When the idea of making a live-action The Little Mermaid movie was first floated to director Rob Marshall, it was a very daunting task, he tells TechRadar. “On a scale of 1 to 10?” he says. “It was an 11! I thought, well how do we do this? It’s never been done before. How do we do an underwater musical; how do you create a live action version of that? It really was some uncharted territory for me.”
The result is a pleasingly effortless showstopper musical that really nails the songs. With Halle Bailey as the playful Ariel; Oscar-winning Javier Bardem as the mighty King Triton; Melissa McCarthy as Ursula the sea-witch and a gaggle of Ariel’s mer-sisters and sea creature friends, they all glide about weightlessly in an underwater kingdom; talking, singing and swimming under the Caribbean sea like it’s the most natural thing in the world, and not the result of years of meticulous staging, puppeteer work and photo-realistic CGI and digital effort.
