The Little Mermaid (film)

The Little Mermaid is a Disney animated feature adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale The Little Mermaid. The film was produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation and first released on November 15, 1989 by Walt Disney Pictures and Buena Vista Distribution. Grossing over $80 million domestically, this movie is given credit for breathing life back into the animated movie genre after a string of critical and commercial failures (The Black Cauldron, The Great Mouse Detective), signaling the start of a decade-long period of successful Disney movies.

Significance

The Little Mermaid is an important film in animation history for many reasons:

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• It marks a return to the musical format that had made Disney films popular from the 1930s to the 1960s, after a test run with Oliver and Company the year before. It features seven original songs by composer Alan Menken and lyricist Howard Ashman, who also served as the film's producer.
• This film was the most special-effects-laden Disney film since Fantasia forty-nine years prior. Effects animation supervisor Mark Dindal estimated that over a million bubbles were drawn for this film, in addition to the use of other processes such as airbrushing, backlighting, superimposition, and some flat-shaded computer animation.
• The happy-ending wedding scene at the close of the film marked the first use of CAPS (Computer Animation Production System) in a Disney feature. CAPS is essentially a digital ink-and-paint and animation production system that is used to take the animators' drawings and color them digitally, as opposed to the traditional method of tracing onto cels using ink and paint (see Traditional animation). The rest of The Little Mermaid is painted traditionally. All subsequent Disney features have used CAPS instead of traditional ink-and-paint.
• This film and Beauty and the Beast signalled a renaissance in Disney animation; the films brought in large amounts of revenue and acclaim, and the Feature Animation department began significant expansion, going from about 300 artists at the time of this film to 2,400 by 1999.
• The Little Mermaid won the 1989 Academy Award for Original Music Score. Both "Kiss the Girl" and "Under the Sea" were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Song, with "Under the Sea" coming out as the winner.