'The Little Mermaid' Review: Overlong and Under the Sea
Few would have guessed this when it arrived in the closing weeks of the 1980s, but “The Little Mermaid” turned out to be one of the most influential movies of the decade. Disney animation was on life support; the studio hadn’t produced anything great in many years. Ariel and her fishy friends not only revived a great company and ushered in a new golden age of animated features but brought back the Broadway-style screen musical, which had been dead for an entire generation, and schooled millions of youngsters in its romantic-comic conventions. In plucking from off-Broadway the immensely gifted composer Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, a fantastically clever lyricist who died two years later, Disney made superstars of both.
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