The Little Mermaid (1989)
★★½ — The Little Mermaid (1989)
By the close of the 1980s, Walt Disney Feature Animation was in a precarious spot. A string of underperforming films had left the studio's hand-drawn tradition looking fragile, and there was genuine industry scepticism about whether audiences still wanted that kind of picture. The Little Mermaid, released in November 1989 and produced under the Silver Screen Partners IV banner, changed the conversation almost overnight. Loosely adapted from Hans Christian Andersen's 1837 fairy tale (though, as you'll see, "loosely" is doing some heavy lifting there), the film follows Ariel, a mermaid princess whose obsession with the human world leads her into a dangerous bargain with the sea witch Ursula. It became a considerable commercial success and is widely credited with inaugurating what critics and fans came to call the Disney Renaissance, a run of animated features through the early-to-mid 1990s that restored the studio's reputation and reshaped the family film market.
The film was directed by the partnership of John Musker and Ron Clements, who had previously collaborated on The Great Mouse Detective (1986). Musker would go on to direct further Disney animations, including Hercules and Moana, and you can see certain preoccupations, bright mythological worlds, larger-than-life antagonists, songs built around a protagonist's longing, running across all of that work. The score and songs were composed by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, a Broadway-rooted partnership that brought a theatrical, almost musical-theatre architecture to Disney's approach to animated song. Two of those songs picked up Academy Awards. At 83 minutes, the film moves at a clip, which suits its target audience well enough, even if it leaves little room for the story to breathe.
The principal voice cast is a polished but unremarkable ensemble in most respects, with a couple of genuine standouts. Jodi Benson voices Ariel with warmth and a clarity of singing tone that suited both the character and the radio-friendly ambitions of the soundtrack. Samuel E. Wright brings considerable personality to Sebastian, the anxious Jamaican-accented crab who functions as both comic relief and the film's most persuasive musical presence. Christopher Daniel Barnes handles Prince Eric, while Kenneth Mars gives the King Triton a booming, authoritative register. The performance that tends to linger longest in the memory, though, is Pat Carroll's Ursula: theatrical, physically exuberant in the animation, and pitched at exactly the right level of pantomime menace. Fans of other animated pictures might also want to browse the site's coverage of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Alice in Wonderland, both of which offer useful points of comparison for thinking about how Disney handles source material with a darker undertow.
The Little Mermaid (1989) is the film that kicked off Disney’s animation renaissance, and while its historical importance is undeniable, as a standalone movie it’s merely pleasant, not profound. The story is a heavily sanitized retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s melancholic fairy tale, swapped for a sunnier, simpler narrative about a mermaid who trades her voice for legs to win a prince’s love. It’s charming in a familiar, formulaic way, but lacks the emotional complexity or narrative ambition of Disney’s later hits like Beauty and the Beast or The Lion King. The animation is decent for its time (fluid underwater sequences, expressive faces, and vibrant sea life) but it hasn’t aged as gracefully as some of its successors. Backgrounds can feel flat, and the human characters (especially Prince Eric) are stiff and forgettable. Where the film truly shines is in its music: “Part of Your World” is a heartfelt anthem of yearning, and “Under the Sea” bursts with calypso energy and Oscar-winning flair. But beyond those two standouts, the rest of the soundtrack fades into filler, serviceable, but rarely memorable. Ursula the sea witch (voiced with delicious camp by Pat Carroll) is a highlight (glamorous, menacing, and dripping with theatrical flair) but even she can’t carry the thin plot alone. The romance feels rushed, the stakes low, and the resolution tidy to the point of predictability. The Little Mermaid is fine, bright, tuneful, and kid-friendly, but it’s more notable for what it started than what it is.
That tension between historical weight and actual merit is one I keep coming back to with films like this. The Little Mermaid earns its place in any serious account of animation history, and I'd never argue otherwise. But sitting down with it now, away from the nostalgia and the anniversary retrospectives, it's hard not to notice the seams. The rushed romance, the tidy ending, the stretches of soundtrack that coast on goodwill rather than earn it, these aren't minor quibbles; they're structural. For me, the real pleasure of revisiting it is Ursula and those two songs, and that's a perfectly decent reason to spend 83 minutes, just not quite the reason the legend would have you believe. Sometimes the spark that starts the fire isn't itself the brightest thing burning.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 1989 | Watched: 2026-04-21
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for The Little Mermaid (1989) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Disney Plus
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Sky Store
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Disney Plus · fuboTV
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from John Musker: Hercules (1997) · Moana (2016)
More from the 1980s: Nightmare City (1980) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Style Wars (1983) · Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers (1980)
More animation: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Alice in Wonderland (1951) · Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025)
More family: Alice in Wonderland (1951) · Wonder (2017) · Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (2005) · Anastasia (1997)
