The Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Beginning
Oh gosh 
When I first heard about this I turned my nose up because of the whole set-up … a prequel to the original, which of course meant no Melody lol. A few months ago I saw a still from the movie posted to some IMDb message board or other and my interest seeing in the movie for all but disappeared because the moment in particular that they’d captured just looked atrociously drawn.
How fast those doubts can be swept away by the merest glance during the first few minutes here of a tiny tiny Ariel (no seashells, just a cute purple wrap, lol!) and all the other characters, and the animation, crucially, in motion. The animation here is spectacular ... and I’m not even gonna add to that ”... for a DTV sequel …”
Well, anyway, the tiny tiny Ariel doesn’t last ‘cos this is evidently all occurring pretty close to the start of the original. The story is nifty once it gets going – I actually laughed out loud when Ariel first stumbles across Sebastian’s underground music speakeasy, lol. Basically Triton has outlawed music in Atlantica and the movie is kind of Prohibition for kids about the importance of music. I guess Disney is getting a headstart on the neo-depression genre lol.
There are lots of cute references to the original, my fave being the jawdrop moment (if I remember correctly, this was also in the sequel when Melody tells Sebastian she sometimes imagines she has fins) – here it’s flipped around and it’s Ariel’s jaw that drops when she first seas goody-goody Sebastian breaking the rules by singing. Later we see the villainess Marina Del Ray mimicking the splash-up-on-the-rock moment that ended the “Part of Your World” reprise. There are some supersubtle gags for adults though, too, like “At-lant-ic-a!” when all the sea creatures find themselves locked away. The movie really has a surprisingly rebellious streak to it. Oh and also, almost making up for the absence of Melody (though her voice, Tara Strong, is here! hehe), at last Flounder is back to the cute version we fell in love with in the original, not the adolescent, voice broken, version that was about the worst thing in Return to the Sea LOL.
All in all I was surprised. I’d obviously rather see another Melody story than this but I can’t deny the animation is just leaps and bounds better than most Disney DTVs – though I’m cringing the more I hear about the Tinker Bell movie which basically sounds like Bratz meets Sex and the City with fairies, bah … I can’t wait to see the animation.