If you loved Disney's 1989 animation The Little Mermaid but somehow thought to yourself, "What that kids' classic really needed was to be a whole lot longer, a little more serious, and – I dunno – maybe feature an aquatic bird rapping a Lin-Manuel Miranda tune", well, you are in luck.
The studio's live-action remake of their beloved musical, directed by Rob Marshall (Chicago; Mary Poppins Returns) and starring pop singer Halle Bailey as fishtail-out-of-water Ariel, lands with a culturally divisive splash – already regarded with suspicion by nostalgia-ridden millennials and harpooned by the usual racists incapable of accepting an actor of colour as a mythological sea creature who pals around with a singing crustacean.
