years have been dominated by remakes and revivals, sequel series and spinoffs — a lucrative nostalgia economy that only ramped up during a global pandemic that has us spending a lot of time with our screens. It’s understandable, during These Unprecedented Times that we’d want, well, some precedent. That we’d find great comfort in familiarity, in the predictability of throwing on something we already know is good and, perhaps crucially during a pandemic, how it ends.
Some people will say this pandemic pull towards the nostalgic was because we were missing the Before Times. But there’s always a Before Times to be nostalgic for. Before the pandemic. Before the 2008 meltdown. Before 9/11. Before the Internet. Before adulthood.
I mentioned in a recent round-table discussion of The Little Mermaid that these Disney live-action remakes are a weird combination of nostalgia and novelty. They are “new” because Sebastian looks like a real crab now, but it’s the same story told virtually the same way — some sequences are nearly shot-for-shot — minus the magic of animation.
And look, as a member of this movie’s target demographic, I will cop to feeling some mild disappointment when some of the original movie’s most recognizable scenes were absent, such as Ursula’s iconic delivery of the line “body language” (If you know you know).
That’s why these remakes are in an unwinnable position; people want familiar and they want different.
These remakes end up being like sparkling water flavours or cauliflower pizza crust: unsatisfying approximations of the real thing. Fine or maybe even good, but rarely ever great.
But there is a way to take a beloved story or character — to tap into childhood nostalgia — and create something completely, thrillingly new, as evidenced by an upcoming slate of summer movies that includes Barbie, Greta Gerwig’s hilariously off-kilter take on the world’s most recognizable doll, and a new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie produced by co-writer and star Seth Rogan that actually emphasizes the fact they’re teenagers.
Or Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, which opened this weekend. It’s the latest installment in the Spider-Verse series which, in addition to telling new stories about a new Spider-Man in the form of Miles Morales, combines computer animation with hand-drawn comic illustration techniques, making it feel like actual comic-book pages are coming to life.
You know, kind of like how the original Disney animators made centuries-old storybook fairy tales come to life and created new classics in the process.
But then, what do I know? The Little Mermaid was a box-office splash on its opening weekend, suggesting there’s an appetite — or, at least, a curiosity — about these live-action remakes. Perhaps the real answer to “who are these for” is “the studio execs making bank.”
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Jen Zoratti
Columnist
Jen Zoratti is a Winnipeg Free Press columnist and author of the newsletter, NEXT, a weekly look towards a post-pandemic future.
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