![]() ![]() In some ways, The Little Mermaid was old-fashioned. In the past quarter-century, ten Disney tunes have won the Best Song Oscar: “Under the Sea,” “Beauty and the Beast” (Menkin and Ashman), “A Whole New World” (Menkin and Tim Rice) from Aladdin, “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” (Rice and Elton John) from The Lion King, “Colors of the Wind” (Menken and Stephen Schwartz) from Pocahontas, “You’ll Be in My Heart” (Phil Collins) from Tarzan, “If I Didn’t Have You” (Randy Newman) from Pixar’s Monsters, Inc., “We Belong Together” (Newman) from Pixar’s Toy Story 3, “Man or Muppet” (Bret McKenzie) from the live-action The Muppets and the worldwide smash “Let It Go” (Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez) from Frozen. Then nothing - until The Little Mermaid again changed the studio’s luck. Disney had earned Best Song Oscars in 1941 for “When You Wish Upon a Star” from Pinocchio and in 1947 for “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” from Song of the South. One measure of a song’s mainstream success is an Academy Award. ![]() ![]() From this decision came the calypso-inflected revel “Under the Sea” and the sweet samba “Kiss the Girl” - two numbers that broke out of the movie to become modest hits. Wright) be changed from a Jeeves-type English butler to a friendly Jamaican. He suggested, for example, that Sebastian the Crab (Samuel E. Menken could compose sumptuous melodies with a pop lilt, and the clever Ashman worked closely with Musker and Clements on the story. For the job of custodians and innovators, Menken and Ashman, who had written the off-Broadway hit Little Shop of Horrors, were a perfect choice. The movie was basically a Broadway musical, but animated and underwater. The Little Mermaid further harkened back to the classic Disney features by mounting a full musical score with songs that explained the characters and propelled the action. You may debate whether the Disney heroines fit the feminist standard, but they don’t live in a democracy. The one constant, ain the sea or on land, is true love, which Ariel discovers with the charming Prince Eric (Christopher Daniel Barnes). She’s literally a fish out of water - an undocumented alien, if you will - who must acclimate herself to the strange customs of beasts who breathe through lungs, not gills. But it all began with Ariel.Īriel’s subterranean nemesis, the sea witch Ursula (voiced by Pat Carroll), makes mischief aplenty but the girl’s main challenge is finding her place in a hostile environment. That they did, making animation the industry’s most reliably money-making “genre.” In 2010, five of the 10 top-grossing movies were CGI-animated: Pixar’s Toy Story 3, Universal’s Despicable Me, DreamWorks’ Shrek Forever After and How to Train Your Dragon and Disney’s Tangled. The phenomenal critical and popular success of the Disney Renaissance features also prodded rival studios (including DreamWorks, which Katzenberg cofounded after leaving Disney) to start their own animation units and rake in the cash. Many live-action filmmakers did try they turned their adventure movies into special-effects showcases indebted to cartoons and comic books. Live-action filmmakers, see this and try to top it. … For 82 minutes, The Little Mermaid reclaims the movie house as a dream palace and the big screen as a window into enchantment. Rom the first frame, Disney’s suave storytellers cue you to wonde rment in their adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. More than two decades after Walt Disney’s death, and following a series of less-than-fabulous cartoon features, this was the picture that launched the Disney Renaissance that soared with Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King. 17, 1989, realized its makers’ dream: recapturing the magic of classic Disney as destination entertainment to enthrall generations of moviegoers. And The Little Mermaid, which opened 25 years ago, on Nov. So the song stayed in, as a declaration of its heroine’s hopes. Both of those numbers served their stories and became enduring hits. Writer-directors John Musker and Ron Clements had to remind Katzenberg that the very first Disney feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, began with a similar “I want” song, “Someday My Prince Will Come,” and that the bosses at MGM had wanted to drop “Over the Rainbow” from The Wizard of Oz until smarter heads prevailed. At an early screening of The Little Mermaid, the young audience got restless during that opening ballad - some kids actually started fighting - and Jeffrey Katzenberg, the head of Disney Animation, considered dropping it. ![]()
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