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The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea Movie Review

The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea is a 2000 animated direct-to-video fantasy film from Disneytoon Studios. It’s a weak sequel.

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“How would you know?

You’ve never even been in it!“

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‘The Little Mermaid’ is one of my absolute favorite Disney films, which I personally deem timeless and almost flawless. This is why I expect a lot from any sequel to this great story, and I was disappointed in this one. Why would I be disappointed in a freaking Disneytoon sequel when most are just so dumb and cheap? Well, the answer lies in the premise.

Yes, I actually found the basic premise behind this film pretty strong. Melody, Ariel’s daughter, yearns for life underwater, but she doesn’t know that her mother was once a mermaid. Then, she makes a pact with an evil witch and gets her tail. That switching of the original was interesting and it could have been emotional to follow mother and daughter on their boding quest, but alas that did not happen.

The potential was certainly there, but the scenes between the two were too few and muted. And the villain being just Ursula’s sister striving to revenge her death was just so lazy as is this entire movie. I found the execution incredibly lazy and dumb, especially in its sidekick characters, which are just weak and annoying. I wished for more Sebastian and Flounder here.

Melody is fine and somewhat proactive, but ultimately not all that memorable. Morgana is just an Ursula rehash while Prince Eric did not get much to do here unfortunately. The same goes for Triton and everyone else here as only Melody and Morgana get a lot of screen time.

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The Little Mermaid II features basic, far from artistic or memorable animation that is very slight. The same goes for the soundtrack, which is pretty mediocre. The movie actually did not need to be a musical as the songs are low in their quantity and simply not that memorable with only For a Moment being okay. But overall, most of the scenes are just mediocre or okay, which was so disappointing as the story held potential. Had they been done ‘The Lion King II’ style, this film would have been pretty good.

The Little Mermaid II has a solid premise, some good moments and a couple of okay characters, but most of the film is lazy in terms of storytelling, disappointingly executed and just quite cheap and mediocre. It could have been so much better.