Today, we are going to be talking about all things The Little Mermaid. We all know the live-action remake of The Little Mermaid just came out at the end of May. And everyone, and I mean everyone, is talking about this movie and what it means for Disney live-action remakes. So I went and scurried along to the movie theater. I brought my freaking notepad. I freaking journaled the entire time. I was writing notes on everything that I could think of, anything that I wanted to remember. I wrote it down in here. This is my Bible now. And today we are going to be discussing The Little Mermaid 2023 live-action remake starring Halle Bailey. Now, before we get into the 2023 remake, we need to get a little bit of history and the importance of The Little Mermaid because this is not just any Disney live-action remake. This is a very important one. So going back all the way to November of 1989, The Little Mermaid is released and it changes cinematic history forever. The Little Mermaid came shortly after Walt Disney's passing in 1966. And with the company under new management, they were suffering from many, many box office elops. They didn't know what to do. They had just lost the head of their company. No pun intended. And unknowing what to do to save the company, Disney took a chance on this musical movie about a mermaid wanting to live on the land. And you know what's coming. This is the start of the infamous Disney Renaissance period that took place from 1989 to 1999. When talking about this movie, you have to understand the cultural significance of it and the importance that it holds within cinema history. That sounds really dramatic, but it really does. Throughout The Little Mermaid, you don't have this string of events of musicals being produced, animated musicals specifically. Ariel doesn't just shift the dynamic for Disney princesses becoming musicals, but also all of animation. It makes this trickle effect throughout animation history to prompt more musicals being produced within, you know, after 1990 all the way up to like 2010. And I know you're probably thinking, The Little Mermaid is not the first Disney movie to feature music. There's tons of movies released before The Little Mermaid that featured plenty of songs. And you're definitely right, but The Little Mermaid is the first to take on a true musical format, using songs to push forward to tell a plot, getting these characters to a point where they have so many emotions that they can't help but sing. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves features music and songs like Whistle While We Work, but the Dwarves aren't singing because they don't have the ability to speak about what they're feeling. They're singing and simply explaining the things they're doing. It's a catchy tune, but Snow White is not a musical. With this being said, the studio executives took a huge chance on making this the new format, and basically they were at their last straw. If The Little Mermaid didn't succeed, Disney probably wouldn't be at company still to this day, or they would just be a way less successful company than they are right now. With all that being said about this monetary success and how The Little Mermaid saved Disney and it's all very great, it's a Disney renaissance, it sounds very fantastical. The Little Mermaid at its core is actually just a wonderful tale. It obviously comes from, you know, a much darker tale of The Little Mermaid. The original story follows the same idea, but I think Ariel ends up killing herself at the end. It's a simple tale, but it instantly connects you to the audience. Ariel is a girl who is trying to chase the impossible dream, but due to her circumstances and the nature of which she lives in, it is impossible for her to achieve. And we, the audience, get to see her achieve that. And I'm saying all of this because I want you to know the importance of The Little Mermaid before we get into my thoughts about the 2023 live-action remake of it. I love Ariel, I love The Little Mermaid, I think it holds so much cultural significance, not only for cinematic history and the business side of things, but also just as a core part of our childhood and the story that it tells. On to the 2023 live-action, I'm going to do some sporadic thoughts, kind of like going back to my notes that I was writing into the theater because I kind of just want to talk about it like I would with a friend. First impressions, I really liked this movie. I was engaged the entire time, I thought it was a really good run time. It actually runs a lot longer than the original movie. The original movie is I think about an hour and a half maybe, and this movie is about two hours and 15 minutes. I was engaged throughout the entire thing. I thought I had a really good pace in my opinion. The main thing that everyone has to talk about when they talk about underwater movies is the CGI. I was very much jolted by the CGI at first, but I think that is honestly become the norm. You have to sit with it for a bit to get used to what we're looking at. My brain can't compute humans underneath water, so to see it is obviously going to be a foreign sight to my eyes, so it took me a little bit of adjusting to get used to it. I got adjusted to it. I was like, this is lit. This looks great. I do think there are some parts in the very beginning, which I think is kind of a mistake to have these little issues within the first couple scenes about the mermaids underneath the water. I think they had a little bit of issues with lighting. I think there were some parts that were a bit overexposed where I was seeing really sharp high points on their faces that made it look very fake, and then I was getting a lot of dim parts within the first moments of the movie, which also didn't fare well for me. But this is coming from someone who knows not a lot about CGI, not a lot about lighting. I'm just taking note of things that I saw when I was watching. There was just some lighting issues that I didn't really like, and this is something that's consistent throughout the entire film in my opinion. I think that there are so many dark parts that where I just genuinely can't see things, I think that they chose a lot of dark night scenes underwater that made it almost impossible to see anything. I was like literally second row when I was having a difficulty seeing what was going on because of the lighting, and that's a shame because I think they spent so much time working on the CGI, and we can't see it. Talking about Ariel and the production design of the movie, I think they did a really good job. I love the details of Ariel.  It just seemed like she was a real mermaid, and I just really liked that. I thought it could be really costuming when I first, you know, when you first get into live actions, it can look very gimmicky and costuming. I think Ariel really looks like a character that they thought out and put a lot of effort into how her wardrobe would be, how her top would be, how it was kind of like, you know, there was there was edges that were like peeling almost of her top. I thought it like actually like it was a very cohesive character design, and I was I was very surprised and very pleased by that because I think a lot of the times when you get into Disney live action remakes, it can just look like a kid's costume. In terms of the the creatures, her friends, in terms of Flounder, Sebastian and Scuddle, I don't think they're fine. I was a little jolted by Sebastian. I'm not going to lie, but I got used to it. Most of the things that I was jolted at within the first scenes, I got used to it very quickly. Eric's character design was great. I it's impossible to mess up Eric. If you could have messed up Eric's character design, I would have actually given you a million dollars because that's the easiest thing to get right. And he looked, oh my God, I was drooling. I was actually drooling at the screen. There were so many scenes. Anytime Eric was dripping in water, I was drooling. I was I was drooling at the screen. He was so freaking fine. I didn't think he was that fine before I watched the movie.  That man is so attractive. Like, oh my God, like I literally wasn't expecting that. But I was so happy because I wanted him so bad. I wanted him really bad. Like at the end of the movie where he's like walking up to the shore and he has this like his like white flowy top is like all wet. And then he was like, you can see his chest.   We'll get to the songs later. Moving on from character design, the performances were great. I'm going to say Halle and Jonah for the last because like, oh my God. I'm going to start with my least favorite, which was obviously Aquafina. I don't think she was that bad. I don't think she was that bad. I don't like her as Scuttle though. I wanted someone a lot funnier to be Scuttle. It pains me that I knew it was Aquafina. Like I don't like watching animated things and knowing the celebrity that is voicing them. I love voice actors, voicing characters. I think the other two actors that voiced the animals, Sebastian and Flounder did a really good job. I think Jacob was amazing as Flounder, like literally like perfect. I was like, that is Flounder. I didn't feel like I was hearing some sort of actor's voice. And I think Dave did a really good job as Sebastian and I think his singing voice was really well as well. Jonah as Eric was scrum dilly umptious. He gave so much to the role, not only his attractive looks, but he also gave a very compelling performance as Eric that made Eric go from like a really boring prince in my opinion to someone who was really you know charismatic and really uh charming on screen. Don't get me started on his voice. That song, I wasn't expecting it. I wasn't expecting wild uncharted waters, but oh my god what I make love to that voice. His voice was so amazing and I never heard him sing. I don't know much about Jonah as an actor or the work he's done before, but goddamn was I literally like if I wasn't drooling before then like I had waterfalls coming out when he started singing. I love him so much and I didn't know anything about him before this movie, but I love that man and that man is going to mine. Today's video is sponsored by Raycon. As you guys know, I love Raycon. I've been working for them for a quite a bit of time now and I'm still just as obsessed as I was with them when I first got them now. 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Everyone was waiting eagerly to see her performance as Ariel and she was wonderful and that is no shocker here. I was not really expecting any bad performance from her. I was expecting her to be amazing and she was amazing. I think she captured the essence of Ariel perfectly. I think she has this look within her eyes that just gleams Ariel. It just sparkles and shows the Ariel doe-eyed look and I think she just did an impeccable job as Ariel. I think she gets a lot of the graceful movements down when she's out of the water. She has this delicate physical body language that really accentuates the character as Ariel. I don't need to really give my compliments to her voice because I think we already knew that her songs were going to be amazing but still, even though I knew her songs were going to be amazing, I was just speechless while watching her sing. It was so beautiful. It was so...I was almost about to start crying because it was so amazing. I love musicals and I love watching Disney live action remakes where they cast someone who can actually sing like a musical. I do not like it when they just cast anyone to play these roles. I'm so sorry Emma Watson, I love you baby boo but you should have never been Belle because you're just not a singer in the same sense of what a singer needs to be to do these roles. These are musical roles you need to have that you can't just be able to sing. That's what I'm trying to say. You can't just be able to sing and sing a tune. You have to be able to thrust forward that emotional connection through the screen. It's so important and with Ariel it's so vital to the story that we know what she wants and we can feel what she wants through these songs and Halle freaking nailed it. Halle nailed it. I was absolutely blown away. She brings this new life to these songs that we've heard a million times. She brings this warmth, this power to the songs that I think was just perfect and don't even get me started on for the first time. I freaking love this song and I'm gonna get into that song when I go into the differences between the original and this movie but oh my god it's on repeat. She sounds so freaking good. I cannot praise Halle Bailey enough and I am adjusted all by this performance. I wasn't expecting her to do bad or anything but it was just amazing to see. Now that I've talked about some of my thoughts on the production design, some of my thoughts on the characters and the actors' performances, I want to go into the differences between the original and the new adaptation of it. This is kind of gonna be where I go into also the plot of the movie because I didn't talk about that in my second section. So this is where we're gonna get all the juicy parts about my thoughts on the plot and the differences and how it all compares. Talking about the differences, obviously the main difference is the time. We get a lot more time to develop these characters within this movie. Firstly Ariel. Ariel has a lot of tweaks to her character and the main one being the song for the first time. By this I mean this song adds a whole new layer to this story. This is the first time we get to see Ariel's doubts about the world above. This is really important because in the original we don't get to see Ariel talk again until she gets her voice back. Adding this new narrative to see what she's thinking about, to hear how she's feeling and how she wants to sing so badly and she's singing within her head. Not only does it add a new layer to see, oh like this is what she wants to say in her head. We're also seeing that she not only has excitement about this land above, we're also seeing her fear. We're seeing her dad's narrative come into her mind where she's asking if all things under the sea are just food to humans. We're seeing that she has this fear and anxiety surrounding being here. In the first movie when Ariel goes to the surface she basically did see, you know, she doesn't understand what's going on and it's very two-dimensional in my opinion. Within this movie we get to see how smart she really is and how purposeful she is with what she does.  We still get those really endearing moments but we also get to see her intelligence. One of the things that Rob Marshall has spoken about in his interviews is how he completely took out charades from the entire movie and he also took out the part where Ariel signs the contract because if anyone knows if she signed the contract that means she's could have written this entire time and she could have just written Eric a note. So they took out her ability to write and they also took out the ability to do charades because the charades kind of makes it a little bit gimmicky and doesn't leave much room for the communicate in any other way. This time we get to see them communicate through so many different things, through culture, through dancing, through food, through these lived experiences and the part where Ariel tells Eric her name by pointing to the constellation Aries and getting him to say Ariel was amazing and I think it really shows off Ariel's intelligence and how smart she actually is. The next difference through the film is Eric. Eric is basically an entirely different character than we saw in the original film. He actually has depth.   Like he actually had a story which was really interesting to see and I was really excited to see what they were doing with Eric's character. He goes from being kind of this like guy who's only obsessed with finding the girl with the voice and he has this like entirely different plot. Like I didn't know, maybe they mentioned this in the first movie. I didn't know he was an orphan. I didn't know that the king and queen saved him. Maybe I just forgot. He gets to have this I want song the same way that Ariel does and it's really clever how they do it because Eric and Ariel stories obviously parallel each other.  He wants to explore new cultures and he has this fear of being the only nation left behind in this, you know, leap forward in society. He wants to connect with other cultures. He wants to meet new people and he wants to explore the unchartered waters. This also goes in turn with finding Ariel. And Ariel has the same wants that parallel his she wants to go to above the ocean. She wants to meet new people. She wants to walk on land and she also wants to find Eric. This is a really clever way to do it. Eric didn't really have that in the original. He was just kind of like, like he was kind of like did see like he was kind of just as did see as Ariel was in my opinion. Like he just like didn't really like have anything to him that made me think of him as a good character. Not that he was ever bad. It's just that there was no, there was never enough to latch on to another big change for this movie is the additional songs. They have three new songs within the movie, which is for the first time, wild unchartered waters and Scuttlebutt. I think that there's, there's one song in here that is not like the others. And it was unnecessary in my opinion. I've never watched the little mermaid and been like, yeah, like. I think Scuttle needs a song and I would cut it. I would actually cut it from all future releases in my opinion, because I just don't think it adds anything. I wish it did, but it did. It doesn't. They could have added Vanessa's whole song. Also, I am segueing to Vanessa loved that, loved her. I think she was like crazy and I loved it. I love the actress that plays her. I think her name is Jessica. She was phenomenal. She was so beautiful, first of all, and for her little screen time within the movie, she like stole the show for a second. I was literally like, oh my God, like, she's laid like, in short, she just laid and I loved her and I hope to see her in more projects because like, I loved her on screen. One of the scenes I was most disappointed with was actually Kiss the Girl. I was really sad that this took place at night. It looked so bad. They look amazing. They look wonderful. The lighting was like so shitty. The color grading looked crazy. It's fine if you want to shoot it at night. Can I see? Would you give that for me? Would you give me the honor of being able to see a scene because I couldn't see it and I love Kiss the Girl and it was like, this scene has so much chemistry between them. They want to kiss each other, yada, yada, yada. It's great. I couldn't see it. I couldn't see it. I couldn't see it. I was so upset. I know I'm being very picky. Yes, you can see it, but the details I wanted to see, like I said, they are using so much CGI. Can you give me the honor of seeing the CGI? Would you do me that? Would you give me that, Disney? Would you bump up the lighting because I can't see shit and in the movie, I would understand it if maybe I came to my laptop and I couldn't see it that well, but I'm in the theater. I was in the theater. I should be able to see the entire movie when I'm in the theater. It should look good in the theater. I can understand if some movies are not made to be watched on your TV, on your laptop, but come on. I was literally second row in the theater and I was having a hard time seeing certain things because it was so dark. You're joking. You're actually joking. I also have a very big issue with the last action scene being super dark. Again, it's a great action scene. The fight between them is great. The underwater scenes are great.   And I know I'm being really picky, but I have to be. When this is a super high budget movie, this is Disney and I can't see what's going on. That was such a shame to me because I know it looked good and I know people put so much effort into these CGI moments and the color grading just took it all away. It might as well have been like a once upon a time episode because I couldn't see anything. Who cares if the CGI is good or not? I can't see it. And I know that they put a lot of effort into it, so it's a shame that they covered it all up with such shitty lighting. So with all the things I liked about the movie and all the things I didn't, I actually fairly enjoyed myself when I was watching this movie and this comes from someone that doesn't really love Disney live action remakes. The only ones I really like are Cinderella and Alice in Wonderland. I don't really like Beauty and the Beast. I don't really like Aladdin that much. So for me, I wasn't going in with the expectation that I was going to come out of the other end really enjoying this movie, but I think as overall as a movie, it definitely is more cohesive than other live actions that I've seen. I will say majority of the movie is the original scene by scene. And I can tell when I'm watching that they do that in fear of the changing certain things. It's like I can tell that they are in fear of like Disney adults when making this movie. And that's a shame because I believe that movie should be like a creative process and should like strike creativity amongst audiences, amongst filmmakers. I think it should be new reinventions of things. With the additions that I liked in this movie, I don't think it's that far off from the original to really strike innovation.  Strike innovation. I find myself questioning why live action remakes are made a lot. What is the benefit of making a live action remake? This does not negate that I liked this movie. I had a fun time. I love the performances. I love the additions, but it is not enough to convince me that there needs to be so many live action remakes. I would love to know what you guys think about this movie. I know I kind of was all over the place today. I really want to sit down here. I really want to sit down and talk with you guys about it. I know this isn't a commentary, but this is something that I kind of wanted to talk through with you guys like I would with any of my besties. I love to just talk. I love to just talk as you can tell. And I would love to talk with you guys. So you guys listen to my opinions. Let me know your thoughts on this movie in the comment section down below. I know live action remakes can kind of be a hit or miss. So I want to know from you guys, is it a hit or is it a miss?  Anyways, that wraps it up for today, guys. I hope you like this video. Let me know other movies coming out that you guys want me to do a little review on like this because I like doing these sometimes along with doing commentaries. I just like doing these with theater releases that I can't do commentaries on. So let me know. Hope you guys had a great day and I'll see you next time. Bye.