The Little Mermaid

In Ron Clements and John Musker’s The Little Mermaid the songs are load bearing rather than decorative. Howard Ashman rebuilt the film on Broadway logic, making each number a tentpole of the story, and it was also Ashman who proposed turning a minor English butler crab into a Jamaican one. Skipping the musical sequences is not an option here, because the plot advances inside them. Part of Your World came close to being cut after children fidgeted at a test screening. Jeffrey Katzenberg wanted it gone, Ashman threatened to walk off the project, and the directors held the line until a more finished version could be put in front of an audience. This was the last Disney feature completed with the traditional hand painted cel method. Effects supervisor Mark Dindal estimated that over a million bubbles were drawn for it, and most of the underwater bubble work was sent out to Pacific Rim Productions, a firm running its animation in Beijing. Two Academy Awards followed, for original score and original song. A good fit if hearing a picture assembled like a stage musical, number by number, is the appeal rather than the wrapping. Not a fit if you are coming for the ending Andersen actually wrote, which is noticeably softened here.