On the first weekend of the live-action version of "The Little Mermaid", word of mouth was not good, and a large number of negative reviews focused on the actress. The picture shows the movie poster.
■ Reporter Liu Qing
The protagonist of the live-action film version of "The Little Mermaid", Hailey Bailey, may be the most unlucky "Disney princess" to date. Since the casting stage, she has become the focus of contradictions in "guilt", and in the first weekend of the film's release, the reputation was not good, and a large number of negative reviews focused on the actress, but ignored the failure of such a big-budget fairy tale film in terms of visual spectacle and music.
"The Little Mermaid" is indeed a Disney live-action movie that is seriously below expectations, but it is not the heroine who is responsible for the "ugly" of the film, on the contrary, this young and healthy girl with superior singing skills has done her job with great responsibility. Scoring movies and shaming actresses based on their looks proves that Disney is at least right in casting—challenging stereotypes. Unfortunately, this challenge ultimately lost to conservative plays and productions.
At the time of Andersen's writing, he had neither the consciousness nor the black and white dictates what the Little Mermaid looked like. It is not surprising that British playwright Martin MacDonald wrote a stroke of genius in the allegorical drama "Dark Attic": Do you know that the "Little Mermaid" is not a slave girl born in the Congo, but a terrifying history deliberately ignored and forgotten by modern Western civilization? Disney certainly doesn't have the sharp attitude and sense of offense of an intellectual, but the cartoon "The Little Mermaid" was not a pandering to the aesthetic habits of the public at that time, when it was born in the late 1980s. The animated image of The Little Mermaid is a red-haired and green-eyed girl, a distinctive characteristic of Irish descent, who at that time was still ostracized and despised by the American mainstream, and the creative team consciously used this image to show their emotional inclination and support. Therefore, the Little Mermaid does not have a specific image of "should", and it is a false proposition to ask her to be white and beautiful.
The first inscription at the beginning of the movie "The Little Mermaid" is dedicated to the original author Hans Christian Andersen, and the subtitle is a quote from the original text: "Mermaids have no tears, so they suffer more than humans." This sentence has nothing to do with the whole film, it is purely a redundant literary and artistic tone. In fact, Disney has always chosen the latter between a step-by-step recreation of the heartbreaking spiritual world of the original book and a different way to tell a family-friendly fairy tale. The 1989 cartoon "The Little Mermaid" became a classic in its own right, cutting the spiritual umbilical cord connected to Hans Christian Andersen long ago. In the original work, the Little Mermaid's real lifelong quest is an "immortal soul". Disney borrowed part of the setting of the original and told an inspirational fairy tale of growth: children who are curious about the outside world are willing to enter the "world of others" at all costs, and different groups will eventually accept and integrate with each other, and no longer see each other as "monsters", in the process, love is a gift for the brave. Obviously, this is the idea of early childhood education in immigrant societies.
From a serious literary point of view, the animation "The Little Mermaid" is a dimensionality reduction rewriting of the original work. But at the time of its birth, it shattered the audience's expectations for a "faithful adaptation of the original" and created a successful mass entertainment product. Its superficial sweet happiness is instead the achievement of its daring to break through conservative adaptation ideas. This touches on the congenital disease shared by several live-action "Disney Princesses", including "The Little Mermaid". "Beauty and the Beast", "Cinderella", "The Little Mermaid", none of these Disney animated classics are "the only legal adaptations" of these story prototypes, and these animated classics created in different eras were "new stories" with different degrees of interest in the times when they were born. But when remaking these classic old works into live-action versions, film capital chose a conservative and lazy way of safe production in order to maximize returns, that is, copy and paste according to animation. Relying on the dividends of the animated version determines the conservativeness of these live-action princess movies at the level of spiritual temperament, and the inherent conservatism of the play dooms the film to be difficult to achieve the improvement or change of external aesthetic expression.
For example, "The Little Mermaid", the casting is indeed against racial stereotypes, challenges appearance anxiety, and is very modern. But the underlying logic of the narrative is still "daddy's little princess, mother's good daughter", the hero and heroine's merit is not won by free will, but the "eyesight" after the completion of the parents, the little mermaid has left the sea and merged into the world, still "daddy's daughter". Trying to get dividends from both the pioneer of the times and conservative products is not a speculative idea of "both want and want"?
And, frame-by-frame, live-action reproductions of animation essentially change the expectations of moviegoers to audiences similar to those of traditional East Asian theater: the default plot and details remain the same, focusing on the presentation of the actors and the situation at the time of the performance. This presents a challenge for the director of the live-action version that is similar to the "Mission Impossible" level: how to recreate the famous scenes of animation while using existing technology to create a "stronger, more impactful, cooler" spectacle experience? Letting Rob Marshall direct "The Little Mermaid" was a bad decision to "not go both ways". Rob Marshall excels at highly staged juggling scenes in limited spaces, and his strength is to create glamorous, extremely artificial and artificial entertainment circuses, allowing him to shoot boundless underwater wonders. Regarding the horror of the sea and the color of the sea, there are too many images of pearl jade in front, and what about the current "The Little Mermaid"? Some viewers left messages on social networking sites, saying very neutrally: From beginning to end, there is not a single scene that can leave an impression.
Hayley Bailey did not disappoint, her voice and singing skills were even better than expected. Compared to the girl's singing, composer Lin-Manuel Miranda is the one who missed. Just as the director did not improve the audiovisual quality on the basis of the animation, the composer Miranda, who is regarded as the "great god", also followed the music of the animation, and the song-level of the film is not comparable to his predecessors "Full House" or "Moana". It's hard to imagine that the songwriter of "Hamilton" wrote for "The Little Mermaid", and as a result, there was not even a song that could be sung loudly.
Losing the two proud strengths of visual spectacle and singing songs, the soul of Disney's live-action princess film is all lost, does this have to be dumped on the actress? (Wen Wei Po)