Review | The Little Mermaid | 2023
Halle Bailey as Ariel in Disney's live-action THE LITTLE MERMAID. Photo courtesy of Disney. © 2023 Disney Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved. In 1989, Disney's original The Little Mermaid ushered in what is widely considered to be one of the the studio's most creatively rich periods, known unofficially as the Disney Renaissance, lasting throughout the 1990s and ending with Tarzan in 1999. Disney's new, live action Little Mermaid , comes in the midst of a much different time for the studio, one less defined by a creative renaissance and more on mining its classic animated films and repackaging them as live action films aimed at a new generation, often with new songs and inflated runtimes. This trend has yielded a few gems ( Cinderella , Pete's Dragon ), but it's mostly yielded bloated, joyless bores like The Lion King and Aladdin , whose attempts at photorealism zap the stories of their original magic. The Little Mermaid lies somewhere in the middle of
