Good ol’ Disney has much bigger problems than black mermaids
• CGI remakes of animated classics are ruining the studio’s reputation
With a new year quickly passing us by faster than we might have imagined and no end in sight to overwhelming real-world problems like the war in Ukraine, the energy crisis or the depressing impossibility of peace in the Middle East or Sudan, the world’s biggest entertainment company is here to remind us that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
That’s because Disney, the once enviably imaginative purveyor of magical animated versions of beloved fairytales and safely entertaining family fare, is about to release yet another live-action remake of a classic animation from its archives.
Over the last decade Disney has stubbornly made aesthetically terrible and lacklustre but often profitable live-action remakes of films from its catalogue. What once stood as testaments to founder Walt Disney’s belief that you could be creative, inventive, entertaining and financially successful have become an endless seam of easy-money for a company that is decidedly risk averse.
These live-action remakes of everything from Alice in Wonderland to Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King have become one of the laziest money-grabbing strategies of recent times, tapping nostalgia instead of creativity and diluting the company’s brand into a thin, weak soup of predictable mediocrity.
This time it’s the turn of 1989’s The Little Mermaid to have its hand-animated charm squeezed out of it by CGI, turned into a live-action film that misses the point of what made it so beloved in the first place. While there has already been angry over-reaction from conservatives to the casting of black actress Halle Bailey in the role of the originally white, redheaded (and imaginary) mermaid Ariel — the real crime against childhood nostalgia has now been revealed.
CREEPY IMITATIONS
Who cares what colour the mermaid is when what is really worrying is how the original film’s lovingly rendered handdrawn animal characters have been turned into simulacra that makes them look flat, lifeless and, as one critic described them in The Guardian, “something a fishmonger would pump full of fibreglass and leave in the front window”.
This has been a consistent problem with all Disney’s remakes: when you transfer the make-believe appeal of animated characters into eerie and creepy imitations of real life, you get something distinctly uncanny, more off-putting than charming, no matter how many cute new Lin-Manuel Miranda songs you put behind it. The sight of Melissa McCarthy as the life-like half-octopus villain Ursula is so frightening that it wouldn’t be out of place in a fever-dream nightmare sequence in My Octopus Teacher; and seeing a CGIrealised singing crab telling Prince Eric to “kiss the girl” verges on fringe-fetish pornography you don’t ever want to discover.
The anthropomorphic cuteness of the original animation becomes something far more unsettling when it is recreated through CGI photorealism but Disney isn’t about to let the expensively unimaginative formula go just yet. That’s because, in spite of exasperated outcries from critics and pundits, some of them have made significant money for the company. Even those that have bombed and passed ingloriously straight to streaming like Dumbo, Pinocchio, Mulan and Lady and the Tramp — haven’t managed to put the kind of dent in profit margins that would warrant a rethink of the strategy.
BACKLASH
With planned remakes of Snow White, Hercules and whatever other animated material sitting in the Disney vaults that hasn’t yet been dragged into live reimagining, there seems to be no end in sight for this horrid trend.
Disney has realised that the name recognition of titles that made it the world’s biggest entertainment giant is enough to warrant the continuation of its butchering strategy; even if that becomes the source for a vicious critical backlash. Noone likes to have their childhood dreams dashed by robotic simulation and one would hope that Disney will just stop ruining everything for everyone.
The problem is compounded by the fact that while older fans may be indignant at seeing their beloved originals mutilated, younger audiences, raised on the CGI photorealism of video games and TikTok filters, sometimes prefer the remakes and see these as their generation’s originals.
If your idea of the original is Will Smith’s ridiculous blue genie in Aladdin rather than Robin Williams’ frenzied shape-shifting animated one, then God help you.
What Disney will do to its “Classics 2.0” series of liveaction remakes in 50 years’ time is anyone’s guess — perhaps they will simply be retooled using prompts fed into an AI-art-generator.
Maybe the corporation will close the circle and play on nostalgia for a long-lost art form by simply reanimating them using hand-drawn techniques ... before it realises that there’s really no need to do that because it’s already been done far better than it misremembered.
Perhaps at that imagined future point in time, it will finally realise the benefits of moving forward into an uncertain but potentially creative future instead of looking backwards to an easily comfortable past.