Director: John Muskier, Ron Clements
Cast: Jodi Bneson, Christopher Daniel Barnes, Pat Carroll, Kenneth Mars
Have I Seen it Before: I’m having a hard time imagining anyone who hasn’t seen the film, doubly so for anyone who came of age in the 90s, and triply so if they had a younger sister.
Did I Like It: What’s not to like? The film may not have anything terribly profound to say about our world or the world in which it was released—or, at least, we hope it doesn’t, but I’ll get to that in a bit—but are there any films, animated or otherwise, where nearly every single shot is iconic? Even the Pixar films can’t quite accomplish that feat. Besides, any film that has René Auberjonois leaning that hard into the French of it all has to be an all-timer. Come to think of it, anything with René Auberjonois in it is good*. I don’t make the rules, I merely enforce them with great glee.
Sure, there’s an undercurrent of misogyny fueling the story. That could be an easy thing to point to as something “not to like.” But I ask, if for no other reason than I am genuinely not sure what the correct answer is, but is Ariel really such a defeat for female agency in film? She is prepared to give up quite a lot to—ultimately—chase a boy. But there never seems to be a moment where she wants something else that is somehow denied to her. Does she not have—for good or for ill—quite a bit of agency as the story progresses? If her ambitions are not the viewer’s ambitions, does that automatically introduce distance between the film and its audience?
Then again, she’s only 16, so King Triton offering up his youngest daughters to forge a detente—if not quite alliance—with humanity. There’s no way that’s not gross, right?
*How a movie like Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991) can get away with cutting him out of the film and still be good is beyond me… Probably why, gun to my head, I enjoy the home video cut of that film the most of all possible cuts.