The trailer suggests that THE LITTLE MERMAID will not be awful. Indeed, if it existed in a vacuum I might want to watch it.
But I do not see the damn point of live-action versions of perfectly fine animated pictures. Obviously, other people disagree with me, in sufficient numbers to encourage Disney to keep making them. When it comes to such things I am quite often wrong, or at least not in the majority. That is not enough to make me want to see this out of nostalgia. I mean, shoot, I’ll just watch the original again.
Moe Lane
I remember Cinderella being okay. And beauty and the beast was not horrible (though I wouldn’t call it great). I think passive disinterest is probably the healthy response to the lot of them.
A few notes for Disney (for my own amusement):
If you’re going to make Ariel black, then make Triton black too. Also make sure Ariel’s sisters are also black. I don’t care about the race issue. I just like consistency. It’s silly to me that Triton sounds like he just got off the plane from Madrid, and Ariel sounds like she just got off a bus from Cleveland.
If you’re going to do an uninspired, shot-for-shot remake of a beloved animated feature to cash in on nostalgia, at least do the shots right. The Ariel on the rock scene is one of my favorite images from the original, and it looks like Halle Bailey was just phoning it in for that scene.
Also, lighting. Light the movie, for goodness sake! Maybe “modern audiences” like guessing. I am not part of the modern audience. It’s probably why I didn’t like Michael Bay’s “Transformers” movies.
That’s pretty much it. I’m not going to see it, but at least Disney will know why, since we all know Bob Iger secretly reads this blog and heeds all of Moe’s advice.