Written by Muchacha Motorista
What little girl in 1989 didn’t love The Little Mermaid? And what Disney fan wasn’t glad to see the animation studio once again create a classic, after years of such ho-hummers as The Black Cauldron, The Great Mouse Detective, and Oliver & Company? The latest direct-to-DVD feature installment, The Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Beginning, may not be deserving of "classic" status like the original, but should be entertaining for those now-grown-up fans and their own little girls.
As the title suggests, this prequel brings us back to a time in Atlantica before Ariel met Eric, and in fact, before she ever garnered an obsession with the world above the sea. It opens when Ariel and her sisters (who play a much larger role in this movie than the original—should we expect a “Mermaids” product line in Disney’s future?) were just little mermaids. King Triton’s hair and beard are orange, his wife is in the picture, they are very much in love, and music fills the kingdom. What destroys this joy is a tragic accident that kills Ariel’s mom.
Years pass and we revisit the mermaid sisters when they are teen-aged and looking much like they did in the original Little Mermaid, though a few of the sisters have fashionably updated hair-dos. King Triton in his grief has banned music (which he blames for his wife's death) and become a distant authority figure (gray beard and all) instead of the once-warm father the mermaids knew as girls. Loveable Sebastian runs an anti-music task force patrolling for violations on the ban. But when Ariel meets Flounder, she is reintroduced to music through an underground movement, and then leads the charge to slowly draw to music those around her. This starts with her sisters, and leads up to a confrontation with King Triton. Can she convince him that this is what their mother would have wanted?
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