Wife wanted to go to see The Little Mermaid. Given that I've been exhausted by the decision-making in some of these live-action remakes, seeing one that still had some thought into its storytelling and cinematography feels like a minor miracle. I don't agree with every decision and the climactic scenes are still too dark and lacking in any sort of eye-catching detail but the film might be more compelling, as a whole work, than the original.
Under the Sea is back, and has an air of a student's graduation thesis animation project. Like, it's actually pretty fun to watch and there are a lot of good ideas; things like weight, movement, composition, etc. all really solid, but the choice of song to direct the action feels like window dressing. The lyrics are fundamentally meaningless in the context of the action shown here. No longer do fish play the saxophone, no, they just move around, but the song still talks about all the music the fish make. All the more baffling in the context of Kiss the Girl getting a (much-needed) lyrical change and, important for the context of this scene, is set up to make the music actually seem diegetic, from the various critters.
As with The Lion King, the animals don't really emote, but the lead human actors all have enough charm that they make up for most of it. Melissa McCarthy understands the role of Ursula perfectly. Halle Bailey and Jonah Hauer-King have excellent chemistry together and the romance feels authentic and the pining comprehensible to the story without it all being too dour (though could you imagine if they did, in fact, let Ariel waste away into sea foam? that would have been an incredible choice and, had it happened, I'd be telling you to get tickets to the next showing). Javier Bardem kinda mumbles through a lot of his lines; even if he's in every Disney film already I almost feel like his role ought to have been played by someone like Brad Garrett who can both be imposing and a little goofy, someone I'd buy as Ursula's sibling (because that's a thing they mention).
There were, of course, a lot of shipwrecks and eel faces. This is definitely a movie that came out after Mario 64. Given that the last movie we saw was the Mario movie that puts us two-for-two in terms of unpleasant, menacing eels gettin their faces right up in front of the camera. Sleep tonight is probably gonna be weird.
Wife had some of the same criticisms but overall was delighted and has basically been acting like a little kid again. Sex tonight is gonna be weird