Although it’s not surprising that The Little Mermaid is being downvoted, it is rather shocking just how badly it is being received. It probably means fans, and society, will be called all sorts of names.
Coming on the heels of Peter Pan and Wendy, a trailer that attempted to subvert just about every racial, gender and quality expectation you might have, we’re now jumping into The Little Mermaid. And in doing so, I suppose we’re all supposed to be happy just so long as she doesn’t get the April O’Neil treatment. A chunky Mermaid wearing frumpy clothes would not do so well in the open waters after all.
Though the trailer, released during The Oscars last night, features impressive vocals and an actress in Halle Bailey who is doing her darndest to sound just like Jodi Benson, there are some issues as well. To go through all of them would be difficult. A few of those problem areas, however, include the underwater cinematography, CGI, lighting and more to all be very poor. Avatar the Way of Water this is not. And I can’t imagine how bad large parts of this movie are going to look. The presumably “Under the Sea” musical portions we see are made up of very poor CGI. It was never going to be easy to translate this movie to live action though. In fact, it’s probably the most difficult movie in the Disney catalog to do so. On top of that, the animal critter friends for Ariel are extremely poorly cast for voice work and the designs are just bad.
But Halle Bailey is clearly giving it her all. The soundtrack will be tremendous. If we’re lucky, it will be devoid of modern social commentary.
And yet, because Disney is staying with this tradition they’ve formed of swapping character ethnicities when it may actually matter (Ariel is sort of a symbol for red-headed women the world over), the flaws of the movie and the poor reception, thus far, of the trailer are likely to lead to gross accusations against society. The r-word is going to be thrown around and people’s feelings are going to be pointlessly hurt. Little black girls are going to think that people don’t like black girl mermaids and social media is going to be filled with all sorts of filth.
And yet it’s all completely unnecessary. It’s an artificial conflict created by an artificial company that can find success if it was handed to them on a silver platter. But we’ll all be the victims of their mess they make. Except for the ratings of screeching cable news coverage, it’s a loss for everyone. And that sucks.
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