The Little Mermaid: A Disney movie I’ve never seen prior to last night. I don’t think I was really in the mood for an animated musical (especially since I had just suffered through a viewing of the immensely unsatisfying X-Men 3), but I do remember having to sing at least one selection from this movie’s soundtrack as a choir concert piece in high school.Ariel, the mermaid, falls in love with a regular landlubber and promises a sea-witch her singing voice if the witch will give her legs. Hijinks ensue. You don’t need to know much more plot than that because there isn’t much more plot than that (the movie clocks in right around 1 hour 20 minutes, so I can’t give you a whole lot more of the plot, because it just doesn’t exist). Insert talking undersea creatures, singing, and an evil witch that looks like my high school pre-calculus teacher, season with a little calypso flavoring, and away we go. This film didn’t knock my socks off. I’ve seen better cel-animated and computer-animated films than this, though it does fit into that same realm of films like “The Black Cauldron” and “The Sword and the Stone” – films that a.) did not age well; and b.) look shoddily put together in the first place. C’mon, Disney, Pixar has shown that you CAN do an animated film that’s longer than 80 minutes and has a script smart enough to keep an adult interested and you can do it consistently. Granted, after “Little Mermaid”, we got the superior films “Beauty & the Beast,” “Aladdin,” and “The Lion King”…but have since followed with a largely lackluster run of films (like the atrocious “Pocahontas”) up to present day (with the exception of my favorite Disney movie to-date, “The Emporer’s New Groove”). Some folks may be ga-ga over this film. I am not one of them. Woodchuck sez, “I’ve seen better and I’ve seen worse.”
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