WE GOT MOVIE SIIIIGN!
After the old Disney logo and the associated nostalgia, we open on…wait, no live-action book?!? What the heck’s going on??? D:
Yes, we’re done with that technique in favor of letting the story tell itself. We fade in on a foggy ocean as some seagulls and dolphins frolic and play together. The lighthearted music grows in intensity as a big dark shape emerges behind them until HOLY SHIP!
The critters scatter as a galleon comes crashing into view with a fanfare, the pounding of the waves against its hull syncing up with the cymbals. Onboard, the sailors are starting off this musical right. "I’ll tell you a tale of the bottomless blue, and it’s hey to the starboard, heave ho! Look out, lad, a mermaid be waitin’ for you in mysterious fathoms below!"
Standing at the bow is a strapping young man and a sheepdog, soon to be revealed as our hero Prince Eric. The guy, not the dog. “Isn’t this great?” he says. “The salty sea air, the wind blowing in your face…a perfect day to be at sea!” Woah, a prince who’s got lines that aren’t about wanting to chase the princess? Stop the presses!
We pan over an older fellow who isn’t wearing a powdered wig but looks like he does. He’s bent over the side of the ship and puking his guts out. “Oh, yes…delightful…”
"A fine strong wind and a following sea," a particularly salty sailor remarks. "King Triton must be in a friendly-type mood."
"King Triton?" Eric asks.
"Why, ruler of the merpeople, lad!" the sailor says, brandishing a live fish. "Thought every good sailor knew about him."
Not-Powdered Wig Man is determined to ward off the whimsy as long as possible and tells Eric to think nothing of this. “It ain’t nonsense, it’s the truth!” says the sailor. “I’m tellin’ you, down in the depths o’ the ocean they live!”
As he rants, he flings his fish overboard. Down it swims, and when it’s put a sufficient amount of distance between itself and the boat, it sighs with relief and goes on its merry way. We follow it past a variety of colorful marine life as the opening credits play. Once again, the music starts off calm and builds in intensity, reaching its peak as the merpeople first appear. There must be hundreds of them, and they’re all swimming towards a gold version of the Emerald City. Hey, there are far worse comparisons I could make.
The overture dies down as the merpeople gather in a concert hall. A seahorse blows a fanfare. “His royal highness, King Triton!” it proclaims. The king, a bearded old stud, enters in a chariot to epic music and much celebration.
It doesn’t last, though. “And presenting the distinguished court composer!” the seahorse continues. “Horatio Thelonius Ignatius Crustaceous Sebastian!” Don’t worry, we’ll just be using that last one. He enters in a miniature chariot to not-so-epic kazoo music and much less celebration.
"I’m really looking forward to this performance, Sebastian," Triton says as he takes his seat in the balcony. His seven daughters will be the stars this evening, and the youngest will be making her musical debut.
"Yes, yes, she has the most beautiful voice!" Sebastian tells him. "If only she’d show up for rehearsals once in a while…"
So the concert starts. There’s not much to it, just the princesses introducing themselves and gushing about how much they love their dad. A giant shell rises up from the floor as they prepare to present their little sister. The shell opens to reveal a pillow and…no, that’s it.
Everyone gasps. Except for Triton, who just gets pissed. "Ariel…!"
Smash cut to the mast of a sunken ship in the middle of nowhere as Ariel and her bouncy red locks pop into the frame. “Flounder, hurry up!” she tells her fish friend, who is yellow and blue and definitely not a flounder.
"You know I can’t swim that fast," Flounder says once he catches up to her.
Ariel isn’t listening. “There it is,” she says proudly, staring at another shipwreck. “Isn’t it fantastic?”
Flounder thinks it looks damp. And he’s suddenly come down with a cough, so he probably shouldn’t go in there.
"Alright," Ariel says knowingly. "I’m going inside. You can just stay here and watch for sharks."
"Okay, yeah. You go, I’ll stay and…what? Sharks? Ariel!” He tries to follow her through a porthole but gets stuck.
"Flounder, don’t be such a guppy," Ariel says, pulling him inside.
"I’m not a guppy! This is great. I mean, I really love this. Excitement, adventure, danger lurking around every corner!" Like a skull, for example. "YAAAAHHH! Ariel!" he screams as he tries to get away from it and bumps into her. "No problem, I’m okay…"
"Shhh!" Ariel’s found what she came for — the strange human treasure known as the fork. "Oh my gosh! Oh my gosh! Have you ever seen anything so wonderful in your entire life?"
"Wow, cool! But what is it?"
"I don’t know. But I bet Scuttle will!" She puts it in her satchel as a dark shape swims by the window.
"What was that?" Flounder asks. "Did you hear something?"
Ariel is distracted by a smoking pipe. “Flounder, will you relax? Nothing is going to happen.”
As if on cue, the shark rises up behind Flounder Jaws-style. "AAAHHHHHH! Run! Run! We’re gonna die!”
They both flee as the shark chases them up through the levels of the boat. At one point, Ariel’s satchel gets caught on something and slips off her. She goes back and gets it, narrowly avoiding getting eaten in the process. They make it through a porthole, get outside and finally manage to trap the shark in a metal ring. “Big bully!” she says, adding a raspberry for good measure and swimming away. “Flounder, you really are a guppy.”
"I am not…!"
Cut to the surface of the ocean, where a seagull is sitting on a rock fiddling with a telescope. Ariel surfaces next to the rock and calls out to him. “Scuttle!”
Scuttle looks at her through the wrong end of the telescope. “Whoa! Mermaid off the port bow! How ya doin’, kid?” he says before lowering it. “Whoa, what a swim.”
"Scuttle, look what we found!" she says, handing him the satchel.
"Human stuff, huh? Lemme see…" He picks up the fork first. "Look at this. Wow, this is special. This is very, very unusual. It’s a dinglehopper! Humans use these babies to straighten their hair out!” He demonstrates, then gives it back to Ariel and looks at the pipe. “Ah, this I haven’t seen in years! This is wonderful! A banded, bulbous snarfblat. The snarfblat dates back to prehistorical times, when humans used to sit around and stare at each other all day. Got very boring. So they invented the snarfblat to make fine music!” He blows into it and gets only a bunch of seaweed.
At the word “music,” Ariel stiffens. “Music? Oh, the concert! Oh my gosh, my father’s gonna kill me! I’m sorry, I gotta go. Thank you, Scuttle!” She and Flounder duck back underwater and swim off.
As they pass a cave, two eel-like creatures peek out of it. One lights up his left eye, one lights up his right eye and the circles combine to form an orb sitting in a dark cave showing the image of Ariel and Flounder.
"Yeeeees. Hurry home, princess," a deep voice rumbles from an alcove. "Wouldn’t want to miss old daddy’s celebration, now would we?" he continues as he…wait, that thing has boobs.
Our villain for the evening, ladies and germs. Ursula the Octopus Thing. “In my day, we had fantastical feasts when I lived in the palace!” she snaps, picking a live shrimp from a dish and chomping on it. “Now look at me…wasted away to nothing!”
She flops out of the alcove, giving us an ass shot we didn’t want or need in the process. “Well, I’ll give ‘em something to celebrate soon enough. Flotsam! Jetsam!” she calls out to the eels, who can somehow hear her. “I want you to keep an extra close watch on this pretty little daughter of his. She may be the key to Triton’s undoing.” She smiles wickedly at the camera as her tentacles curl up around her face, creating an unsettling image that stares into your soul until it fades out.
Back at the palace, Ariel is being reprimanded. Not by the character you’d think, though; it’s Sebastian who’s truly pissed off. “This concert was to be the pinnacle of my distinguished career. Now thanks to you, I am the laughing stock of the entire kingdom!”
"But it wasn’t her fault!" Flounder tells him and Triton. "Ah, well…first, this shark chased us! And we tried to…but we couldn’t…and grrrrrr and we whoooaaa. But then this seagull came, and it was this is this and that is that…"
"Seagull?" Triton asks, finally showing a bit of concern. "You went up to the surface again, didn’t you?"
"Nothing happened — "
"Oh, Ariel, how many times must we go through this? You could’ve been seen by one of those barbarians! By one of those humans!”
"Daddy, they’re not barbarians!"
"They’re dangerous! Do you think I want to see my youngest daughter snared by some fish-eater’s hook?"
"I’m sixteen years old. I’m not a child anymore!" No, you’re a teenager. There isn’t much difference when you think about it.
"Don’t you use that tone of voice with me, young lady! As long as you live under my ocean, you’ll obey my rules!" I can’t tell if the filmmakers are aware of how silly this sounds or not.
"But if you would just listen — "
"Not another word. And I am never to hear of you going to the surface again. Is that clear?” Ariel merely puts on a pouty face and swims off.
"Teenagers. They think they know everything," Sebastian remarks. "You give them an inch, they swim all over you."
"Do you…think I was too hard on her?" Triton asks.
"Definitely not. Why, if Ariel was my daughter, I’d show her who was boss. None of this flitting to the surface and other such nonsense! No sir, I’d keep her under tight control."
This gives Triton an idea. “Ariel needs constant supervision.”
"Constant!"
"Someone to watch over her, to keep her out of trouble."
"All the time — "
"And you are just the crab to do it!”
Cut to Sebastian trudging away from the palace. “How do I get myself into these situations?” he moans. “I should be writing symphonies, not tagging along after some headstrong teenager!”
Speaking of which, Ariel and Flounder are swimming off somewhere again. Sebastian sees them and follows them into a cave that Ariel has blocked up with a rock. He barely makes it inside, and what he sees presents an even bigger problem. “Huh…?”
The shelves are piled with trinkets that Ariel has taken from shipwrecks. In the center of it all, she’s sitting with her fork and looking sad. “Are you okay?”
"If only I could make him understand. I just don’t see things the way he does. I don’t see how a world that makes such wonderful things could be bad…"
I had my famous musical number senses surgically removed because they’d overload just from this film alone. But if I still had them, they’d be going crazy right about now.
