The Little Mermaid, part of our world

 

 In this article I will make a comparison of the 1989 and 2023 adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's tale made by Disney.

In this movie/cartoon we follow Ariel (Jodi Benson/Halle Bailey), a mermaid, through her journey from. her obsession for mankind to become part of their world. Her father, King Triton (Kenneth Mars/Javier Bardem) doesn't want his daughters to go to men's world because men killed his wife and doesn't want to support the grief of the loss of one of them by loosing them the same way as their mother, so knowing that Ariel has this obsession for Men makes him out of his mind.

After Ariel saves Prince Eric, Ursula proposes a deal to Ariel: her voice against a pair of legs BUT has to get a real love kiss with the Prince in the next three days. Ariel does her best to charm the Prince and during the third day Ursula changes herself into a seductive human and uses Ariel's voice. Scuttle, Sebastian and Flounder discover the disguise of the sea witch and make chaos during the wedding of the Prince to give a chance to their friend Ariel to make her wish come true.

The eldest adaptation is great, the animation is extremely well done. I remember watching the DVD as a child, I have great memories that are coming back while writing this article. I even remember having a Gameboy game of the cartoon (a video game cartridge which was working on DS lite).

Watching this reboot brought back so many memories. I found it more detailed at some points, they developed Eric (which was an excellent idea because in the cartoon he doesn't seem interested in Ariel at all while in the movie he is and he has a personality).

In the movie Ariel and Eric are complementary: Ariel is interested in the world of Men while Eric is obsessed with the sea and discovering the world, while in the cartoon the characters seem without a personality.

 

See you next week for the next article.