“Wild Uncharted Waters” is essentially Eric doing a Les Mis impersonation. Those things are sorely missing in these new songs. The downside is that, despite Halle’s gorgeous voice, they’re all pretty much inconsequential.Īshman’s lyrics had a way of giving you an entire character’s backstory in a three-minute song, while not sacrificing cleverness or even a sense of daring. All of the tunes are designed to give the characters more insight, like Eric’s adventurous spirit, Ariel’s inner monologue, and Scuttle’s complete confusion about the human world. The major songs are “Wild Uncharted Waters” (sung by Jonah Hauer-King, playing Prince Eric), “For The First Time” (sung by Halle), and a rap called “The Scuttlebutt” (sung by Awkwafina as Scuttle and Daveed Diggs as Sebastian). Menken and Miranda have created three full new songs (as well as an additional “Part of Your World” reprise) featured in the movie. And if not for the Oscar rule that limits nominations to two songs per movie, Ashman and Menken probably could have seen nods for “Poor Unfortunate Souls” and “Part Of Your World.”Īshman died in 1991, and in his absence his songwriter partner Menken teamed up with Lin-Manuel Miranda to steer the music of the remake. Ashman and Menken actually had to beat themselves in the song category, as “Kiss The Girl” was also nominated. The movie won two Oscars in 1990 for Best Original Score and Best Original Song for “Under the Sea,” written by Ashman and composer Alan Menken. The Little Mermaid is arguably the best animated musical Disney has created. The exhausting and extremely predictable racist backlashĪ shot-for-shot remake would’ve probably been better.įor good or bad, here’s what’s different from the 1989 classic and the 2023 live-action remake: The new Little Mermaid has three new songs.Where have all the Disney villains gone?.The live action remake of the Little Mermaid, explained Examined in full, it raises the bleaker question of why this movie exists in the first place. Examining these choices one by one can make you question the directive that Disney and Marshall were going for. Marshall and his crew cleaved away some of songwriter Howard Ashman’s lyrics, added new songs, and sanded down the romantic undertone of the first movie. Unfortunately for director Rob Marshall, most of the script and score modifications in his and Disney’s live-action animated remake of The Little Mermaid don’t better its predecessor. Each change feels glaring, and implicitly comes with a question: Does this tweak actually improve what was there before? If the answer is no, then there’s another question, an existential one: Why does this change exist? That’s what happens when the source material is pretty close to perfection. The problem when recreating a beloved, classic movie like The Little Mermaid is that more things can go wrong than right. This article contains light spoilers for The Little Mermaid.
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