In a Land Without Music

One would think that my comments about The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea would largely carry over to The Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Beginnings. In both cases these are films about a character who has already, functionally, gone through their character arc. Ariel had her big moment in The Little Mermaid, realizing that her love for the humans that walked around on land meant she was one day destined to be out on land, only for her to then try to find a way, any way she could, to achieve that goal. A sequel to that would already see her on land, while a prequel (like this film) would effectively keep her off land and in the sea the whole time. What is the point of a story like that?

As it turns out, the creators who worked on The Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Beginnings at least thought similarly. If you can’t have Ariel go on land then you have to find some other adventure for her to go on. Instead of learning to love humans and their weird objects, instead you have to give her something else as motivation. And, by their logic, what is better motivation than to have her fight against her father for the love of music. She’s a musical girl, singing her heart out in her original film. Taking that away from her would feel like quite a blow.

Credit where it’s due, this does make The Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Beginnings into a very different kind of film. It doesn’t bother trying to retell the story of The Little Mermaid in any way (not only ignoring the later events from the first sequel, but also actively contradicting the events of the spin-off cartoon series from 1992 as well) instead simply setting off to find its own story to tell on its own terms. This makes for a much more interesting, and more enjoyable, film than The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea, even if it’s still, in some ways, just a little bit flawed.

The film opens with King Triton (now voiced by Darkwing Duck himself, Jim Cummings) and his wife, Queen Athena (Lorelei Hill Butters speaking voice, Andrea Robinson singing voice) enjoying a day topside with their seven young daughters, as well as other mermaids. Everything is going well, with the King presenting his wife with a wonderful music box he had commissioned, because she really loved music. Unfortunately, a pirate ship comes into their cove and, quite by accident, the queen is crushed by their ship against rocks, killing her. In his grief, the King outlaws all music, hating the very thing his wife once loved so dearly.

Years later we catch up with Ariel as a teen on the cusp of adulthood. She and her sisters have started to chafe under their father’s rule, finding his distant demeanor, and lack of joy, hard to stomach. Ariel, most of all, just wants to be able to have fun with her sisters, but fun is functionally not allowed. But then she meets Flounder (now voiced by Parker Goris), a little yellow fish who can’t help but jam out on anything he can find, and when she follows him to a secret place one night she finds out that he’s a member of an underground jazz club. And once Ariel finds the club, she tells her sisters about it so they can all go and have fun. But once the King learns about their musical escapades from their overbearing nanny, Marina Del Rey (Sally Field), he’s likely to overreact and ruin all their fun… for good.

In some ways the story of The Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Beginnings isn’t that different from the previous films. We have an overbearing parent that overreacts and goes too far when they find something that displeases them about their child. That’s Triton’s power move in these films, and Ariel does the same thing in her first sequel as well. It seems to be how these films always motivate themselves, letting the parent be the bad guy so the child can rebel. And Ariel is rebellious, so this is a dynamic we’re used to by now.

With that said, I was far more entertained by this film than I expected, and that’s in large part because while the motivating factor does feel familiar, so much else about this film at least goes in a different direction. Making the story about a lack of music in Atlantica is interesting and it motivates the film to not only follow a different path but also work up to some decent musical numbers as well. Sure, some of them are covers, like Sebastian’s take on “Jump In the Line”, but they are at least fun.

The film also does a great job of fleshing out the characters around Ariel. While we knew from the very first film that Ariel had sisters, we never really got much time with them. They existed, but we’re quickly shunted off to the side so that Ariel could go off and have an adventure on land. Here, though, each of the sisters has their own personality, they have their own desires, they each go off and do their own things. They feel like real characters and I appreciate the film finding time to give them depth.

Along with them we also have Marina, the villain of the story, but she’s not just another sea witch. She’s a power-hungry nanny that wants Sebastian’s job (as overseer of the kingdom), and she’s joined in her adventure by a mild-mannered, but just a bit sarcastic, manatee assistant, Benjamin (Jeff Bennett), and the dynamic between the two is great. I didn’t think I’d enjoy Marina, as she felt like a cross between Ursula from the first film and Yzma (from The Emperor's New Groove), but the film quickly finds its own pace and makes these two into very amusing characters.

Most importantly, though, the animation here is much better than in The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea. This film has life and fluidity to the animation, feeling much more like a classic Disney film than we normally get with direct-to-video fare. It’s not quite as pretty as the original film, but it’s substantially nicer than the first sequel. The mermaids feel more fluid, the hair floats and bobs. Everything just looks like a step up in production from the sequel, and that makes this a lot more fun to watch.

There are some flaws, though, that really do keep the film from being one of the best of the Disney Princess line. For starters, the last act does kind of drag in places. The film could easily have been an hour long and felt just right, but there’s an extra fifteen minutes of padding where not much happens in the story and the characters just talk and run around for no real reason, and this could easily have been trimmed. Picking up the pace would have helped the last act of the film, and thus the film in general, a lot.

And the film doesn’t, in any way, seem concerned with having Ariel have any interest in the topside world. That was such a big factor in her life in the first film and by not even making a passing nod to it at all it makes it out like, “oh, she’ll get to that eventually.” Her being into human stuff was her main trait in the first film but not even having it at all would seem to set this film in a slightly different continuity, one where Ariel just loves music and not much else. It’s a tad odd and makes it hard to align this film with what we’ve already seen.

Still, The Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Beginnings is leaps and bounds better than not only The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea, but most of the other Disney sequels and prequels we’ve seen. It might not be perfect, but this is one of the few sequels I could see watching again, at some point, and that’s a statement I never thought I’d say about any of the direct-to-video continuations.