How Disney's "The Little Mermaid" changed the course of animated musicals -

This story has been updated.

Before the 1989 release of “The Little Mermaid,” Walt Disney Studios chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg wanted to temper expectations. So he met with the movie’s writer-directors, John Musker and Ron Clements, to deliver a decidedly un-Disney-fied message: Don’t get your hopes up.

“It’s getting there,” Katzenberg told the creative duo after screening a next-to-final cut of the animated fairy tale, The Walt Disney Company’s first since “Sleeping Beauty” three decades earlier. All right, cool, Musker and Clements could take that. But Katzenberg’s next comment stung a little.

“You know this movie’s not going to do as well as ‘Oliver and Company’ — and that’s okay,” said Katzenberg. When they asked why, the studio chief was matter-of-fact.

“It’s a girl’s movie, and girl’s movies don’t do as well as boy’s movies,” said Katzenberg, according to Musker. File that under “Studio Execs Say the Darndest Things.”

Hear that? It’s the sound of a zillion little girls stampeding toward theaters on May 26 to watch the live-action remake of “The Little Mermaid,” starring Halle Bailey in the titular role of Ariel, the young mermaid who dreams of life on land. Box office predictions for the new film’s opening weekend are hovering around $110 million. Not bad for a “girl’s movie.”

Because the original “Little Mermaid” started it all. The animated feature would go on to change Disney for the foreseeable future, helping hone the direction of animated films for the next three decades and thrusting the company into culture wars over feminism, girl power and what happy ever after looks like.

“I never thought of it as a girl’s movie,” said Musker, who came up with Clements through Disney animation’s 1970s talent development program, which was created to breathe new life into the house the mouse built. “I like fairy tales.”

As did the millions of fans who made “The Little Mermaid” an unbridled success. The original film took in more than $200 million at the global box office. Four months after its premiere, the film won two Oscars at the 62nd annual Academy Awards — best original song for the calypso-inspired “Under the Sea” and best original score. The movie was released on VHS two months later, and within a year sold 10 million copies.

“It reset Disney” said Lee Artz, a professor of media studies at Purdue University Northwest. “It was the beginning.”

Katzenberg walked out of an early audience screening looking dazed, recalled Musker. Everyone loved it, but the studio chief said he had no clue how to market the film. Before “The Little Mermaid,” the consensus was that “no parent in their right mind would want to see an animated film,” added Musker. So Disney took a multipronged approach, targeting every demographic. The original film posters range from cartoony to sleek.

The movie represented a whole new kind of animated feature. One that appealed to girls, boys, parents and adults without kids. It was date-night cinema, family movie night fare and a babysitter flick all in one.

‘The Little Mermaid’: An Ariel for a new generation

With “The Little Mermaid,” Disney didn’t just have a hit on its hands, it had a cultural and commercial tidal wave that would reinvigorate the company’s animation department — and eventually its consumer products division. The film is also responsible for the contemporary incarnation of what we now know as the Disney Princess — a slew of the studio’s subsequent films featured heroines who did more than sing in an impossibly high soprano about a prince who’ll someday come to save her.

“It was so different than anything else that Disney had released in decades. It changed the company’s trajectory for the better and pulled it out of the dark years where they were recycling material,” said Rebecca Hains, author of “The Princess Problem: Guiding Our Girls Through the Princess-Obsessed Years.”

But it almost didn’t make the cut.

After thumbing through a book of Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales, Clements landed on the story of the “The Little Mermaid.” The original 19th-century tale is beyond tragic. A teenage mermaid falls in love with a human prince and after making a deal with an evil sea witch heads to shore with two legs but no voice. In the end the prince marries another girl and the mermaid, unable to kill the prince with a magical dagger for which her sisters have traded their long hair, eventually dissolves into thin air — seriously.

In 1985 Clements presented a happier version to the studio’s “Gong Show,” a rapid-fire pitch session where creators threw their ideas at Katzenberg and Michael Eisner, the CEO of Disney, who either gave them a “Hmm, maybe” or a “Gooooong, forget it.”

“'Mermaid’ got gonged,” said Musker. Katzenberg thought the story was too similar to Disney’s 1984 hit “Splash,” which already had a sequel in the works. But Clements kept at it and delivered a two-page movie treatment that Eisner and Katzenberg liked. Musker was brought on to help expand the story. Then both writers were introduced to Broadway lyricist and playwright Howard Ashman, who Disney had been courting, and composer Alan Menken, who worked with Ashman on off-Broadway’s “Little Shop of Horrors.” The foursome met in New York and hit it off.

The rest is animation history. When Musker and Clements first heard Ashman sing “Part of Your World” in his Soho apartment, they “totally believed he was a mermaid yearning for a place outside of her confines.”

Because, really, if there’s a secret to the film’s success, it starts with the songs. Sweeping Broadway-style numbers like “Part of Your World,” “Kiss the Girl,” and “Under the Sea” connected to the storytelling in a way that the songs in Disney’s animated musicals had never done before. The plot itself, said Musker, was less about romance and more about rebellion. Ariel is an independent-minded daughter clashing with an overprotective father. It’s a universal story.

“We made the film for us. We weren’t thinking of it as a kids’ film,” said Musker.

But the kids? They came.

And they kept coming to gobble up the subsequent films that built on the success of the “The Little Mermaid.” Next up were “Beauty and Beast,” “Pocahontas,” “Aladdin,” “Mulan,” “The Princess and the Frog, “Tangled,” “Brave,” “Moana,” “Frozen,” “Raya and the Last Dragon,” and “Encanto.” Each new film building on the popularity of the last and plugging that winning formula — vibrant visuals, a coming-of-age moment and that over-the-top musical number you can’t help but belt out.

And with that cinematic catnip came the Disney Princess Industrial Complex.

“Looking back at the history of modern Disney princess culture, the whole conceptualization of the Disney princess as its own brand traces back to the popularity of ‘The Little Mermaid,’” said Hains.

Even if you’re not familiar with the Disney Princess brand you are familiar with the Disney Princess Brand. It is everywhere. There are ball gowns and bedsheets, Lego sets and lunchboxes, sleep masks and slippers. The consumer reach is massive.

“In the last 15 years they’ve made over 2 billion in toy sales that are completely outside the film take,” said Artz.

According to Robyn Muir, author of “The Disney Princess Phenomenon: A Feminist Analysis,” the official princess franchise started from the ground up, born out of the fandom. Seeing dollar signs, Disney harnessed that fervor with products and at its theme parks. Additionally, the company licenses the princess lineup to other toy manufacturers, ensuring that children can own a piece of princess culture at any price point.

“You can see Disney Princess stuff wherever you go. They’re a cultural phenomenon. It’s no longer just the films. You can go to Walmart and the Dollar Store and still get princess stuff. It’s everywhere,” Muir said.

But it wasn’t until 2000, after five princess films had been released, that Disney realized it had something big on its hands. “There wasn’t a thought of turning them into this marketing phenomenon,” said Musker of the movie that started it all. “We never even thought of Ariel as a princess.”

For that parents can thank Andy Mooney. About a month into his role as president of Disney Consumer Products, Mooney attended a Disney on Ice performance in Arizona and noticed that all the little girls there were wearing homemade princess costumes. It was an “A-ha!” moment. He asked their mothers if they would pay for official merchandise. The answer was a resounding yes. Immediately, Disney got to work creating the princess brand.

Theofficial Disney Princess universe consists of 13 characters (characters have been added along the years), not all of whom are actually princesses: They are Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora, Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Pocahontas, Mulan, Tiana, Rapunzel, Merida, Moana and Raya. Once the original lineup was announced, one thing became glaringly obvious: All of them were white except Jasmine of “Aladdin.”

“That was clearly not diverse enough,” said Hains. So they threw in Pocahontas and Mulan. Both were controversial choices. “Pocahontas” literally rewrote history, reframing colonialism and genocide as a love story. While the character Mulan, a young woman who joins the army in place of her father and trains as a warrior, is about as far away from a princess as you can get.

With only a select number of princesses of color in the lineup — one character each from three marginalized cultures — the burden of representation becomes especially heavy, Hains said. Was Tiana of “The Princess and the Frog” positive or problematic? She is independent, talented and smart, but she also works to the point of exhaustion — not the healthiest message for little Black girls.

Enter Halle Bailey, the Black singer and actress who stars as Ariel in the live action remake. When the trailer for the new movie was released last September the internet was flooded with feel-good viral videos featuring Black children reacting to Bailey swimming through the ocean and singing a snippet of “Part of Your World.” “She looks like me!” was the collective refrain.

“Little White girls have a lot of choices in princesses, but girls from non-White backgrounds have one each, which is better than zero, but still not enough,” Hains said.

And then there’s the princess problem in general. Despite Ariel being a progressive step up from the passive examples of “Snow White,” “Sleeping Beauty” and “Cinderella” — when audiences first encounter the young mermaid she is quite literally breaking the rules — there are consistent criticisms of “The Little Mermaid” and the princess movies that followed. Ariel has to trade away her voice and change her body to find love.

In 2018, actress Kiera Knightley told Ellen DeGeneres that “Cinderella” and “The Little Mermaid” were banned from her house. “I mean, the songs are great but do not give your voice up for a man. Hello?” said Knightley.

But Musker and team never saw it that way. Ariel’s main goal is adventure. When she sings “Part of Your World” in the film’s first act, she hasn’t met her one true love yet. The longing she feels is for independence, not a prince.

“The king and the crab change,” said Musker. “Ariel remained steadfast to her goal.”

Instead of “pitting these fictional women against” one another, said Muir, parents can open up the conversation about which attributes to emulate and which to avoid. Moana is brave. Pocahontas is a leader. Mulan is fierce. Cinderella, on the other hand, remains quietly passive as people mistreat and take advantage of her.

“Disney princesses are not inherently good and they are not inherently bad. They’re complex. There’s something to learn from each wave of princess,” said Muir.

Ariel was spunky, fiery and driven — a much different heroine than any Disney princess before her, paving the way for Jasmine, who won’t be rushed into an arranged marriage, and Belle, who loves books, and Merida, who doesn’t want to be anything like her uptight mother.

Yet while there has been “a massive change from decades of romance, romance, romance on screen” said Hains, the products on the shelves have not kept pace.

“There was never a Belle library, but there was a Belle beauty kit. They didn’t have a Mulan doll in armor until after the movie was rereleased. She was warrior. They put Merida in the dress she hated because it’s the prettier dress,” said Hains. “There are different logics at play with film and product divisions.”

Yet here we are more than three decades after “The Little Mermaid” premiered, and a new wave of little girls, many the daughters of women who grew up watching the original film on repeat, are heading to theaters to be mesmerized by the same story and songs. Musker, who retired from Disney in 2018 and has been hand-drawing his own animated short for the last few years, isn’t at all surprised by the film’s reach.

“There was a lot of pixie dust on the movie.”

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZK6zwNJmnKeslafBorXNppynrF9nfXN%2FjmlsaGpkZLGqv82esGakmanBrbGMppyrpZGesW64yK%2BcZpmTqbawuoylnKCZk658