“I want adventure in the great wide somewhere!” Belle sings it to us directly. She gets her adventure, but while the castle is certainly more than the provincial life she feared, being confined there is not a great wide open space. When she leaves the castle to go to her father, she has a second adventure, but again this isn’t a great wide somewhere. She can’t have both of the things she asks for, apparently.
Also notice how she complains that nothing changes in the quiet town where every day is like the one before and then ends up in a castle where everything has been the same day after day for years. In this case, however, she herself brings the change she wants and makes everything different.
What does he want?
It isn’t said directly, but apparently more than being human again the Beast wants to lash out and punish others for his unhappiness. He might want to be human, but he has no hope that it can happen and assumes it never will, so being angry at the world is all there is, along with being angry at himself for causing this mess. My own speculation is that while he doubtless started out blaming everything and everyone but himself, over the years he’s come to admit to himself that his own behavior led the enchantress to cast the spell, and he’s owned up to his own role in his misfortune. But that’s not what will break the spell, so he’s still always ready to spread his misery to anyone in striking range.
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How can she be so casual about a sheep chewing the corner off a page in her book? What is wrong with you, Belle? How can you love books and not care what happens to the pages? In my mind she swipes the book away and frowns sternly just before the sheep can take a bite.
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I’m uncomfortable every time I see a movie with wolf scenes like this film has. Philippe the horse might have something to fear, but basically wolves don’t attack human beings without a reason like rabies or the human is violently threatening the pack. I’ve heard that European wolves may have been less hesitant to attack people than U.S. wolves are, but scenes like this are essentially Medieval anti-wolf propaganda.
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Things I never noticed before:
• For all the talk of how much Gaston is admired and adored, at the start of the story everybody pretty much ignores his pleading for them to get out of his way. He’s not more important than their own business (or gossip).
• The Beast is in body a beast. He’s gigantic, has fangs, has massive paws with ravaging claws. But by all appearances he doesn’t physically harm Maurice in the slightest. He has the power to inflict a nightmarish mauling, but instead places the man in a cell uninjured.
• “I have been burned by you before!”
• The castle staff have been living under this spell for ten years and most days there is nothing to do but lie around idle. I’ve watched Beauty and the Beast several times, and heard “Be Our Guest” even more, but I had not really listened to these lines. Now I finally hear how miserable their lives must be in this near-vacant castle with only the Beast to feed, and the rest of the day (every day) reduced to sheer emptiness.
• Although we the audience have seen the prologue, Belle has not. For all she knows, the Beast has been a beast his entire life. She’s left to figure out for herself that he was once human.
• When Belle sneaks into the west wing of the castle, she’s being spectacularly rude. The enchanted staff have just gone out of their way to break rules for her, and she repays them by slipping off into the one part of the castle she knows she’s not allowed into and where Cogsworth and Lumiere have just begged her not to go. Worse, when she gets into the Beast’s torn-up room and sees the flower in a glass case, she goes right over and takes the case away! It’s the one precious item in a devastated room that gets careful treatment (along with the hand mirror beside it), but she doesn’t respect the painfully obvious intention to keep this flower safe. Her curiosity has led her past common decency and good sense.
• In the song “Something There,” the Beast entertains (though quickly dismisses) the idea that Belle might now care for him. It could be that he is finally coming to see something in himself he hasn’t seen before (or saw only, as a human, in an entitled, privileged, false way): that he is someone worth loving.
• At the end of the movie, Mrs. Potts assures Chip the couple will live happily ever after, but she isn’t saying this to the audience, or not to all of the audience. She’s saying this to her son, because of course this is how you answer a small child; yet the rest of us don’t have to imagine things are as simple as that in a relationship.
• The closing credits have a couple of voice credits for characters labeled “Bimbette.” No. No. No. Ugh.
For a sideways look at the 2017 live-action remake, see here.
I watched most of these discs before I was in the habit of writing comments to post here, and I’ve got a mountain of other movies to go through before I’ll be rewatching these (although I surely will rewatch them). So I won’t be doing a full post on them any time soon, but I will make a few quick comments from memory even though the material isn’t fresh on my mind.
More of the shelf has filled in since I took this photo, but those films already have their own entries.
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The Gold Rush (1925/1942)
A decent DVD/blu-ray of The Gold Rush will include both the original silent version and the later rerelease with voiceover. Both are legitimate versions of the film; Charlie Chaplin not only supplied the voice narrating the rerelease, he also carefully decided on and placed all the music used (maybe wrote some of the score himself? I can’t fully recall what those bonus features said). But for me the original is the one to turn to. I for one am much more entertained by a silent movie left silent than a silent movie with narration laid on top of it where it wasn’t meant to have any.
The voiceover version is still a pleasure, though, because the essence of the original is still there. Chaplin updated the silent film without ruining it, because he knew the film and what made it wonderful, and in any case the rerelease kept the movie (and Chaplin’s renown) in the public imagination and is probably why we can still see the original at all.
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Metropolis (1927)
Metropolis was pretty long when first released but was trimmed considerably for wider distribution, and the cut scenes were long believed to be lost; much of the cut material has been rediscovered in some degree of watchability. The film is a milestone not only in special effects but also in the history of film preservation, one of the early occasions when people realized there was a need to preserve.
I’ve seen this film in three different renditions: two or three times in the shortened once-standard edit; a version with some bits restored; and now the most-scenes-restored-sorta version. The material (re-)added for the longest version makes the story much more coherent, notably providing a reason for the scientist to make his robot look like this woman. I’d have to watch it again to recall whether any particular restored bits slow things down too much, but my recollection is that the plot is greatly improved.
The movie in any of the available cuts has an obvious socialist message of “it’s bad for callous rich people to exploit the working class,” but the solution given is not “revolt and take over” (we see how a careless revolution can endanger workers’ own families), the answer is “you need understanding and feeling between the classes.” Still it’s mainly the upper class that needs to do the work of looking and listening and adapting.
The film is German, but the scenes of rich people partying while the world is more or less ending remind me of what I know of the U.S. during the Roaring Twenties and the Stock Market Crash.
By today’s standards Metropolis can seem simplistic or naive—or, let’s say, unsubtle—but it was a thundering groundbreaker of science fiction and cultural commentary in the movies.
It’s my understanding that Hitchcock didn’t want to follow the novel faithfully, but the producers forced him to—except in one critical point which the morals office would not have tolerated (but Hitchcock probably would have preferred).
I might not even know who Daphne du Maurier was if not for this movie. Because the film is so good I read the novel, and was rather surprised by that important difference.
I think the constraints on Hitchcock in this case resulted in a much better film than he would’ve given us if left to his own devices.
The female lead of the story is hard to cast and play. If she’s too mousy we won’t believe she would catch Maxim’s notice or dare to go around with him at the resort, but if she’s too lively we won’t believe she’ll be so intimidated by Mrs. Danvers.
Maxim is kind of a jerk. It’s true that the man of the estate is not going to have a lot of in-depth interaction with the housekeeper, certainly compared to his wife; and as a product of his class he will take it for granted that you simply give orders to servants and they carry them out. But he can’t be this oblivious to what’s happening or this unaware of his housekeeper’s personal character. Surely on some level he knows his new wife is being bullied. He even sees first-hand in the broken-figurine incident that she’s afraid of Danvers. He consciously chose someone the opposite of the imposing, self-assertive, rule-making Rebecca, which means at the very least he should be aware she’s unprepared for her new position. Is Maxim enjoying the situation, perhaps amused by his inept wife’s childish insecurity? Does he like seeing her flounder? It’s hard to think ill of anyone played by Laurence Olivier, but still.
This film is laden with nonverbal signals, dripping with meaning in looks and gestures and silent interactions between people.
As an aside, we also see a proper response to blackmail.
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The Philadelphia Story (1940)
“Shall we flip a coin?”
“Why didn’t you sell tickets?!?”
In addition to smart, sharp one-liners, three Hollywood greats colliding, a plot richer than you’d think a “screwball comedy” would have, a sassy younger sister eager to see trouble, and overall fun expertly dancing with overall drama, it always strikes me that in an era when drunkenness was often a source of cheap humor, this film treats Dex’s alcoholism quite seriously. He himself delivers the occasional remark about his “glorious thirst,” but it’s unmistakably sarcasm from a place of his own hard experience. Other characters might be treated lightly when they indulge too much, but Dex’s drinking is a problem and he knows it and he explicitly turns down every bit of alcohol offered to him, because it’s essential to his future that he stays sober, no exceptions.
Also, from multiple angles: two wrongs don’t make a right, and being partly right doesn’t make you wholly right.
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Cat People (1942)
As I understand it, the director, Jacques Tourneur, did not want this film to have a visible monster at all, but the higher-ups (studio or producers) insisted on having a cat onscreen in the office-room attack scene, and would’ve preferred a lot more of the same. In this case I don’t think the movie is harmed by that profit-conscious interference. For me Cat People has exactly the right balance: plenty of suspense, lots left to the imagination, a focus on the psychological effects of thinking you might be a killer whether you really are or not, and a higher standard of storytelling than repeatedly having people scream while a costume-creature attacks them, and it does all this without sitting on the fence of “Is she or isn’t she, make your own interpretation!” To me there is just the right amount of monster, taking a position but showing enormous restraint.
(That can’t be said of the 1982 remake, which shrugs aside story in favor of the attack gimmick and laughable levels of nudity. Although the pool sequence is still extremely effective.)
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Curse of the Cat People (1944)
This film refuses to be distracted by the pull of the title monster. It is definitely a sequel to Cat People but has nothing to do with people turning into cats. Curse knows what it means to do and it does it, no matter what the studio executives undoubtedly wanted it to do. I’m glad the original had a touch of cat monster in it, and also glad the filmmakers didn’t allow anyone to force monsters into the sequel. (Yes, there is the question of a ghost, but it isn’t here to threaten or frighten, and there are no human-feline transformations.)
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Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
Good songs, an enjoyable story, the importance of family, childhood mischief, Judy Garland.
At a glance, this movie might be seen as “well-to-do white families having wholesome fun,” but the parts about the younger daughters are based on a real person’s autobiography and add a certain layer of complexity regarding children’s lives. Traffic-accident injuries, morbid games with dolls, kids running loose on the streets Halloween night playing pranks—still nothing shocking, but showing more rough edges to childhood than Hollywood musicals would usually acknowledge.
The film’s origin in an autobiography is also why you seem to have two main characters—Tootie comes from the book and lives out those adventures, while Esther was created to pull in audiences and let Judy Garland do what she could do so well.
From the bonus features I learned there was a scene cut following the trolley song showing Judy Garland’s character and her love interest at the fair, and I suspect it would’ve made better sense of a few little snippets elsewhere in the film if they’d left that in. But, so be it.
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The Inspector General (1949)
Basically Danny Kaye plays somebody who wanders into town and is mistaken for an important dignitary. This gains him a lot of perks but also means certain people want to kill him. I remember poison, assassins, corrupt local officials, and people locked in boxes.
In college a friend and I had a great time watching this movie. Apart from that association I’m not sure a physical copy would have a place on my shelf, though it is fun and worth a watch. After all, it’s Danny Kaye.
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All About Eve (1950)
Bette Davis, willing to play an actress unwilling to admit she can no longer play young women.
We see a skilled manipulator who does quite well using other women but makes critical misjudgements of two men.
The story is driven by the fact that Margo is too old to play twenty-year-olds, and yet that story is largely about Margo growing up and becoming an adult. She has to find her maturity in order to relate to herself, her career, and her would-be husband.
It’s a time when a columnist had the power to create or end careers.
Addison DeWitt is a truly awful person. He appears calm, cool, and sophisticated throughout—until someone looks down on him, and his violent reaction shows how insecure and fragile he really is. He’s a bully who exercises power over people to prove to himself he’s important. Of course he writes about The Stage and not The Screen, but I’ve always associated the character with gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, who could ruin a Hollywood career with a few paragraphs, in addition to Walter Winchell. (The movie was released in 1950, so McCarthyism was barely getting underway and wasn’t the issue here.)
Oh yeah, Marilyn Monroe has a brief part here too, and she’s pretty funny.
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Singin in the Rain (1952)
This film is so, so, so, much fun. Singing! Dancing! Laughing! Hijinks! Satire of the movie business! Romance! Charm! Charisma! Toeses! Everything about it is just about perfect, except—sorry, Gene Kelly devotees—the long, long, long dance sequence of Kelly’s character-within-a-character-outside-a-character looking for a job in New York. Yes, yes, I know it’s a Gene Kelly movie so people wanted to see him dance, but this is still a movie and it has a plot and a story which skids to a complete and jarring halt when this sequence intrudes with a premise that makes no sense. (This saves The Duelling Cavalier how exactly? Really?) I love this movie dearly and when I watch it I fast-forward through the whole nine(?) minutes of the hoofer doing “Gotta Dance” at cardboard talent agencies.
But oh the rest of it makes me happy.
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Roman Holiday (1953)
Audrey Hepburn, ah. A timeless tale—meaning you’ve seen the premise elsewhere—but timelessly charming and moving. She thinks she’s fooling them, playing normal young woman, but she isn’t, although she is winning them over. Some things can’t be, and she has to give things up and they choose to give things up, and without saying all the words they all understand. She’s perfect for the role—European but of undefinable nationality; looking young enough to try something stupid but old enough she’s been weighted with responsibility; luminously beautiful as a princess “should” be, yet not so glamorous or stately she couldn’t walk through Rome unidentified; innocent and sophisticated at the same time, believable in welcoming dignitaries and in eating gelato on the street.
And I can’t forget to note the glories of having this filmed on location: real Rome, tall and ancient all around the actors, nearly tangible as you watch.
You’ll hear it called “the greatest Hitchcock movie Hitchcock never made,” which sounds about right except it isn’t really fair to the actual director, Stanley Donen.
I love the theme music by Henry Mancini and find myself clicking it out with my tongue probably once a week or more (TOK-tok-tok t’tok-tok-t’tok-tok).
Audrey Hepburn is a delight as always. Cary Grant is wonderful as usual (even if he needs to be twenty/thirty years younger for this role).
Mystery, suspense, humor, one-liners, danger, lies, double-crosses, a missing fortune, Hepburn playing a character stretched and strained until she doesn’t know which end is up, and naturally that infectious theme: it gets almost everything right.
In some bonus feature somewhere I heard Audrey Hepburn complain that one of the funniest lines in the movie—one of hers—is stepped on by the instrumentation at the very, very, very end, and I have to agree with her. If only they’d waited two more seconds and let her words come through cleanly!
Only Yesterday is a Studio Ghibli film likely unfamiliar to many anime fans. It’s based on a manga showcasing incidents from a girl’s life, but Ghibli director Isao Takahata added a parallel timeline so that now the film follows both 10-year-old Taeko, in 1966, and 27-year-old Taeko, who is remembering those incidents. The movie shares some distinctive Studio Ghibli hallmarks: the Japanese countryside, the balance of humanity and nature, looking back at the past, a focus on girls with strong feelings.
Adult Taeko is finding her way just as child Taeko did seventeen years earlier. As she says, this too may be a time of chrysalis, her life changing into something else. It isn’t simply that she’s past the age society says she should be married—or at least this causes her to look more broadly at her life to wonder if what she has is what she wants.
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Adult Taeko likes to present her stories of childhood as funny, but nearly all of them center around disappointment. There’s a lot to laugh at in the pineapple sequence, for one, but it’s still about something she looked forward to that turned out badly.
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Ghibli films tend to be firmly rooted in Japanese locations and culture, and Only Yesterday is intensely rooted there. This is a wonderful, engaging film, but if it’s your first glimpse of Japanese life you may be lost. And since half of the story is set in the 1960s, you need to be aware that families then were even more traditional (including unquestionably patriarchal) than they are now. The other half of the story, featuring adult Taeko, takes place at a time when women choosing to work instead of getting married still seemed odd to a lot of people and it was generally assumed that office women were just biding their time at work until they could acquire a husband.
One particular scene needs special attention. Plenty of people in the U.S. have a general idea that in Japan you take off your shoes when you enter a home. But the reverse could also be true: in a proper Japanese family you did NOT go outside with no shoes on. I don’t know all the standards for when it was fine to be shoeless (for instance, swimming), but as I understand it, leaving the house in socks but no shoes was considered indecent. It was not a question of whether your socks got dirty; in U.S. culture a parallel might be standing on your front lawn in your panties or perhaps wearing swim trunks to a fancy wedding.
At the same time, children always change shoes when they arrive at school, and no one is bothered by the exposure of sock feet for the few seconds it takes to do so, as we would be if a sixth-grader changed pants in the school lobby.
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Only Yesterday includes no spaceships, explosions, yokai, sword fights, or named attacks, and a common reaction is that there’s not a lot here that couldn’t be done in live action: a couple of minor special-effects shots, really, or you could just drop those elements. And yet without anything dynamic or flashy, the animation helps us understand the constant shifting back and forth of the timelines—this shot is back then; this shot is now. What’s more, the animation makes it seem okay that those are children from back then scurrying around in the event happening now, in a way I don’t think live action could manage very well. And the brief flashes of a pose (like Taeko strutting with a childish purse) or a sudden visual metaphor (like the baseball hitting the glove) are definitely the language of anime.
The film deserves a wider audience. It has tenderness between people getting to know each other and tenderness between a person and her younger self. It has someone talking about memories and finding out, from another person’s response, that maybe she misinterpreted that thing that happened seventeen years ago. It shows adults bonding over a TV show they loved as kids. It underscores the distinction between loving a place and knowing it, and notes that working at something on vacation is not the same as making it part of your life.
From lovingly depicted saffron fields to a wild shriek over a younger sister’s math score to a moment of first-love floating to a gentle, slowly developing relationship, Only Yesterday has a lot to offer anyone not in a hurry and willing to appreciate the less explosive events that shape us.
I saw Dances With Wolves in the theater near the end of 1990 (I was in my teens) and it profoundly affected my life in ways I won’t try to describe here. I saw it at least twice during its original release; the running time of 3+ hours was not an obstacle. It remains one of my top five favorite films, but I rarely watch it because it hurts. The idea of sitting down and viewing it starts to seem too heavy for comfort—but I have also found that I only need to hear the music on a blu-ray menu screen and I wonder why I ever waited.
(It should be said that for a long time part of my reason for not watching was the simple fact of not having access to the right version: only the extended cut was readily available, and I was not enthusiastic about seeing it.)
The film still strikes deeply. I wasn’t just a foolish teenager to be moved by it when it came out.
Among many other things, the movie demonstrates that people see the world in different ways and have different value systems, and you won’t understand others or judge them fairly unless you begin to see from the place where they are. What makes the land yours? Do you have to build permanent houses on it and put up a fence? If you don’t, do you still expect strangers to know it’s yours?
Different scenes along the way intentionally demonstrate that children are witnesses to awful violence, whether these children are white or Indigenous. They are not spared.
Near the close of the story, the film very carefully shows us there are terrible people in the army and also decent people in the army. We are made to despise some and be sympathetic to others. Then we are carefully shown that both are killed. For how would the Lakota know the difference? And how much would it matter, in the face of rescuing the friend they do know?
Viewed at a distance, Dances With Wolves might seem like an instance of the White Savior trope. But while Dunbar’s transformation through learning Lakota language and culture does parallel what happens in many white-savior stories, it’s an unavoidable fact that he does not save them. (To the contrary, they literally save him.)
In the middle of the film he does bring in rifles that allow the Lakota to fight off a Pawnee attack, but this is not the main story, and the Pawnee are never the true threat. This is one battle in a long, long inter-tribal conflict, and it makes a huge difference on one particular day, but soon enough the Pawnee will acquire rifles and the sides will again be more evenly matched. We see Pawnee working for the U.S. Army, so there’s already a hint of where weapons will come from. Dunbar delivering rifles only gives this group of Lakota advance access to a technology that we know, historically, radically altered the Plains cultures.
The true threat in the film is white encroachment—not merely the army and their forts, or white hunters and trappers, but more than anything white settlements. And before the final credits of the movie begin, there’s a paragraph of text on the screen informing us that thirteen years later everything was over and the last of the Lakota surrendered. The film deliberately tells us that Dunbar/Dances With Wolves does not save them.
Dances With Wolves threads between hopelessness and resilience; it’s not a happy ending but doesn’t suggest despair either. Logically I know he doesn’t change the minds of the white people in power, if he even makes it to them—history says no one changed things that way—and yet still I’m left with something positive, not quite hope and not the poignance of fighting for the lost cause. It’s doing what you can.
Perhaps it’s what Kicking Bird says: he is following the path of being a good human being. Whether his effort succeeds or not, whether he could’ve been safe disappearing among the Lakota or not, he knows it is right to try to persuade people, and wrong to endanger the People by his presence.
He is right the army will hunt him, though maybe he overestimates how important he is to them, how long they will hunt if they don’t find him soon. He is also right, I think, that if he stayed awareness of his presence would eventually filter out to the whites. Someone from another band or nation, trading or visiting or even attacking, would notice the white man among this group and mention it to someone else, who would mention it to someone else, and at some point an officer would be told, “I hear there’s a white man living with the Lakota who hunt over in __________.” Things don’t stay secret forever.
Ultimately it isn’t an issue of futility, and success or failure is not the question. Leaving won’t solve everything, and may solve nothing, but it is the truer choice of the options available.
Although it is not fair to Stands With a Fist, to make her begin a new life yet again.
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The Extended Cut
Memory tells me the extended four-hour version of Dances With Wolves was first sent into the world as a TV broadcast a handful of years after the movie was in theaters, airing over two or three nights. Since they could take up more time, they restored scenes that had been edited out to make the film shorter for theaters.
I finally watched the extended cut a couple of weeks ago. I still prefer the original-release version; to me that is unquestionably the authentic film. But if I were making my own edit of Dances With Wolves I would incorporate bits and pieces from the longer version—for instance, some of the added material about the developing relationship between Dunbar and Stands With a Fist. We don’t need every one of these scenes, but some filling out of the romance is nice.
On the other hand, some things are just unnecessary. The fuller sequence about the unstable commander at Fort Hays actually dilutes the shock of his actions. And while there is some value in showing an encounter between Dunbar and the “good officer” who has a role later, it’s not enough to make up for slowing the movie down. (However, the shot of a child peeking in the bloody window is a kind of counterweight to the later shot of a Lakota child peeking under a tent flap watching a Pawnee warrior die.)
I don’t think there’s any reason at all to add in the scenes about the soldiers abandoning the fort before Dunbar’s arrival. He never finds out where they went or why they left, so why should we, when we can make general guesses?
I have mixed feelings about the scene where Dunbar discovers the Lakota have killed the white bison hunters. Without it the film can create an idealized impression by pinning all “negative” behavior to the Pawnee and showing only “positive” deeds by the Lakota. Instead of pretending “the ones we like never attacked white people” we need to wrestle with why Native Americans would attack white people, which is more complex than being bloodthirsty or hyper-territorial. So this sequence makes the film more balanced, and yet some of the images around the firelight dance, quick as they are, are too gruesome. But would it be honest to trim those frames out just to make myself more comfortable?
One thing I’m still missing, in either version, is somehow Smiles a Lot communicating “I found this at the place we fought the soldiers” when he hands over the diary at the end, so Dunbar isn’t left to wonder if this kid had the diary the whole time and he never needed to go back to the fort in the first place. I know poor Smiles a Lot is too emotional to speak, but this issue shouldn’t be left to doubt.
Every time I see this cover I start to whistle “Under the Sea.”
It’s mentioned a lot in DVD extras and the like, but casual post–Gen X viewers may not realize how revolutionary The Little Mermaid was in U.S. animation when it came out.* In the 1980s animated movies were still being made—Secret of NIMH, Last Unicorn, American Tail, Disney’s own Oliver and Company—but they weren’t huge, and Disney was more engaged with making live-action films and rereleasing past glories than with creating new animation.
The idea of “the Disney princess” did not exist. Snow White, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty were around, but they weren’t viewed as a collective franchise or thought of as a group beyond the general fact that all three were in Disney movies. Now, after a long spell of modest efforts, Disney went back to the formula of fairy tale + songs, and The Little Mermaid became an enormous success, effectively launching all the princess films that followed, from Beauty and the Beast to Pocahontas on through Moana. Animation from other studios came hurrying after in the wake.
Disney animated movies had always had songs, but this time the songs took on a new dimension. Howard Ashman and Alan Menken brought in more of the sensibility of musical theatre, and transformed what the animated musical looked like. Oliver and Company—its production overlapped with that of Little Mermaid—was also a musical, but something about it didn’t catch. Little Mermaid got into the country’s heart.
This is a wonderful, moving film, combining dynamic animation, beautiful music, and characters with depth and complexity, a film that went light years beyond the things that had come before it in this country. It soared off the screen in a way we weren’t prepared for.
* I specify U.S. animation, because despite Battle of the Planets, Star Blazers, and Robotech, general U.S. culture wasn’t paying attention to the animation coming out of Japan.
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I had a problem the first time I saw Little Mermaid, though: I knew how the story was supposed to end, and I felt betrayed because they changed the beauty of the original story’s conclusion. After all, it’s only logical that if you’re to choose a tragedy, you must be okay with a heartbreaking ending. Keeping the unhappy ending seems unthinkable now, but at the time it actually felt possible to me—naive perhaps, but also a sign that the movie existed at a truly transitional moment, with the old Disney fairy-tales long past, and the modern stream not yet imagined. I knew this film was a new thing, although it wasn’t quite as groundbreaking as that would have been.
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Ariel is an active princess who goes out and pursues her desires. She has choices, and she makes them herself, good and bad. The entire plot moves because she is chasing her dreams and fantasies, and if she had been a passive, obedient daughter, the story would consist of a successful debut concert and Eric’s ship sinking, which she would not care about even if she knew of it, because it would be just another shipwreck she had no connection to.
I think one of the main reasons this film had such an impact is that as an audience we care deeply about Ariel, something that might be traced largely to a single song. “Part of Your World” brings together lyrics, instruments, vocal performance, and animation into a sequence of almost tangible longing. From the careful, steady pacing to the breathiness of certain lines to the size of her eyes and the way she literally reaches upward to the world she can’t have, it all brings you into her yearning so you can feel what she feels (and oh-so-naturally slips in a phrase you might not notice at the time or think about even after you know what happens later: “What would I give—?”).
Ariel’s father Triton does harsh things that hurt her but immediately regrets losing his temper and second-guesses his impulsive actions. He doesn’t rage over nothing, but he overreacts, then sees that he overreacted and blames himself. He acts like he has all the answers, but when he has time to think, he realizes he doesn’t. His negative actions drive Ariel forward in the plot, but he isn’t a villain. And when the moment comes to save Ariel, he takes her place just as impulsively and without concern for anything but her.
Ursula the sea witch is intelligent, devious, and crafty. More than that, she’s formidable. She thinks several steps ahead and has an old feud with Triton that the storyline only skims but must have been festering for years. You might suspect that all the merfolk she’s cheated over this time have in some way been jabs to get back at Triton, taking his people away from him whenever she can. The movie’s main character is only a pawn in Ursula’s own tale; she uses Ariel as a tool to achieve something else and near the end directly tells her, “It’s not you I’m after.” Ursula’s grievance and resentment has made her keen and meticulous instead of impulsive and reckless; in temperament she is the exact opposite of Triton. Which is probably why she finally gets the better of him. (Note that Triton has no hand in defeating her.)
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We should not overlook the sheer daring of deciding to make a musical, establishing within the story that the main character has a beautiful singing voice, and then making that character voiceless for half the movie.
The first time I saw a picture of what actual flounders look like, I was first disgusted and second confused, because there was no way Flounder was a flounder, no matter how much you prettify an ugly fish for animation. But of course, he isn’t a flounder, it’s just his name, inexplicably. This is a lot like naming your horse Moose, or calling your dog Hyena. But did Ariel name him or did his mother or did he name himself? I think we should know that.
I wonder, was this the last Disney fairy-tale where the villain was deliberately killed by one of the good guys? Usually they fall by accident or some natural disaster overtakes them.
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Comics Scene magazine, issue 11 (Feb. 1990)
I recently read an article from an issue of Comics Scene—which, as you can see, covered animation as well as comics—about The Little Mermaid. The cover date is Feb 1990, but it would’ve been published a little earlier; this would’ve been on sale while the movie was in theaters, and the article written before that. The people being interviewed couldn’t be sure how successful the movie would be, and it’s funny to see the co-director feeling a need to clarify that Ariel is the name of the main character.
I think my favorite part of the article is this little gem about Ursula:
“Inky, slinky Ursula is voiced by Pat Carroll, who envisions the character as part Shakespearean actress, with all the requisite theatricality, and part used car saleswoman.”
