My Disney animated rewatch movie last weekend was The Little Mermaid. I’d been planning to go more or less chronological, but my pastor planned a sermon involving The Little Mermaid last Sunday, so I jumped ahead.

In a way, it made for an interesting contrast, going straight from the start of full-length animated movies to the start of the Disney Renaissance. We definitely see some changes in the way the heroine is presented. Ariel is an actual protagonist who has a personal goal at the beginning of the story, develops a story goal, and takes action to achieve both her personal goal and story goal. Prince Eric gets a name and something of a personality (but no songs), and actually interacts with Ariel before they fall in love. On the other hand, Ariel is just 16 and still gets married at the end, something that didn’t get corrected explicitly in Disney films until Tangled, when they actually said at the end that they wouldn’t get married until much later. Maybe there’s a time gap we don’t see between Ariel returning to Eric with legs and a voice and the wedding. She could have spent a few years living on land and getting to know Eric before they got married.

I saw this one at the theater when it was released, and I know I’ve seen it at least a couple of times since then, but it’s been a long time since I’ve seen more than clips, and I’d forgotten what a delightful movie this is. My face hurt at the end because I’d been grinning the whole time. I remember being frustrated by the fact that the movie was about a girl with a beautiful voice, and then she only got one song, with all the rest of the songs coming from the sidekicks, but the sidekick songs are a lot of fun, as well as being truly good music.

One interesting thing about story structure is that there’s a rolling/escalating inciting event. We start the story with Ariel fascinated with humans and longing to be part of the human world. Then she sees the ship, watches Eric, falls for him, then sees him risk his life to save his dog from the shipwreck and saves him. That’s part one — she falls in love with Eric, which ramps up her desire to be part of the human world. Then it escalates further when her father finds out about her obsession with humans and destroys her collection. That drives her further away from the world of the merpeople and makes her feel even more like she doesn’t belong there, and she doesn’t want to be part of them. And then Ursula takes advantage of this by offering the deal to become human, which is what creates the actual story goal: she has to make Eric fall in love with her and kiss her by sunset on the third day. All that other stuff has to happen to motivate her to take the deal and set the plot in motion. If Ursula had offered that deal at the beginning when it was just about collecting stuff, I’m not sure she’d have taken it. I’m not sure she’d have even taken it after meeting Eric. It took the final straw of being mad at her father for her to be willing to make that leap.

There’s a lot of mention in articles about this movie about how it was taking a new approach to the musical Disney movie by using the music the way a Broadway show does, to reveal character and move the plot forward, but I’m not sure I buy that. The older movies used music this way. The “I Want” song may have been codified formally into the formula with this movie, but it goes all the way back to Snow White. And not all the numbers in this film actually move the plot along. “Under the Sea” is a wonderful song, but the movie would still make total sense without it. The movie would lose a lot without “Kiss the Girl,” but, again, it’s not essential for the plot. Not to mention the chef’s song, which could go entirely. I don’t necessarily see any of these songs as being more essential to the story than most of the songs from the older musicals. It was a revival of the way they used to use music, not any kind of change. I actually felt like they were being cautious with the music, like they were afraid to make a full-fledged musical. Ariel’s and Ursula’s songs were true musical theater songs, but the rest of the songs are pretty much what I consider “performance” songs, in which the characters are performing music in the context of the story, not just bursting into song with the backing of an invisible orchestra.

I saw an article about the new live-action remake in which they say one difference from the animated version is that Ariel doesn’t just give up her voice for Eric because she’s already obsessed with the human world, and I have to wonder how recently they’ve seen the animated version because we see her collecting human stuff, visiting her treasure trove, and singing “Part of Your World” before she ever sets eyes on Eric. The whole “she gave up her voice to get a man, how anti-feminist!” argument has never actually fit this movie. She already wanted to be human. Eric mostly came into it because Ursula wrote him into the deal. Ariel didn’t just become human for Eric, but if she wanted to stay human she had to get Eric to fall for her. The analogy that comes to me would be if someone was obsessed with the idea of Paris, collected things from Paris, learned everything she could about Paris, and dreamed of going to Paris someday. Then she fell in love with a man from Paris, and that was what spurred her to sell her house and go to Paris, and then she needed to get him to marry her before her visa ran out so she could stay, knowing she wouldn’t be able to go back home if she failed because she’d already sold her house. The real relationship in this movie is between Ariel and her father. They have conflicting views of humanity, and Eric ends up proving that Ariel is right, that humans can be good, since he takes great risks to help both Ariel and her father, and the resolution of the movie is the reconciliation between Ariel and her father, with him finally understanding her. The romance isn’t the main plot.

I have some fun “six degrees” connections with this movie. I’ve seen Jodi Benson in a number of stage productions, one of which was in a pretty intimate theater in the round, where she was only a few feet away (that was in a touring production of Chess in the summer of 1991). I’ve also seen both the voice actor and the live action model for Eric in stage productions.

For those wondering how my pastor connected a sermon to The Little Mermaid, it was a sermon on Pentecost, getting into how that forced the disciples out of their comfort zones to follow the calling to preach the Gospel, with some of them going into far-off parts of the world, and he connected that to Ariel feeling called to leave her comfort zone of the ocean to go to the human world. But he also got into how this was the start of the Disney Renaissance, with the way the company was going downhill because they were being complacent and cheap, and they decided to make a leap of faith to return to old-school animation in making this film, which he then also tied to John Wesley beginning the Methodist movement, getting out of the comfort zone of the church and going out to where ordinary people were.

Next up for the sermon series is The Lion King. Depending on my mood, I may also do another animated movie this weekend.