The Little Mermaid

A beautiful mermaid, Ariel, is fascinated by the human world-much to the dismay of her father King Triton, ruler of the Mer-people. Ariel spies handsome Prince Eric and falls hopelessly in love. Sebastian, the crab, is sent by Triton to keep an eye on Ariel, but he cannot stop her from saving Eric's life during a storm at sea.

Ursula, the sea witch, plots to grant Ariel's wish to be human and marry her prince, but only as part of a larger scheme to gain control of Triton's undersea kingdom. In the end, Eric and Ariel join forces to destroy Ursula, and Ariel, transformed into a human, is given Triton's blessing to marry Prince Eric.

Ariel, Eric, Sebastian, Flounder, Triton, Ursula/Vanessa, Flotsam, Jetsam, Scuttle, Louis, Grimsby, Carlotta

Initial anticipation was that the film would not even do as well as the previous Oliver & Company, mainly because Mermaid was a "girls film"- Jeffrey Katzenberg's words, not ours. But as the release date neared, all involved knew they had lightning in a bottle, and it would be a big hit. Katzenberg even went back on his initial assessment and proclaimed that The Little Mermaid would be a blockbuster, and be the first animated film to top 100 million in box office. It only reached 85 million.

The idea of doing Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid had been around the studio for a long time. It was first thought of as a segment in one of the anthology films from the 1940's. Ron Clements proposed it as a full-length feature while still involved in directing The Great Mouse Detective. In 1985, with Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah's Splash still fresh in his mind, Katzenberg felt the project too similar and vetoed the idea. But even then there was something to the proposal, and he soon relented.

In 1987, off-Broadway songwriter Howard Ashman was brought in to start working on songs for the film. he was familiar to the Disney team having contributed a song to Oliver & Company. In an off-handed remark, Ashman mentioned an idea to update a minor character named Clarence to a Jamaican Rastafarian crab. This small change ended up snowballing through the whole production, changing the focus and energy of the whole film. Music suddenly became one of the main characters of the film, and the story was modified to become a Broadway-style story structure.

Hopes for the film rose ate the studio, and more money was allocated to the budget. The film ended up costing more than 40 million dollars, and amount almost unheard of for an animated film. To create the undersea world, and animate floating characters required a whole new style of animating, and more special effects for any film since Fantasia. Effects animation supervisor Mark Dindal estimated that over a million bubbles were drawn for this film, in addition to the use of other special processes such as airbrushing, back lighting, superimposition, and limited computer animation added to the costs of the movie. There was even an attempt to bring Disney's venerable multi-plane camera into use for the first time in decades. But the machine was in such dilapidated condition there was no way they could use it and the multi-plane shots ended up being photographed at an outside animation camera facility.

While they did not realize it during production, The Little Mermaid would be the last Disney feature to use the traditional hand-painted cel method of animation. Beginning with their next film, final color animation would be accomplished using a digital method of importing the animators drawings, then coloring and combining scanned drawings. This process was called CAPS (Computer Animation Production System), and was developed for Disney by a northern California computer company called Pixar. The CAPS system would save substantial amounts of time and money by eliminating the whole step for inking and painting cels; in fact, cels became a relic of the past. By working in the digital realm, the multi-plane camera and other optical effects used in The Little Mermaid could be previewed in real time rather than after days or weeks of work.

Originally released with the Wallace and Gromit short A Grand Day Out.

So what caused this resurgence in interest in Disney Animated Films? First, the studio was firing on all cylinders, with great animation (Glen Keane and Mark Henn sharing duties on Ariel, Andreas Deja supervising King Triton and Ruben Aquino positively owning Ursula), great music (Broadway-style songs from Alan Menken and incredible lyrics by Howard Ashman) and a great story written by directors Ron Clements and John Musker.

But most of all, it was a return to the Disney roots of animated film making. The Little Mermaid was the first fairy tale the studios had animated since 1959's Sleeping Beauty (a thirty year lapse, for those who are counting). And like the other great Disney classic animated films, The Little Mermaid featured a strong, scary villain, not the milquetoast or comic villains so common through the dark ages of Disney.

The critics saw something they liked, too... The Little Mermaid was nominated for three Oscars (the first Disney film to be so honored since 1977's The Rescuers). It won two, for Best Song ("Under the Sea") and Best Score. The Disney Studios had not been an Academy Award Winner for an animated feature film since 1941 for Dumbo... or 1947 for Song of the South if you want to count that film.

This was the 28th film in the official Disney list of animated films.

Voice actor Samuel E. Wright is also known as actor on "The Dukes of Hazzard" spinoff "Enos" as Officer Turk Adams.

Academy Award Winner, Best Music, Original Score, 1990.
Academy Award Winner, Best Music, Song ("Under The Sea"), 1990.
Academy Award Nominee, Best Music, Song ("Kiss The Girl"), 1990.
Golden Globe Award Winner, Best Original Score (Motion Picture), 1990.
Golden Globe Award Winner, Best Original Song (Motion Picture), "Under the Sea", 1990.
Golden Globe Award Nominee, Best Picture (Musical or Comedy), 1990.
Golden Globe Award Nominee, Best Original Song (Motion Picture), "Kiss the Girl", 1990