The Little Mermaid, the latest of Disney’s endless procession of live-action remakes of their beloved animated classics, hits theaters today and, well, it’s earning pretty much the exact reception you would expect. Halle Bailey deserves all the praise for her star-making leading performance, but the film is as bloated as a pufferfish, and some of its weird character choices are reeling in ridicule online. Case in point, the new Scuttle literally makes no sense.
As William Bibbiani went viral for pointing out on Twitter, there’s a “scene right at the beginning where the filmmakers apparently forgot that Scuttle isn’t a fish, so they just show a bird talking and breathing underwater for several minutes.”
Yes, we all know that Scuttle isn’t a seagull anymore but a diving fish, but it is still impossible for any kind of bird to breathe underwater.
Still, many are blasting this pedantic take when the whole premise of the movie is so fantastical in the first place. Isn’t a mermaid from a magical kingdom more ridiculous than a bird breathing underwater?
While this is just a light-hearted online argument (mostly, anyway — there are always some that get bizarrely heated) about one small aspect of the film, what I’m now going to dub the Scuttle Conundrum is actually the big problem with Disney’s live-action remakes in a microcosm. Namely, that by bringing these stories specifically designed for animation into live-action, the elastic reality they exist in can threaten to snap.
We’ve been seeing this for years with those remakes that employ photo-realistic renderings of their animal casts and yet still force them into cartoonish situations — resulting in the serious uncanny valley factor that The Lion King suffers from worst of all. And then there are all those song lyrics that mean nothing anymore (the ending of Aladdin‘s “Prince Ali” springs to mind — where are those bears, lions, and birds that warble on key, Genie?).
As for The Little Mermaid, in the animation department, it’s a-OK when Flounder pops his head above the water to talk with Scuttle, but presumably, that seemed to be too much of a stretch for the new version, so Scuttle was brought under the water — thereby creating this issue with his breathing. Fans mocking this move just goes to show Disney can’t have it both ways — you can’t go some way to making things more “realistic” while still closely adapting a story that was always intended to be told in an animated medium.
Seeing as that is the case, it’s no surprise that the best-reviewed of the remakes either took more liberties with the source material — like The Jungle Book — or tackle tales more easily suited to live-action — e.g. Cinderella. They might continue to swim to success at the box office, but until Disney faces up to the fact that its remakes are always caught between two worlds — a bit like Ariel herself — they’re doomed to sink on a creative level.
