Updated with video.
Look people, I tried to warn you. Back in the summer of 2019 I told everybody that the live-action remake of The Little Mermaid was going to have a serious problem that nobody had considered. Specifically, the fact that making photo-realisitic versions of the animal characters from the animated movie was going to mean creating versions of Flounder of Sebastian that were not nearly as adorable as the ones we already had. And now here we are.
The live-action remake of The Little Mermaid will be hitting theaters at the end of the month, and while the buzz around this one is absolutely off the charts, not everybody is completely excited by all aspects of it. First, the internet took aim at Scuttle, now it’s been getting a look at what Sebastian and Flounder are going to look like in the new movie that has fans scratching their heads.
It can’t really be argued that Sebastian and Flounder look pretty realistic, which is fitting for a movie that is otherwise live-action. But not everybody is on board with this. These characters actually look more than a little creepy and fans on Twitter are not on board with these designs.
I could’ve gone my entire life without seeing this and have been fine
But then what was the digital effects team supposed to do? The Little Mermaid is a live-action adaptation so all the human and mermaid characters are played by people. What exactly are the animal characters supposed to look like? As one response points out, the digital effects people did their job, and honestly did it well, but the expectation of realistic characters was only ever going to create this.
i feel bad for the animators when they told them to humanize a fuckin crab AND make him realistic, disney set them up for failure
If the characters didn't need to talk and were just animals, that would be fine. But they also need to have the human characteristics that make the audience connect with them and allow them to do some human-like things, like speak. We saw this problem with The Lion King remake. The technology to make the animals look real was amazing, but it sacrificed the ability of the characters to properly emote. When you bring the need for "realistic" and "speaking like people" together you get some Island of Dr. Moreau-looking monster…
they put flounder on ozempic too nobody is safe
It’s legitimately hard to find anybody who really loves these designs. Even a Texas Department of Public Safety decided to get in on the Twitter dogpile and call this one a literal crime.
Yes this is a crime- we’re just trying to find out which one
Maybe, once we actually sit down and watch The Little Mermaid, we’ll all get used to these looks and they’ll be ok. It’s possible that we’ll get over our initial hesitation. However, there’s also the possibility that we will spend the entire movie just wondering what in the hell it is we are staring at. Anybody who had the misfortune to watch Cats understands what that is like.
Wtf. This is starting to be on par with the Cats movie
Maybe Flounder and Sebastian aren’t actually in that much of the movie, so it won’t bother us that much. Or maybe the voice performances from Daveed Diggs and Jacob Trembley and the rest of The Little Mermaid cast are so good we’ll overlook the look. We can only hope.
