‘The Little Mermaid’ changed everything
The Princess Diaries #4: The Little Mermaid (1989)
In “The Princess Diaries,” pop culture critic Caroline Siede reexamines the Disney princess legacy one film at a time. This column is available only to paid subscribers. To get a sneak peek, there’s currently no paywall on the entries for Snow White, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty.
Certain movies shift culture forever. Jaws invented the summer blockbuster. Bonnie and Clyde cracked open New Hollywood. And When Harry Met Sally kicked off the modern romantic comedy. But if I had to pick one movie that’s influence is still being felt more than any other it would be The Little Mermaid—the 1989 animated classic that pulled Walt Disney Animation Studios out of its dark days and back into a cultural behemoth.
Without the success of The Little Mermaid, the modern animation landscape would look different, Broadway would certainly look different, and the Disney theme parks (and by extension, theme parks in general) would look different too. In fact, Disney as a company would probably be in a different place entirely. And considering the Mouse House shapes everything from Marvel superhero stories to modern Star Wars to Pixar to Disney Channel Original Movies and ABC TV shows, a pretty big chunk of culture owes its existence to a little mermaid with a big dream.
In some ways, The Little Mermaid was a continuation of what Disney had already done with its earlier princess movies, 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1950’s Cinderella, and 1959’s Sleeping Beauty. But, in others, the film marked a seismic shift into a whole new world.
To understand just how impactful The Little Mermaid was, you have to understand where Disney Animation Studios was at before her arrival. Though Disney followed up Sleeping Beauty with a couple of classics like One Hundred and One Dalmatians and The Jungle Book, the studio entered a “Dark Age” in the 1970s and ’80s with films like The Fox and the Hound and The Black Cauldron. Budgets shrunk, talent fled to other studios, and the idea of a Disney animated movie as a big event lost its luster.
It had been nearly three decades since Disney had produced the sort of princess musical that had first given the studio its identity. So as Walt Disney had done with Cinderella, the studio realized it could use that gap as a chance to relaunch its image. Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” was chosen as the source material and Disney gave the film more money and resources than it had any animated project in decades. This little mermaid would sink or swim a Disney Renaissance.
