Each time Disney reaches back into its vast animation archive and says “let’s live action… this one!” to add to its roster of Disney Plus movies, there’s often a collection of groans online. Why? What’s the point? And just because you can, does it mean you should? The results are extremely varied – for every Jungle Book (2016), there’s a Pinocchio (2022) – and would seem to point in the direction that perhaps some charming animated adventures are better off just staying in that format.
So hats off to director Rob Marshall (Chicago, Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides), for undertaking perhaps one of the trickiest Disney films to translate into “real-life”: the underwater musical about singing mythical sea creatures. He told TechRadar that, on a scale of 1 to 10 of how daunting the project was at the beginning, it was an “11”, but through four years worth of CGI, puppetry, live-action acting, stunts and other movie magic, he’s made the underwater world come alive, just as the original 1989 The Little Mermaid imagined.
