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What Went Wrong with ‘The Little Mermaid’?

May 30, 2023
Notes
Transcript
On this week’s show, Sonny Bunch (The Bulwark), Alyssa Rosenberg (The Washington Post), and Peter Suderman (Reason) argue over whether or not “kink” is the right word to use when discussing a movie about a teenage mermaid. Then they discuss just went wrong with Disney’s latest live-action adaptation of The Little Mermaid. Make sure to swing by for the bonus episode, in which we critique Disney’s addiction to the dollars generated by these monstrosities as creativity-killing coporate endpoints. And if you enjoyed the episode, share it with a friend!

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors and omissions. Ironically, the transcription service has particular problems with the word “bulwark,” so you may see it mangled as “Bullard,” “Boulart,” or even “bull word.” Enjoy!
  • Speaker 1
    0:00:11

    Welcome back to Accross movie, I’ll present it
  • Speaker 2
    0:00:13

    by Bulwark Plus. I am your host Sunny Bunch Culture Editor of the Bulwark. I’m joined as always by Elizabeth Rosenberg of the Washington Post Peter Suiterman of Reason Magazine. And, listen, Peter, how are you today?
  • Speaker 3
    0:00:22

    I’m spiffy.
  • Speaker 4
    0:00:24

    I am so happy to be talking about movies with friends.
  • Speaker 2
    0:00:27

    First up, in controversies and controversies, people were scratching their heads about the opening sentence from Wesley Morris’ New York Times’ review of the Little Mermaid, which was exerted by the Times’ Twitter account and led to some chuckles and groans and and dunking. Here it is, quote, The new live action, the little mermaid, is everything nobody should want in a movie, dutiful and defensive, yet desperate for approval. It reeks of obligation and noble intentions, joy, fun, mystery risk flavor, kink, they’re missing, end quote, Yeah. I this is it’s the kink that is freaking people out a little bit. Right?
  • Speaker 2
    0:01:08

    I don’t know that we necessarily should bemoan the lack of kink in the movie about the teenage girl, adapted from a cartoon about an even younger teenage girl, I don’t know. I don’t know. Anyway, conservatives on Twitter hold on. I’ve I got news coming in through my earpiece here. Yes.
  • Speaker 2
    0:01:27

    The conservatives on Twitter pounced on it. They were making fun of times and Morris for being kind of pervy on Maine, but they weren’t alone Roy Price formerly of Amazon studios asked on Twitter if it were a typo, if this was what they meant to say. It’s not It was not a it’s not a typo. It’s not a typo, though I kind of wish it had been because it obscured what could have been an otherwise fruitful converse about the review in the movie and the state of Hollywood itself. I mean, I’m just gonna throw this out there.
  • Speaker 2
    0:01:58

    Look, my own priors here, right? We’re in the middle of what is either a social panic or a long overdue reckoning with, like, the sexualization of younger children in all sorts of spheres of life, And in this setting, in this current social moment, a word like King is one that we might want to avoid, particularly again, about a movie. Teenage girl adapted from a cartoon that is beloved by children. And also, like, you know, sometimes people forget but that cartoon itself was also wrapped up in a series of controversies over hidden penises in the movie and the movie’s artwork and that sort of thing. I don’t know.
  • Speaker 2
    0:02:33

    Do you remember the hidden Dildo on the cover of the VHS? Because I remember
  • Speaker 1
    0:02:36

  • Speaker 3
    0:02:37

    Absolutely.
  • Speaker 1
    0:02:37

  • Speaker 2
    0:02:37

    the hidden Dildo on the cover of the VHS. Anyway, as I said One
  • Speaker 4
    0:02:41

    of the all time great Disney scandals.
  • Speaker 2
    0:02:43

    I don’t wanna get hung up on this because it’s an annoying thing to get hung up on. Because Morris, from the left, from a left wing perspective, says a lot of things folks on the writer saying about the movie as well. Right? He kind of notes the comical absurdity of the diversity in this movie, the UN General Assembly of Myrfolk Princesses, the casting of Harvey r Bardem as King Triton, making Prince Eric’s mother black for some reason, the happy multicolored crew of servants running around their Caribbean castle. The whole thing is insane.
  • Speaker 2
    0:03:13

    And it closes with this paragraph. About the one decent addition to the picture, which is a new song. It’s a wrap, actually. It’s a it is potentially gas, very problematic. It’s a duo between Aquafina as the bird scuttle and Davit Diggs as the crab Sebastian, and here’s here’s how he closes his review.
  • Speaker 2
    0:03:30

    Quote, Watching it, you realize why the rest of the movie plays it so safe, because fun is some risky business. This is a witty, complex, exuberant, breathless, deeply american, Number, that’s also the movie’s one moment of unbridled unabashed delight. And I can’t wait to see how Disney’s going to apologize for it in thirty four years. And vote. I could have written that paragraph.
  • Speaker 2
    0:03:52

    I believe Armond White could have written that paragraph. If we want to get fully reactionary here. Look, yes, Morris approaches this review from an unabashedly left wing perspective. And no, I don’t agree with his overall desire or his overall take or the the need to make it more like the whiz. Right?
  • Speaker 2
    0:04:09

    I don’t necessarily agree with all that. But I there’s a lot to wrestle with here and there’s to agree with. I think there’s a lot of common ground here of people are getting people on the left and the right alike are getting tired of this like weird corporate diversity, United Color of Beneton thing that we have going on in the movies. And I’m little sad that no one really wanted to read past the kink, again, poor choice of words, to see where there might be some shared space here. I don’t know.
  • Speaker 2
    0:04:38

    Anyway, the controversial part of this, obviously. Again, the king, Alyssa, are you one of those sickos who thinks the little mermaid should have Kinkier, you and Wesley Morris, group of group of sickos?
  • Speaker 3
    0:04:50

    I will definitely be billing you when someone swats me over this podcast. Or call CPS on me. But look, I think part of what is tricky about making a live action adaptation to the little mermaid in a way that is not true of the other live adaptations, is that the little mermaid is fundamentally a story about desire. Right? It’s, you know, it is a story about Ariel’s sort of desire and longing for the, you know, the world above the surface that takes specific form in her desire for Eric, right?
  • Speaker 3
    0:05:24

    Who is, in many ways, of this era of Disney movies, he’s sort of the least developed romantic object Right? I mean, he is just sort of an object of lust. He doesn’t have much of a personality. There is an extent to which he, on the sort of sexy statue of him, that sink under the waves and end up in Ariel’s grotto, are sort of interchangeable. Right?
  • Speaker 3
    0:05:46

    I mean, they are objects of desire that she projects herself onto and has to win over. And, it is a sort of lustier, more yearning concept than the other Disney movies. And that is a risky thing to bring in to the live action adaptation. They still have the, you know, sort of, obviously sort of sexualized shots of, like, the big wave rushing up behind her in part of your world, the sort of hair flip of her in sort of silhouette when she comes out of the water after she gets her legs, But the movie is, you know, sort of you can’t make the yearning And, you know, the sort of lot the teenage lust of the original little mermaid comic, more intense in live action form, and kinda keep the p g thirteen rating. Right?
  • Speaker 3
    0:06:38

    I mean, that is an element It’s
  • Speaker 4
    0:06:40

    a p g movie, actually. And so that’s a I’m
  • Speaker 3
    0:06:42

    sorry to keep the p g
  • Speaker 4
    0:06:43

    The original was said that she rated cartoon. Right? And so that I mean, this is an an actual issue, is that in some ways, this movie wants to be a PG thirteen film and then can’t be because it had I mean, it it can’t push beyond the PG.
  • Speaker 3
    0:06:56

    Right. And the fact that I mean, it’s a place where sort of animation and theme work together to make it permissible to sort of say and project some stuff that is less g rated and the live action and the sort of inherent, you know, desirousness of the movie end up working against each other because if you have to sort of preserve that rating, you can’t have the whole, you know, sort of body heat intensity of it, and still have it be a family movie. And so in a way, it gets at the inherent mistake of the live action adaptation which is an assumption that animation is somehow lesser. And in fact, there are places where animation serves its subject matter and characters, an intended purpose better than a live action performance here. And so look, I like, I don’t think Morris is wrong to say that this is I mean, the word kink is obviously going to sort of get people head up.
  • Speaker 3
    0:07:57

    You know, literally and metaphorically. But it is a movie about wanting, about yearning, about like wanting to sort of be in your body and experience physical sensation of a whole range of kinds in a way that is, you know, sort of tricky subject material for family entertainment, the whole, you know, what’s a fire and why does it what’s the word burn? It’s like basically, you know, Ariel’s riff on, like, Bruce Spring Steenstein on Fire, which is not at all, sort of disguised as a song about like sex and sexual yearning. And so, Look, the word was obviously gonna set people off on the internet, but Morris is not wrong that this is, you know, this is a story about yearning and desire, and some of that desire is sexual, and what you give up for it. It is more adult in many ways than the other sort of early nineties, Disney stories, and that interacts with live action direction in a very different way than it interacts with animation.
  • Speaker 2
    0:08:59

    I wouldn’t push back a little bit on your suggestion that this is the only of the live action movies to deal with desire. I mean, like Aladdin is very much a movie about desire in the same almost exact ways about getting the princess to love you to move into a different strata of society, even if it’s
  • Speaker 3
    0:09:15

    not But it’s less bodily. Right? I mean Is it You know?
  • Speaker 2
    0:09:19

    Is it I I mean, I I I will say, as a kid, I remember watching some of those scenes on the flying carpet. With Aladdin and Jasmine. And, you know, that’s not
  • Speaker 3
    0:09:29

    I agree that those scenes all have a lot of sexual heat. But the As a movie, it’s sort of less bodily. Right? I mean, among other things, like, your main character isn’t like either half naked or, like, entirely naked in a bunch of pivotal scenes. Right?
  • Speaker 3
    0:09:45

    And it’s like the yearning is about Like, the characters are attracted to each other. There is chemistry there, but the sort of fundamental yearning is about sort of class status and curity, not like bodily sensation. Right? And so I I I think it’s maybe it’s a difference of degree.
  • Speaker 4
    0:10:03

    I mean, just to underline Alissa’s point, There’s almost a a crown and burgian body horror aspect to the little mermaid, which is, again, it’s not played as horror. It’s not played as gross or anything like that. But it is literally about an unusual body transformation of an adolescent girl in a way that is not true of Aladdin, which is just about here’s a here’s a poor boy who has a the hots for a rich girl. And yes, there is a there is some heat there — Yeah.
  • Speaker 1
    0:10:29

  • Speaker 4
    0:10:29

    like Eliza said. But but there’s something the physical metaphors for bodily change and for adolescent not quite sexual desire. It’s the thing that comes before you know what that is. Like, it’s we don’t have a word for it, so I don’t wanna make I don’t wanna say it’s sexual. But, like, it’s it’s, like, twelve and thirteen year olds are have feelings.
  • Speaker 4
    0:10:51

    It’s just attraction.
  • Speaker 3
    0:10:53

    It’s your name. Yeah.
  • Speaker 2
    0:10:53

    All you got, like, Again, I think what part of what people are pushing back on here is, again, the kind of like the effort to put adults ideas and ideals in the world of these kids. Like, I think it’s fine for adults to talk about their weird kinks. It’s always gonna be kind of squicky when you start saying, you know, this movie about kids should be kinkier. I it just is. I, like I don’t know.
  • Speaker 2
    0:11:18

    Yeah. Again, I don’t wanna get hung up on this because it’s it’s it’s it’s actually the least interesting part of his his review. Peter, one of the interesting things that has happened with this movie is there was some pushback when when the casting was real, oh, you awoke, little mermaid, Bulwark, Ariel. This is, you know, just more Disney propaganda. But the movie has done okay domestically.
  • Speaker 2
    0:11:40

    Where it has gotten killed is overseas. And the question then becomes, is this a a thing that studios like Disney have to worry about more, kind of racially diverse casting than they do here in the United States. I think there’s a there’s a strong argument to be made for the rest of the world being much more racist than America, weirdly.
  • Speaker 4
    0:12:03

    Your question is whether studios have to because of this? And my answer is, I don’t I’m not a studio executive. I don’t know what they’re gonna do based on box office numbers and you know, international breakdowns from this one movie. What I do know is that historically, it’s been pretty clear that Hollywood has even if they haven’t liked to talk about it. I have read multiple reports about casting decisions from the nineties and even into the aughts, where movies were where there were often romantic comedies, and they basically said that we have a Bulwark male lead.
  • Speaker 4
    0:12:38

    You can’t pair that Bulwark male lead with a black woman who is the the sort of the the female lead and a potential like sort of a a love interest. Because international audiences don’t want to see a couple, you know, with two black people in it. And that is something that, like, used to be just sort of I got never like, you would never find a a studio executive saying that on the record in the Hollywood reporter.
  • Speaker 2
    0:13:02

    Mhmm. It
  • Speaker 4
    0:13:02

    was always, like, sorta just kinda under stood and, like, vague you know, sometimes a columnist would say, well, this is known. And, you know, again, I’m not in those rooms making those decisions. It’s not like you can find hard evidence. For, oh, yeah. You know, this this development VP from Disney or from Touchstone or from Universal, like, they just they had they had a rule against, you know, black couples on on Mona Charen, but you can kind of see it especially in bigger in in films that are not intended to be sort of niche movies.
  • Speaker 4
    0:13:35

    And you can see that weariness about certain types of casting historically here. So your question is what are they gonna do? I don’t know. But I can tell you what they’ve done in the past when presented with box office numbers that they feel like tell a certain story here. I don’t know if you can draw on like, how much you can draw from like, from just one movie here, this sort of thing is a little bit odd just in the sense that, like, the Little mermaid is a huge cultural touchstone in the United States.
  • Speaker 4
    0:14:04

    And just much less so overseas. And so in the same way that like Star Wars doesn’t perform really well in China, it’s just because Star Wars was never the mass cultural force in China the way it was in the United States, and I think that’s true with a little mermaid internationally. So it may have absolutely nothing to do with the casting.
  • Speaker 2
    0:14:23

    I’ve read that as well. I’m I’m kinda curious because I I don’t understand why the little mermaid is less would be less of a in overseas phenomenon where where asset would be like Aladdin or I mean, even the, you know, Tim Burton, Alice in Wonderland, these are movies that gross Lion King doing really well overseas. That movie was a global phenomenon always. But I like, I’m not entirely sold Jonathan Last an explanation, I don’t know.
  • Speaker 3
    0:14:50

    I mean, I think what Morris is getting at in the the body of the review is sort of the question of what is different state for. Right? Right. And in a kids movie, you know, I can totally see, you know, the value of little girls who haven’t historically gotten to see themselves as Disney Princess is. Getting to inhabit that fantasy for an afternoon.
  • Speaker 3
    0:15:09

    And when Peter Knight saw the movie at the Elmo, there were a bunch of black families there with little girls. And it was cute, you know. I hope they enjoyed it. I like I I felt sort of obligated to not start talking about what I didn’t like about the movie until after we left the theater because I didn’t wanna be a jerk to a bunch of three year olds, you know.
  • Speaker 2
    0:15:27

    They gotta learn sometime.
  • Speaker 3
    0:15:29

    Yeah. But do they need to learn, like, walking out of a theater? It’s like, you know, grumpy weirdo there to spoil their fun. But I think it’s reasonable to ask what function does diversity serve in the rest of this movie. Right?
  • Speaker 3
    0:15:42

    I mean, I don’t know if there’s anyone who like Perhaps I am mistaken about this. So forgive me if you are the person for whom this experience is true, but I don’t think there are a lot of people who are like, I just really need to see myself as Prince Eric’s mother in a remake of the little mermaid, and that’s where diversity starts to work in weird ways here. Right? Because you know, if part of the story of the sort of colonization of the Caribbean is that, like, there’s a bunch of slavery and racism and, you know, sort of, not great plantation, agriculture, stuff going Jonathan Last does it mean to make a black woman the queen of one of those kingdoms. Right?
  • Speaker 3
    0:16:22

    Like, what does it mean to have this sort of like chipper multi ethnic society? A movie where you’re also talking about, like, human damage to coral reefs and the need for, like, a diversified economy and trade. Right? The combination of fantastical casting and nods is sort of more real world. Script stuff functioned together in strange ways, to end up blurring the racial story of the Caribbean.
  • Speaker 3
    0:16:46

    And that’s not to say that, like, should be like Little mermaid two, Chattel Slabier would be, you know, the appropriate way to make here. But it ends up functioning in some very strange ways in a way that like a movie that leaves out all of the sort of like, here are real world impacts of trade and humans on the ocean. Like, maybe it doesn’t have that. If it’s like sort of clearly not the Caribbean and it’s like, Prince Eric of Fantasy Landia
  • Speaker 1
    0:17:14

  • Speaker 3
    0:17:14

    Yeah. — who’s just like on a boat because he likes being on boats and the companies of sailors. And he’s not trying to improve his country’s trade routes?
  • Speaker 2
    0:17:23

    The thing this reminds me of is how in frozen two, they tried to do this whole, like, the indigenous population has the magical powers, and then all of a sudden it’s like, oh, yeah. But also they need Queen else to come in and rule them. Just bizarre weird stuff. I don’t know. Peter, go ahead.
  • Speaker 4
    0:17:37

    The very best part of Morris’s review, I really like the kicker which you already read, but he he raises some of the questions about the oddness of the racial diversity in this film. Right? Like, he talks about, you know, the the sort of the questions that, like, having a Bulwark queen raises about, like, Is she the queen of the slave ships? Is that Ed? She’s just like, what?
  • Speaker 4
    0:17:58

    Like, stuff like that? And then he says, This is my favorite line. It’s really a misery to notice these things.
  • Speaker 2
    0:18:05

    Yeah.
  • Speaker 4
    0:18:05

    A nine year old wouldn’t, but one reason we have this remake is that former nine year olds raised on and besotted with these original Disney movies grew up and had questions. But this is the thing is the movie is worse in some ways because if you are old enough to to be able to kind of have these questions in your head, then you just spend the whole time kind of wondering what What is going on here? What is this implying? Because the implications are either kind of awful or bizarre or just flat out, don’t make any sense.
  • Speaker 2
    0:18:33

    Yeah. Look, we’re we’ll get to the actual review here in a second, but I I Will Saletan as a brief introduction to that, every change they make to this movie makes it worse. Virtually every change made to this movie like damages it in some some very real way. Alright. So what do we think?
  • Speaker 2
    0:18:48

    Is that is that a controversy? Or a controversy to, you know, talking about the the kinky fish in the teenage girl mermaid movie.
  • Speaker 4
    0:18:57

    Peter, It’s a controversy, but it’s probably an intentional one. I suspect Morris knew exactly what he was doing and hoped that it would get more people to read the rest of his review.
  • Speaker 2
    0:19:05

    Alyssa.
  • Speaker 3
    0:19:06

    Yeah. Same. I mean, Wesley Morris is nothing if not an incredibly considered writer. Yeah.
  • Speaker 4
    0:19:11

    That wasn’t an accident.
  • Speaker 3
    0:19:12

    He can yeah. It’s controversial, but, like, he’s a big boy. He can Yeah.
  • Speaker 2
    0:19:16

    It’s an intentional controversy, I think. And what what’s what is interest about it is that it does get to a very real thing about this movie, and we can talk about this more in the review, which is that this is a movie for adults. I think. And and you see it in a bunch of different ways. You see it in the running times.
  • Speaker 2
    0:19:34

    You see it in the the fact that there’s a title card at the beginning. Talking about the sadness of mermaid tears, like, this is not necessarily a movie for children, and that is kind of a running theme of a lot of these Disney live action. Remakes. Alright. Make sure to swing by the bonus episode on Friday.
  • Speaker 2
    0:19:53

    We’re gonna be talking about just the awful the awfulness of all of these live action remakes and what they what they mean for for Hollywood and Disney in particular. But now we’re on to the main event little mermaid. Alright. So here is some math for you. The original little mermaid was eighty three minutes long.
  • Speaker 2
    0:20:12

    New little mermaid is one hundred and thirty five minutes long, even if you account for credits at adding an extra eight minutes or so, right? That’s still an extra forty minutes of running in time. It’s basically fifty percent longer. And aside from three new songs, two of which are be terrible. One that I’ve mentioned briefly previously, I actually thought it was pretty funny and exuberant as Wesley Moore said.
  • Speaker 2
    0:20:33

    I’m hard pressed to figure out exactly what was added and why this needed to be the length that would destroy the attention span of my four year old. I coming at this from the perspective of being a writer. Right? When a writer deals with an editor, the thing that they like about editors, the kind of editor that they like are the editors who make trims that you never notice. Right?
  • Speaker 2
    0:20:53

    Every once in a while, I’ll turn it in a piece that’s twelve hundred words, and it’ll come back three hundred words shorter. And I’m only slightly aware of what’s been taken out, and that’s great. A writer, that’s what you want from an editor. You want somebody who’s gonna make you more concise and less bloated and get you to the point faster. This movie and this is true of basically all of the Disney animated remakes, has almost the exact opposite problem.
  • Speaker 2
    0:21:16

    It’s like an anti editor went in there and started adding things that didn’t need to be there to beef the story up to unimaginable lengths, but you you can’t really figure out exactly what they were. Like, there’s there’s no point in this move where I’m like, oh, yeah, that was that’s definitely new and bad and we we don’t need that. You know, this is it it was it’s just like a constant addition of little things that you don’t need that make it too long. The new little mermaid tells same basic story of the original Little Mermaid, Ariel. She’s the daughter of King Triton is obsessed with the land.
  • Speaker 2
    0:21:49

    After she gets yelled at by her father for ignoring his totally reasonable wishes for her to stay the hell away from the surface, she pouts off to a sea witch who gives her legs in exchange for her voice. If she can get her crush on the land to kiss her within three days, she’ll get to stay human forever. If not, she belongs to the witch, a fitting punishment for a daughter who, again, refuses to follow the very reasonable wishes of her father, There are a couple of wrinkles this time around. Here’s the most baffling. As part of the spell cast by Ursula, Ariel cannot remember she needs to kiss Prince Eric.
  • Speaker 2
    0:22:19

    Which negates the whole reason for her to go to the surface world? Like, I I I don’t exactly understand what they’re doing with this plot point. Can’t even tell if it’s like an ideological thing or if it’s like they’re trying to make the story more complicated or more I I nothing about it made any sense to me. I don’t know. Maybe one of you guys can explain it to me.
  • Speaker 2
    0:22:38

    But it would it just it is just an addition that makes it more confusing and makes everything more pointless. I don’t know. The whole thing is long and dumb. As I mentioned, it’s kind of very comically diverse the, like, general assembly idea of the mermaids at the end of the movie. Like, I practically expected, like, a wheelchair mermaid to pop up.
  • Speaker 2
    0:22:59

    And that that shot at the end where we’re seeing the, you know, the land folk and the sea folk come together. It was so it’s so funny and bizarre. The only time the movie even briefly sparks to life is when Melissa McCarthy is on screen as the sea witch. Ursula, she’s the only one who doesn’t look like she’s interacting with nothing. Like, everybody in this movie looks like they’re talking to nothing.
  • Speaker 2
    0:23:20

    It’s really weird and bizarre, and she has genuine comic timing, the likes of which is missing from most of the rest of this movie. I don’t know, Peter. I’ve now had to see this movie twice because I have kids. I went by myself once to kids. Second time, and I kind of wanted to die both times But movie’s not for me.
  • Speaker 2
    0:23:36

    Kids more or less liked it, daughter in particular. I don’t know. What did you make of the little mermaid?
  • Speaker 4
    0:23:42

    Well, that’s an interesting way of framing this as, on the one hand, you said it’s a movie for adults and then you said you hated it, and maybe your kids kinda enjoyed it. And I I think that you’ve actually sort of maybe inadvertently, but like hit on a real tension here in that this movie is on the one hand, being made for and not exactly by but like for and in consultation with People who are middle aged or early middle aged and love the movie as a kid, right? And on the other hand it’s supposed to be a kids movie, a PG rated sort of Disney family extravaganza. And it’s not at all obvious to me that it works for either group. Because on the one hand, it’s totally sort of cautious and uninspired and dutiful in the way that it sort of presents the the famous bits from the original And then on the other hand, it’s so long, and it’s not fun.
  • Speaker 4
    0:24:36

    Like, the the most fun bits are merely things that worked in the original film that they haven’t screwed up. So Ursula works in the original film, and Melissa McCarthy doesn’t screw up the Ursula character. And in fact, does a very good job with the role, but it’s still pretty limited by the fact that she’s basically just doing a face and voice impression of the original voice actress. And the under the sea bit is like it’s a good song still. But there’s something weirdly kind of dead and unenergetic about the presentation of that of that that even though it’s like, oh, this is lavish, it doesn’t look it doesn’t look cheap.
  • Speaker 4
    0:25:15

    It doesn’t look under thought. It doesn’t look it I wouldn’t say it looked good. It looks lavish and expensive. And it looks like someone spent a lot of time thinking about how the the camera was going to swirl through all of these different parts of the ocean and have the sea anemones or whatever the hell they are, you know, start dancing in unison and like all of these are different colors. Someone spent a lot of time on that.
  • Speaker 4
    0:25:36

    That’s not slept together. But it doesn’t look very good either. It just looks sort of lavish and sad, and that’s this whole movie. It’s lavish and sad and it doesn’t know who it’s for, except that it doesn’t wanna make the people who already loved the little mermaid mad. And I don’t know.
  • Speaker 4
    0:25:56

    I was a kid who grew up watching the that sort of great run of Disney films from the Little Mermaid through The Lion King and Aladdin. And they were just regular fixtures in my household. I mean, we had the clamshell VHSs and because they had much younger siblings, Even as a teenager, I was very often like the thing I could watch with a much younger brother and sister. The thing I could watch was the lion king And I loved that movie, and I loved the little mermaid as well. And it was because I as a, like, a budding cinephile, I thought they were really well made.
  • Speaker 4
    0:26:25

    And I get that, like, not everybody who watched The Little Mermaid in nineteen eighty nine was, like, a future movie critic, obsessive type. But but at the same time, like, This movie doesn’t make a case for its own existence, and this is, I think, maybe the the the biggest problem with it. It differs from the original only in ways that make it worse, and it doesn’t make any kind of argument for why it needs to exist except except that it’ll probably make, you know, seven hundred and fifty million or a billion dollars or something even if it’s somewhat underperforms.
  • Speaker 2
    0:26:55

    I mean, that is the argument this movie is that it will make Disney money. That is Disney’s argument for this movie, which, you know, maybe is true or maybe isn’t. I’m those international numbers have to be very, very worrisome for Disney.
  • Speaker 4
    0:27:08

    I’m I’m On the screen, in the text of the film, it cannot come up with a reason to justify its existence. It’s it’s just sort of says, well, I guess the original was pretty good and we’ll try not to screw it up too bad.
  • Speaker 2
    0:27:21

    No. I do think they screwed up at times. But but they do introduce new elements here, Alyssa. And it it is it’s very weird. Some of the stuff that they have thrown in.
  • Speaker 2
    0:27:30

    The thing about this movie that jumps out most is that Prince Eric is more of a character in this movie than in the original, but he’s also kind of more of a character than Ariel. Like, his motivations are more interesting and frankly more believable than hers.
  • Speaker 3
    0:27:45

    Yeah. Like, the whole I would like to improve the welfare of my island nation. Yeah. Reestablishing its trade routes, like
  • Speaker 2
    0:27:51

    I believe in neo liberalism, the song.
  • Speaker 3
    0:27:53

    Yeah. It’s like, I would I would like for us to have quinine, so we don’t all have malaria constantly. Like,
  • Speaker 2
    0:28:01

    Totally.
  • Speaker 3
    0:28:02

    Yeah. At the same time, I I unfortunately think that Jenna Howard King, who plays Prince Eric, is kind of not great. Like the new song that he gets is pretty terrible and he doesn’t do much to sell it. And look, this is one of the reasons for having Eric kind of not be a character in the original. Right?
  • Speaker 3
    0:28:20

    Like, he’s just supposed to be a blank hottie who Ariel can, like, kinda live out her fantasies through. And making him a person’s like, okay. Fine. Whatever. You know, he’s pretty.
  • Speaker 3
    0:28:31

    We don’t need to hear him talk.
  • Speaker 2
    0:28:34

    Sex.
  • Speaker 3
    0:28:35

    Yes. You know what? It’s our turn. It’s Lady’s turn to just objectify some cartoon dudes. But look, you know, what is live action and like really putting that in scare quotes for here.
  • Speaker 3
    0:28:47

    Right? I mean, and look, everything that involves water at all for the next twenty years is gonna be compared to Avatar the way of water. Like, no question. But what Avatar in the way of water does and it’s sort of like photorealistic imagery is to make stuff that’s not real, feel real. And what the little mermaid does here is take a bunch of stuff that is, you know, real in the sense that like this C life exists.
  • Speaker 3
    0:29:14

    But make it sort of hyperreal in a way that’s off putting. Right? It’s like, the animation again allows you to sort of suspend more disbelief in a sequence like, under the sea, then those sort of live action stuff does here. You know, having that sort of photorealistic imagery enhances the sense of fakery rather than the sense of realism in the same way that, like, the sort of perfect Caribbean island where all races live in harmony and everything and it’s like every You know, all the stuff on land looks like it’s set at a Disney resort, which maybe is good if what you want to sell people on is like going to a Disney resort, but it’s not very convincing in terms of being like, Ariel is on land and is having this amazing over powering experience of like, you know, the above world or whatever. You know, Triton and all of his daughter’s like look like they’re wearing very good costumes, but they don’t necessarily look real, if that makes any sense.
  • Speaker 3
    0:30:13

    And so, you know, artistically, the question of sort of what live action is for is just sort of present in every frame of movie. And again, like what live action is for is that it will make Disney money. Yeah. What a live action is for is that like it will convince you to go to an attraction at a theme park. But artistically, there is no answer to what either the sort of live action or the diversity of the movie is for.
  • Speaker 3
    0:30:37

    You mentioned, you know, how good Melissa McCarthy is in this, and I totally agree. I also think that the movie just does not deserve Javier Britum’s final scene in the movie, where he just pulls the, like, I’m a sad dad who has to let my daughter go.
  • Speaker 4
    0:30:50

    Like Pfizer car, sends her out to college.
  • Speaker 3
    0:30:52

    Yeah. Exactly. And he does that beautifully despite the, like, ridiculous facial hair and scales and whatever else.
  • Speaker 2
    0:30:59

    He has little moments that are good, like, when he’s interrogating Sebastian about Ariel Suter, But anytime he is asked to move, it looks terrible. When the camera’s tied on his face, it’s great, because Javier Bardem has a great face. He’s a great actor. When he is asked to move around the water, the whole thing looks insane. The whole thing looks dumb and bad, and I just it’s it’s one of these things where I just can’t believe everyone involved with the production here is like, yeah, this is good.
  • Speaker 2
    0:31:27

    This I
  • Speaker 4
    0:31:27

    think what we need
  • Speaker 2
    0:31:28

    I think this works.
  • Speaker 4
    0:31:29

    It’s another remake. Helmed by James Cameron.
  • Speaker 2
    0:31:32

    James Cameron’s little
  • Speaker 4
    0:31:33

    mermaid. James Cameron’s the little mermaid. I would watch that.
  • Speaker 2
    0:31:36

    We need the James Cameron movie about the orcas going around capsizing all the boats. Do you guys see this story? That’s great. Well, this is well, we’ll have to tackle that on another episode sometime. But
  • Speaker 3
    0:31:46

    Controsy or not Traversea, like, are we team Fercos?
  • Speaker 2
    0:31:49

    We’ve radicalized the orcas. The orcas got a hold of a copy of Avatar the way of water, and we’re like, oh, we can do that. I didn’t really I didn’t know that. Awesome. Anyway, I’m sorry.
  • Speaker 2
    0:31:59

    For this It’s amazing. I’m sorry for thinking about a better movie while discussing this terrible movie. Alright. Here, I guess, is the the exit question. Do you guys think Aquafina is great or terrible here?
  • Speaker 2
    0:32:12

    Because I could go either way. Escuttle, the seagull, or whatever is she heron? I don’t I don’t know what sort of bird that is, not a bird.
  • Speaker 3
    0:32:19

    It’s seagull.
  • Speaker 2
    0:32:20

    She’s a bird. I thought it was a seagull too, but it’s not a but somebody yelled at me on Twitter. They were like, she’s not a seagull in this movie. I’m like, she’s clearly a seagull in the in the original. I don’t know what she is here but
  • Speaker 3
    0:32:30

    But but, Sonny, what do think a Heron is.
  • Speaker 2
    0:32:33

    I don’t I don’t know. I said it was a seagull in my review when somebody yelled at me. So I was like, well, I don’t know what sort of birth is. Maybe it’s an answer for you here now.
  • Speaker 4
    0:32:40

    Wikipedia says that the bird is a northern Janet, a seabird, the largest species of the Ganet family.
  • Speaker 2
    0:32:47

    Can the Janet breathe and sing underwater?
  • Speaker 4
    0:32:50

    In the movies, yes.
  • Speaker 2
    0:32:53

    In this movie, there’s a whole there’s like a five minute stretch where this bird is just talking underwater. It’s like they forgot. It’s like they forgot they were underwater, and they were like, oh, yeah, we gotta get this bird up for some air. He’s gonna drown. Anyway, I have a serious question about Aquafino because I, like, on the one hand, her voice is very annoying.
  • Speaker 2
    0:33:10

    On the other hand though, it works very well for this character. And I think that The only new addition to this movie that I really like is the wrap with her and Sebastian The Crab written by Lynn Manuel Miranda, of course, the bard of late stage Disney. Like, that sequence worked for me, but I don’t know if if it worked for you guys. Maybe I was just so bludgeoned by the rest of this. That I was like, oh, finally, some life a spark of life.
  • Speaker 2
    0:33:32

    I have something to grab onto here.
  • Speaker 3
    0:33:34

    I did not love that, but maybe Ith was just so, like, sort of squick to buy the movie that I was having an allergic reaction to it.
  • Speaker 4
    0:33:43

    I thought that scene was lively and fun, but it also felt out of place and reminded me of, like, the ways that the movie felt sort of stitched together and tonally uncertain about itself, except for the fact that it did Like, it I mean, Morris again addresses this in his review very well, but the movie just sort of feels like it’s desperate not to make any mistakes. And that’s the only moment in the movie where it feels like maybe we could just try something that might be fun. And okay, they tried something and it is a little fun, but it’s actually weird to have one moment like that in the movie when the rest of it is so dutiful. But I I liked aquafina here. I thought she was very good in this role.
  • Speaker 4
    0:34:23

    I’m not always like a huge fit. I don’t ever dislike her. But often, you know, I’m like, I don’t get why people have fallen overhead over heels for her, but she’s I thought she’s great in in this particular role. The the distinctiveness of her voice works really, really well.
  • Speaker 2
    0:34:39

    Yeah. I mean, I think it’s a nice compliment to I think it was Buddy Hackett who played the the scuttle in the original. Right? I anyway, I like her, and I like that number, and it’s the it’s the only time it’s like that sequence was shot by an entirely different director. And I was like, oh, this movie is good.
  • Speaker 2
    0:34:54

    I like watching this movie. Can we make we get an eighty minute version that’s just the whoever put the sequence together, that would be great.
  • Speaker 4
    0:35:00

    Lynn Manuel Miranda should script it. And James Cameron should direct it.
  • Speaker 2
    0:35:04

    I don’t know. I don’t know that James Cameron is the right
  • Speaker 4
    0:35:07

    place for this. James Cameron would give us mermaids who actually move in water in ways that, like, make visual sense.
  • Speaker 2
    0:35:16

    He could produce. He’s got five other Avatar movies that
  • Speaker 4
    0:35:18

    he needs
  • Speaker 2
    0:35:19

    to make. If he if we want him to finish So that’s series before you can do that.
  • Speaker 4
    0:35:22

    And Robert Rodriguez can make it, and it’ll not quite as look not quite as good.
  • Speaker 2
    0:35:26

    Robert Rodriguez is making Battle Angel part two, stop you’re you’re ruining my whole plan for James Cameron’s empire. Alright. So what do we think? Thumbs up or thumbs down on the little mermaid Peter? Thumbs down.
  • Speaker 2
    0:35:38

    Alyssa.
  • Speaker 3
    0:35:39

    Thumbs down. One of the rare times, I’m glad my five year old is not into movies.
  • Speaker 2
    0:35:43

    Thumbs down. Bad movies. Stop it, Disney. Stop making these. Alright.
  • Speaker 2
    0:35:49

    That’s it for this week’s show. Make sure to head over to Bulwark Plus for our bonus episode on Friday where we will continue to tell Disney to stop making these dumb movies. Tell your friends. Strong recommendation from a friend is basically the only way to grow podcast audience as if we don’t grow or die. You did not love two days episode.
  • Speaker 2
    0:36:02

    Combining me on Twitter at Sonybunch. I’ll given you that it is in fact the best show in your podcast feed. See you guys next week.
Bulwark+ members enjoy weekly bonus episodes here.