Halle Bailey – with her huge eyes, soaring singing voice and palpable purity of spirit – is about as naturally Disneyfied as real human beings get. So it’s ironic that her casting as the titular Ariel was ever thought controversial. Bailey is both the finished film’s only unmitigated triumph and the best argument for this whole live action remake enterprise in one shimmering mermaidcore package. If these films are to have any purpose beyond being nostalgia-powered cash-ins, it must be to allow all children – not just the white ones – to see themselves as Magic Kingdom denizens.
But almost everything else about this flops about like a dying fish on deck. Most significantly this applies to the trio of comic-relief characters: Sebastian the crab, Flounder the fish and Scuttle the seabird. This is no fault of the talented voice cast: Daveed Diggs, Jacob Tremblay and Awkwafina, respectively. It’s just that things that are cute or funny when done by an anthropomorphised cartoon cuddlies are no longer cute or funny when done by computer-generated sea-life approximates with no recognisable facial expressions. Whole sequences of character interaction fondly remembered from its 1989 predecessor – Scuttle’s instructions on how to use a human “dinglehopper”, Flounder fleeing a shark attack – are rendered lifeless by CGI. And you’d be lucky to make much of it out through the murk of the underwater cinematography anyway.
