--- description: Twenty-five years ago, the old Disney magic launched an animation revolution that bloomed with Pixar, DreamWorks and Disney's own 'Frozen' title: The Little Mermaid at 25: How It Started Disney's Animated Renaissance image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt4f6eea7ee880d4fa/698768df0b72e3673e6dbedd/little-mermaid.jpg?branch=production&width=2400&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [History](/section/history/) ## History Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close * [movies](/tag/movies/) ## movies Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close # How _The Little Mermaid_ Cued the Disney Animation Renaissance by [Richard Corliss](/author/richard-corliss/) ## Richard Corliss Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close Nov 17, 2014 9:39 PM CUT  Disney by [Richard Corliss](/author/richard-corliss/) ## Richard Corliss Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close Nov 17, 2014 9:39 PM CUT Ariel (voiced by Jodi Benson) has a cushy job: mermaid princess of her father Triton’s underwater kingdom. But she’s also a teenager, restless with wanderlust and fascinated by the “gizmos and gadgets” that have fallen from her sky — the water’s surface. She dreams of joining the magical creatures up on land and, this being a Disney animated feature, she dreams in song. In the Howard Ashman lyric put to Alan Menken’s tune, she sings: “Up where they walk, up where they run, / Up where they stay all day in the sun, / Wanderin’ free. Wish I could be / Part of that world.” At an early screening of _The Little Mermaid_, the young audience got restless during that opening ballad — some kids actually started fighting — and Jeffrey Katzenberg, the head of Disney Animation, considered dropping it. Writer-directors John Musker and Ron Clements had to remind Katzenberg that the very first Disney feature, _Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs_, began with a similar “I want” song, “Someday My Prince Will Come,” and that the bosses at MGM had wanted to drop [“Over the Rainbow” from _The Wizard of Oz_](https://tmpowa2.timeinc.com/OWA/redir.aspx?C=3KNOP1djTEiriAI1gS8Flb%5FdeeIb1tEIHDRCGBIGrxnOMUkN%5F-5juUxmz6pLm36VScyUknc%5F9dE.&URL=http%3a%2f%2fentertainment.time.com%2f2013%2f09%2f19%2foz-revisited-part-4-wheres-the-rainbow%2f "undefined") until smarter heads prevailed. Both of those numbers served their stories and became enduring hits. Why not stick with “Part of Your World”? So the song stayed in, as a declaration of its heroine’s hopes. And _The Little Mermaid_, which opened 25 years ago, on Nov. 17, 1989, realized its makers’ dream: recapturing the magic of classic Disney as destination entertainment to enthrall generations of moviegoers. More than two decades after Walt Disney’s death, and following a series of less-than-fabulous cartoon features, this was the picture that launched the Disney Renaissance that soared with _Beauty and the Beast_, _Aladdin_ and _The Lion King_. As I wrote in my most enthusi-woozy-astic tone in the Nov. 20, 1989, issue of TIME: --- > “” --- Many live-action filmmakers did try; they turned their adventure movies into special-effects showcases indebted to cartoons and comic books. The phenomenal critical and popular success of the Disney Renaissance features also prodded rival studios (including DreamWorks, which Katzenberg cofounded after leaving Disney) to start their own animation units and rake in the cash. That they did, making animation the industry’s most reliably money-making “genre.” In 2010, five of the 10 top-grossing movies were CGI-animated: Pixar’s _Toy Story 3_, Universal’s _Despicable Me_, DreamWorks’ _Shrek Forever After_ and _How to Train Your Dragon_ and Disney’s _Tangled_. But it all began with Ariel. Walt Disney had first considered the story in the 1930s, as one segment in a proposed omnibus feature of Andersen tales. Fifty years later, Musker and Clements freshened the idea for Disney’s first fairy-tale animated feature since the 1959 _Sleeping Beauty_. That meant reviving the long-dormant Disney notion of a questing young female (Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora from _Sleeping Beauty_) who battles for her life and honor against an evil older woman (the Queen, the wicked stepmother, Maleficient). Much later, this conflict of young beauty vs. middle-aged sorcery stoked the drama of Rapunzel and her crone captor in _Tangled_. Ariel’s subterranean nemesis, the sea witch Ursula (voiced by Pat Carroll), makes mischief aplenty; but the girl’s main challenge is finding her place in a hostile environment. She’s literally a fish out of water — an undocumented alien, if you will — who must acclimate herself to the strange customs of beasts who breathe through lungs, not gills. The one constant, ain the sea or on land, is true love, which Ariel discovers with the charming Prince Eric (Christopher Daniel Barnes). You may debate whether the Disney heroines fit the feminist standard, but they don’t live in a democracy. [Remember, they’re princesses.](https://time.com/3588178/disney-princesses/ "undefined") _The Little Mermaid_ further harkened back to the classic Disney features by mounting a full musical score with songs that explained the characters and propelled the action. The movie was basically a Broadway musical, but animated and underwater. For the job of custodians and innovators, Menken and Ashman, who had written the off-Broadway hit _Little Shop of Horrors_, were a perfect choice. Menken could compose sumptuous melodies with a pop lilt, and the clever Ashman worked closely with Musker and Clements on the story. He suggested, for example, that Sebastian the Crab (Samuel E. Wright) be changed from a Jeeves-type English butler to a friendly Jamaican. From this decision came the calypso-inflected revel “Under the Sea” and the sweet samba “Kiss the Girl” — two numbers that broke out of the movie to become modest hits. One measure of a song’s mainstream success is an Academy Award. Disney had earned Best Song Oscars in 1941 for “When You Wish Upon a Star” from _Pinocchio_ and in 1947 for “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” from _Song of the South_. Then nothing — until _The Little Mermaid_ again changed the studio’s luck. In the past quarter-century, ten Disney tunes have won the Best Song Oscar: “Under the Sea,” “Beauty and the Beast” (Menkin and Ashman), “A Whole New World” (Menkin and Tim Rice) from _Aladdin_, “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” (Rice and Elton John) from _The Lion King_, “Colors of the Wind” (Menken and Stephen Schwartz) from _Pocahontas_, “You’ll Be in My Heart” (Phil Collins) from _Tarzan_, “If I Didn’t Have You” (Randy Newman) from Pixar’s _Monsters, Inc._, “We Belong Together” (Newman) from Pixar’s _Toy Story 3_, “Man or Muppet” (Bret McKenzie) from the live-action _The Muppets_ and the worldwide smash “Let It Go” (Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez) from _Frozen_. In some ways, _The Little Mermaid_ was old-fashioned. Rendered in the hand-drawn style, it was the last Disney animated feature to use cels and Xeroxing. Pixar and its CGI imitators soon made that rigorous process obsolete. The _Toy Story_, _Shrek_ and _Ice Age_ franchises taught audiences to accept movies that emphasized comedy, not romance, and to forget that a cartoon feature was supposed to sing. Not until the return of the Disney princess musical — _The Princess and the Frog_, _Tangled_ and _Frozen_ — did moviegoers re-warm to the old pleasure of leaving a theater humming as well as smiling. But the phrase “old-fashioned” means nothing to kids treated to their first view of a Disney classic like _The Little Mermaid_. Its humor and heart, not to mention its verve and impeccable craft, can touch any viewer today as it did in 1989\. How lucky we are that this timeless movie became part of our world. **_Read TIME’s Nov. 1989 review of_** **The Little Mermaid,** **_here in the archives:_** [Festive Film Fare for Thanksgiving](http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,959063,00.html "undefined") ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/3589558/little-mermaid-disney-animation-renaissance/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/3589558/little-mermaid-disney-animation-renaissance/"},"headline":"How The Little Mermaid Cued the Disney Animation Renaissance","datePublished":"2014-11-17T21:39:55.000Z","dateModified":"2026-02-21T11:29:05.213Z","description":"Twenty-five years ago, the old Disney magic launched an animation revolution that bloomed with Pixar, DreamWorks and Disney's own 'Frozen'","url":"https://time.com/3589558/little-mermaid-disney-animation-renaissance/","keywords":["movies","Beauty and the Beast"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt4f6eea7ee880d4fa/698768df0b72e3673e6dbedd/little-mermaid.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Richard Corliss","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/richard-corliss/"}],"articleSection":"History","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt4f6eea7ee880d4fa/698768df0b72e3673e6dbedd/little-mermaid.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"little-mermaid","caption":"","creditText":"Disney","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/history/","name":"History"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/movies/","name":"movies"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/3589558/little-mermaid-disney-animation-renaissance/","name":"How The Little Mermaid Cued the Disney Animation Renaissance"}}]},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"The 10 All-TIME Best Animated Movies","description":"TIME movie critic Richard Corliss lists the ten best animated features of all time, from Finding Nemo to Pinocchio","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/2cDpG9PM/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2011-06-22T23:44:53.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/2cDpG9PM.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/3589558/little-mermaid-disney-animation-renaissance/","duration":"PT5M41S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/3589558/little-mermaid-disney-animation-renaissance/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}}] ```