Taglines: Be a part of her world.
The Little Mermaid movie storyline. While she is the youngest daughter of the powerful King Triton, teenage mermaid Ariel has found a fascination with the human world. Only problem is that her father has banned all contact with humans. But Ariel’s disappointment changes when she rescues dashing Prince Eric from drowning. To experience life on the land, she unwittingly strikes a bargain with the villainous sea witch Ursula to make her dream come true. Little does Ariel know is that if she doesn’t get a kiss from Eric, the choices she make could lead to a chain of events that would put her life and Triton’s kingdom in jeopardy.
The Little Mermaid is a 2023 American musical romantic fantasy film directed by Rob Marshall from a screenplay written by David Magee. Co-produced by Walt Disney Pictures, Lucamar Productions, and Marc Platt Productions, it is a live-action adaptation of Disney’s 1989 animated film of the same name, itself loosely based on the 1837 fairy tale of the same title by Hans Christian Andersen.
The film stars singer Halle Bailey in the titular role, alongside Jonah Hauer-King, Daveed Diggs, Awkwafina, Jacob Tremblay, Noma Dumezweni, Art Malik, Javier Bardem and Melissa McCarthy. The Little Mermaid follows a mermaid princess Ariel who is fascinated with the human world and makes a deal with a treacherous sea witch Ursula to trade her voice for human legs to impress Prince Eric, whom she saved from a shipwreck before time runs out.
Plans for a remake of 1989’s The Little Mermaid were confirmed in May 2016. In December 2017, Disney announced Marshall was being courted to direct the film. Bailey, Hauer-King, McCarthy, Bardem, Diggs, Tremblay, Awkwafina, and the rest of the cast signed on between July to November 2019. Production was expected to begin in London between late March and early April 2020 but was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Filming ultimately took place primarily at Pinewood Studios in England and on the island of Sardinia, Italy, from January to July 2021. Composer Alan Menken, who worked on the original film’s soundtrack, returned to compose the score and write new songs alongside Lin-Manuel Miranda, who serves as a producer with Platt, John DeLuca and Marshall. The film is dedicated to the late Howard Ashman, who co-produced and co-wrote the songs from the original film.
The Little Mermaid premiered at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles on May 8, 2023,[7] and was released in the United States on May 26. It received mixed reviews from critics, who praised the performances of the cast and the musical sequences but criticized the visual effects and character designs.
The film has grossed over $566 million worldwide against a total production budget of $250 million, becoming the ninth-highest-grossing film of 2023. Amongst Disney’s live-action remakes, the film is the second-most-expensive and seventh-highest-grossing readaptation to date.
Visual Effects
Visual effects were provided by Industrial Light & Magic, Wētā FX, Moving Picture Company and Framestore. DNEG also provided the stereo conversion. For the “Under the Sea” sequence, Marshall called it a “big, massive musical number” and said that creating the underwater environments involved “a lot of work in advance with John DeLuca and myself creating these musical sequences, to prep it in advance from storyboards to something called pre-visualization, which is almost like a little mini-animated film, so we know how it flowed and how it worked … You are creating a world, you’re creating creatures, but it’s very important to me that it feels real – you have to believe, you have to care about them, you have to follow their journey.”
On May 19, 2023, Marshall revealed that his work on Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (which featured a mermaid character named Tamara) helped influence his work on The Little Mermaid, using similar live-action and CGI techniques to bring Ariel, her sisters and King Triton to life. He called it “a great launching point for us” and showed his work on Pirates to the crew and visual effects team to break down the process. The colorful tails of the merpeople characters were designed by Marshall’s frequent costume designer Colleen Atwood, who used real fish as references to make each of the tails of Ariel and her sisters look more distinct from one another, and also designed the costumes for the human characters.
The Little Mermaid (2023)
Directed by: Rob Marshall
Starring: Halle Bailey, Jonah Hauer-King, Javier Bardem, Melissa McCarthy, Daveed Diggs Awkwafina, Jacob Tremblay, Noma Dumezweni, Art Malik, Jessica Alexander, Martina Laird, Emily Coates
Screenplay by: David Magee
Production Design by: John Myhre
Cinematography by: Dion Beebe
Film Editing by: Wyatt Smith
Costume Design by: Colleen Atwood
Set Decoration by: Diana Samuila, Gordon Sim, Katie Walker
Art Direction by: Lauren Briggs-Miller, Simon Elsley, Elaine Kusmishko
Music by: Alan Menken
MPAA Rating: PG for action / peril and some scary images.
Distributed by: Walt Disney Pictures
Release Date: May 8, 2023 (Dolby Theatre), May 26, 2023 (United States)
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