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Ariel’s Beginning Movie Review

The Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Beginning is a 2008 animated direct-to-video film from Disneytoon Studios. It ranks among the finest Disneytoon sequels.

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“Our song“

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This movie is so good. It works because it doesn’t focus on some stupid new adventure full of unnecessary action scenes. This is quite the contrary. It’s character-based and it was made for people such as myself as I am a huge ‘Little Mermaid’ fan. It enriches and deepens the mythology and these wonderful characters and I really appreciated the movie for that.

King Triton has forbidden all music in the kingdom and Ariel is all about singing so the two clash as they would clash in the original film years later in the storyline. Their relationship is the heart and soul of the original and so is it here, but even more emphasis should have been on them in my opinion. Ariel and Triton both are faithful here to their previous iterations and are undoubtedly the standouts.

I also really liked Sebastian, though he is less memorable this time around obviously. On the side of the bad, Flounder is insufferable instead of cute here and Marina del Rey is such a poor, mediocre, forgettable villain that did not work at all.

Ariel’s Beginning is particularly potent emotionally speaking. We finally found out here what happened to Ariel’s mother and this realization deepened the character of Triton even more while perfectly accompanying the original movie thematically speaking. It was an ingenious choice that paid off stupendously.

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What doesn’t work here is the soundtrack. For a movie that is all about the joys of singing and dancing, the music here is very mediocre. They used Jump in the Line, which is a popular, already created song, thus the movie felt derivative. Also, it felt overly cheerful and energetic for this type of material. I wanted more ballads, let’s just say that. The animation itself is very cheap-looking. The designs looked fine, but the background work needed more, well, work. Technically speaking, the movie’s ain’t all that great, but the plot is terrific.

Ariel’s Beginning is weak in soundtrack and animation, but it’s phenomenal in its very deep, moving storyline that enriched the mythology and characters of the original stupendously. It’s a very well written, surprisingly complex movie that ranks among the greatest Disneytoon sequels of all time. This is what the previous Little Mermaid sequel should have been like in the first place.

My Rating – 4