For instance, some people see a sense of noble sadness in unrequited love, whereas others think it's just creepy. (When it happens in real life, who feels what way about it tends to depend very much on who's, um, giving, and who's receiving.) And some people feel brightness and happiness and general optimism when they hear tales of "love at first sight", whereas others will say, hey, c'mon, dudes, that's just silly and impractical. And then there are the idiots who think falling in love with one person means abandoning everyone else of importance in one's life, which is...well, I'd like to think that's more objectively stupid, but maybe it's not? Actually, for proof of how much people's taste in romance differs in weird ways, look no further than Twilight. THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO FIND THAT ROMANTIC. And there are apparently weirdos out there who find The Little Mermaid romantic, too, though I am, shall we say............not one of them.
The first problem the movie faces is the fact that it can't even be bothered to establish a reasonable reason for King Triton's misanthropy. Is it....is it because human people eat fish? Do you mean to tell me that a fellow like Triton got that beefy without consuming ANY protein? Really??? (For that matter, if common eating utensils are unknown to mermaids, does that mean they just sloppily cram food down their mermaws by hand? Yeah, that.....that makes Ariel a lot less sexy, doesn't it? I suppose Triton could just use his trident, at least. But I digress.) Or maybe it's just because he thinks human people are terrible savages on a more general level. Terrible savages, unlike mermen, who resolve their problems in perfectly reasonable ways, like snapping and blowing up all of their daughter's shit with magickal Trident Beams. Reasonable!
But that doesn't matter if there's a nice little tale of romance behind it all, right? Well, um....here's the thing. It's not really romantic, at all. I mean, it's romantic in the sense that there is almost-kissing, and characters use the word "love", and it all ends with a marriage, but in spite of all of this, Ariel and Philip's relationship seems about as secure to me as Oliver and Penny's did last week! Sure, she thinks she's happy and that she's gonna feed him and bathe him and everything, but in a couple weeks she'll get bored with his blandness and start longing for fins again, and he'll end up in a shelter. Um. A....prince shelter. Well, it's not a perfect comparison, but you get the idea. They'll eventually get bored when they realise they can't spend every waking moment singing and stabbing giant octopuses, after all!
So why DO people regard this as the beginning of the Disney Renaissance, then? Well, it's undeniably a very pretty-looking motion picture. Ariel's hair is more impressive than you probably realise! And, furthermore, it's undeniably an even prettier-SOUNDING film. People remember these songs for a reason! "Part of Your World" is genuinely moving! (And yes, Taylor, I can identify with it, too. Especially right now...) "Poor Unfortunate Souls" is another great villain song in a Clements/Musker film! "Les Poissons" is.........well, it's very French, that's for sure. And "Under the Sea" is catchy in a way that Sebastian's two real-life children's reggae albums most likely aren't! (Sadly, I wasn't able to find the Sebastian cover of "Octopus's Garden" from Party Gras! online to fully confirm this hypothesis....but it seems like a safe bet. By the way, is Disney under the misapprehension that Mardi Gras is a Jamaican thing? Because, um. Wow.)
The Little Mermaid is, frankly, not the best of the Disney Renaissance. As a story, it's no deeper than the last few decades of films have been. It's very much something you're just supposed to gaze at and listen to and not put much thought into. You're not supposed to think about why Flounder is named Flounder when he's nothing like a flounder at all! You're not supposed to think about why Ariel finds, um, "dinglehoppers" to be so fascinating, when her dad owns a fucking TRIDENT, which is essentially a dinglehopper on some sort of theoretical type of steroids that work on inanimate objects! You're not supposed to contemplate why Ariel can still understand Sebastian after becoming a human, but none of the other humans can! And you're certainly not supposed to ponder why Tim Curry was so bored that he provided "additional voices" for just the opening scene, like some no-name shmuck! You're supposed to just sit back, shut up, enjoy what you can, and don't even think about questioning it, lest ye ruin the fun for yourselves, you poor unfortunate souls.
It's kind of a stressful week, so I don't really have a comic to share. I do have an important and valuable lesson for the kiddies, though! JESSE SEZ: Never ever EVER attempt amateur dinglehoppery, especially with short hair!*
TERRIBLY USELESSLY WORTHLESS DISNEY DIRECT-TO-DVD SEQUEL CONCEPT OF THE WEEK: Well, now we're getting to a point where EVERY film will already have at least one or two perfectly valid contenders for this! But the best of all would have to be The Little Mermaid IV: The Rather Smallish Human, which is totally all about Ariel and Philip's daughter, Gretchen (Debby Ryan). See, she doesn't enjoy being a human princess, at all! It's just the worst! So, she runs away from the castle, a lot. One night, she stumbles upon a poor helpless beached merman, Reginald (Wayne Dalglish), and helps him back into the water, falling deeply and madly and eye-rollingly in love in the process. Despite her own personal history, Ariel disapproves of this for some reason, being hesitant to tell her own daughter that she, too, was once a mermaid. But Philip's advisor, a scheming Chinese sheep named Zheng Baa (James Hong), knows! He casually reveals the secret to Gretchen, causing all sorts of family turmoil, which Zheng Baa uses to power up his secret family turmoil-powered doomsday robot! It's okay, though. In the end, Ariel and Gretchen make up, Gretchen gets mermaidified so she can go off and live with her new boyfriend and leave all her old friends behind, and this renewed family unity weakens the robot enough for it to be destroyed, by hurling a boat at it, of course. The end!
*It's ketchup, people. Ketchup.
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