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In August 2008, a prequel to Disney's classic film The Little Mermaid was released direct to DVD. The title of the new movie is The Little Mermaid: Ariel's Beginning, and it looks at stuff that happened before Ariel had her above-the-water adventures and fell in love with a human prince.

There's been loads of rumours flying around before the movie got released, and for a long time the title was The Little Mermaid III, but (from what little I know) the movie underwent major rewrites and/or revamps during production before it finally got released. Now what many fans have wanted for years is to know what happened to Ariel's mum, and this movie serves that little plot point to us on a silver platter.

The story of Ariel's Beginning focuses on music. Specifically, King Triton's rule that there be no music in the kingdom of Atlantica. Ariel and her sisters grow up without music (and by proxy, any fun) because in this version of their history King Triton couldn't get over the death of his wife and became an uber-strict version of Captain Von Trapp. Although the princesses do have a governess in the form of mermaid Marina Del Ray, she is no Fräulein Maria, so it's up to Ariel the young mermaid to change her father's overbearing ways.1

Oh, and Marina Del Ray is plotting to take over Sebastian's role as royal attache, Ariel's sisters get a chance to shine with their own individual personalities, and Ariel meets Flounder for the first time2.

I feel that Ariel's Beginning is a quiet little self-contained story made up of little moments of joy and sorrow. It doesn't emulate the world-crossing epic about love and sacrifice that was the original movie, or even the shocking conflict of Return to the Sea, but it's pretty obvious that Ariel's Beginning wasn't made to push the envelope. What we've got is a small snapshot of Ariel's Atlantican life. I did enjoy her interaction with her sisters, whom have been overlooked far too much.

The title is actually quite misleading, because only a small portion of Ariel's Beginning (as a prequel) sets up the story of The Little Mermaid.3 Aside for the introduction of Queen Athena, the prequel tv series answers more questions about Ariel's past than this movie.

That said, this movie gets OVER NINE THOUSAND cool points for gorgeously animating Ariel (and the other mermaids) as actually swimming in water, with their hair reacting to water just the way that fascinated me so much in the 1989 film, coupled with constant water sound effects. ♥





















































FOOTNOTES:
1: The depiction of King Triton in this movie as a hard-nosed fun-sucker makes me a sad panda. He loses TEN YEARS with his daughters because of his behaviour, and though I can believe their relationship is improved after the end of this movie, the closeness I've always assumed to exist between Ariel and Triton doesn't work with this version. I'll stick to the occasionally-harsh but still-huggable version of Triton in the series, because he doesn't make me depressed. [ Go back ]

2: This is different from the other time Ariel and Flounder met for the first time, which was when they were both much younger. [ Go back ]

3: **SPOILERS - DO NOT READ IF YOU DON'T WANT TO BE SPOILED FOR THIS MOVIE** Things you will NOT see in this movie are: (1) Any explanation of Ariel's fascination with the human world. Humans are almost completely absent from this movie, and Ariel does zero exploring and almost zero adventuring. (2) Any mention of the huge issue that contact between the merworld and the human world is forbidden. (3) Prince Eric. (4) Ursula, or her origins. "Back in my day, we had fantastical feasts, when I lived in the palace." Nope, they didn't use it. [ Go back ]

This page was last modified on September 1st, 2008.