The Naturalistic Horror of <em>The Little Mermaid</em>
The film features a talking, orchestra-conducting crab—it doesn’t need to look like a wildlife documentary.
Fairy tales do not typically stand up to a lot of scrutiny. One does not hear the story of Sleeping Beauty and think, . These gauzy fables function because they only vaguely resemble reality, a condition that makes them perfect as subjects of Disney cartoons. But that also makes them terrible as subjects of Disney “live-action” remakes, which have been a scourge on pop culture for more than a decade now; beloved children’s, which takes the charming 1989 film that began Disney’s animated “” and turns it into an aquarium of naturalistic fishy horror.
