The new, Disney live-action version of the Little Mermaid is, sad to say, disappointing and boring, as I’m sure the handful of restless, inattentive kids who were at the same screening as me will agree. But why?

The film is not without merits, although they are subtle and probably not particularly meaningful to a child audience. The cast is expensive and good. Criminally-underused Melissa McCarthy is as compelling as she can be within the constraints of some ungenerous editing. Javier Bardem brings a surplus of gravitas to a two-dimensional role. Halle Bailey, when she isn’t belting out the Disney show-stoppers, is as blandly cute as a princess should be. 

The scene-setting takes a while to get going, but once on land the action picks up, with the contrast between the temporarily muted Ariel’s actions and her sung inner voice proving to be oddly diverting. The romantic tension between the leads building sweetly over the set-piece song Kiss the Girl. There are even a few good gags. 

The film’s new songs, written by Hollywood darling Lin Manuel Miranda, are a divisive mixed bag. Love-interest Eric’s Wild Uncharted Waters is a redundant dirge. The machine-gun rap Scuttlebutt, delivered by Awkwafina, is either a fun kick-in-the-pants change of pace or one of the worst Disney songs ever, depending on who you ask. I liked it. Shoot me.

So why is the film as a whole such a draggy disappointment? The overall experience is much, much less than the sum of its parts. Those of a more cynical disposition may be tempted to point the finger at the dread shadow of ‘woke’ hanging over the film. 

There has been much unedifying internet back-and-forth over the casting of a black actress, Halle Bailey, as Ariel, on the grounds that this choice was made for other than purely artistic reasons. The addition of new “consent is good” lyrics to Kiss the Girl, to bring it closer in line with contemporary dating sensibilities, is at least potentially jarring. There is even conjecture that the film is a metaphor for everyone’s least favourite princess Meghan Markle, to which it can only be said – if it is, it is a very remote metaphor. 

Without a doubt, the film has been run past a committee of blue-haired sensitivity readers, but this is not why it is so intermittently entertaining. If there is any ‘wokeness’ to be seen in the film, it is negligible, and it does nothing to change either the intended emotional affect or the fundamental content of the story. The 2023 Little Mermaid is the same intergenerational-conflict, coming-of-age story as the beloved 1989 original. 

People are reaching for ‘wokeness’ as an easy explanation for their real sense of disappointment in this film, but it is neither a satisfying nor accurate diagnosis. To understand the anticlimactic nature of this viewing experience, it is necessary to look at Disney’s ongoing habit of remaking their animated back catalog using combined live action and CGI. Sleeping Beauty, The Jungle Book, Cinderella, Dumbo, The Lady and the Tramp, Aladdin, Mulan, and Pinocchio – all these remakes have been disappointments in their own way, suggesting something of a deeper problem than superficial woke tampering with plot details. 

The main reason these remakes are disappointing is the nature of the experience itself. It is hard to know who is supposed to be the audience for live-action remakes. Children find them boring and uninvolving, adults find them childish and insubstantial. If there is a natural audience at all, it is adults who want to get the same emotional experience as the they did from the original – a desire which can only ever be disappointed.

The essence of this disappointment derives from the essence of the medium of animation. Old-school cel animation is designed to make action as heightened, appealing and emotionally involving as it can be. Disney animators pretty much invented and codified the 12 principles that inform animation as we know it. 

The problem is that it is not that it is difficult to achieve the same emotional affect with a mix of live-action and CGI animation, but that CGI is in fact antithetical to it. It kills the animation. It kills the life.  

Compare the renderings in the two versions of the film of the first emotional climax of the story. Ariel, singing her “I want” song Part of Your World, contorts herself on a rock as an enormous wave crashes over her. Cel animation makes possible a wave that lingers in the air seemingly forever, voluminous hair that dances without weight, a human spine without rigidity, made only of pure emotion. Real life, with its real weight and real physics, can never measure up. In the 2023 film the same climactic moment can be held only as long as real water can stay in the air, and Ariel bends like a young actress in an uncomfortable fish costume. The bathos is such that even the most ardent fan must surely feel short-changed. 

Why do Disney keep doing this to their own back catalog? More generally, as an audience, why are we given so many remakes? Are there no new stories? 

The deepest problem of all is that stories are inherently risky, both commercially and culturally, and we live in risk-averse times. Stories are conflict – psychological trauma. And trauma changes people, for better or worse. But contemporary mores dictate that individual identities are fixed, and challenges to identity are erasing. We are ‘born this way’, and any attempt to change, individually or societally, is seen as inherently dangerous.  

“Be your best self” is the contemporary mantra of a narcissistic age, afraid of growth and contradiction. As long as trauma and change are taboo, new stories are too risky to be told. For the time being, we will have to sit through the inevitably anodyne, bloodless live-animation re-makes of Snow White, Lilo and Stitch and Hercules that are already in the works.