★★★★

Disney hasn’t half come a long way since Angela Lansbury and David Tomlinson shimmied a sub-marina two step back in 1971’s Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Gone are the two-dimensional toons and hand-drawn backdrops. This is the post-Avatar world of CGI wizardry. Rob Marshall’s new take on Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid, by way of Disney’s beloved 1989 animation, follows hot on the heels of James Cameron’s Way of the Water in this respect and achieves a feat that must once have seemed impossible. Which is to say: to film a technically brilliant underwater musical. Though only marginally less perfunctory than its fellow Disney remakes of recent years – only David Lowery’s Pete’s Dragon has thus far bested the original – Marshall’s Little Mermaid is terrific fun and a well timed launch pad for Summer at the cinema.

Unquestionably, the film’s greatest asset is the you-saw-her-here-first casting of Halle Bailey as the titular little mermaid. Once playfully voiced by Jodi Benson, Bailey brings to Ariel a startling truth of feeling. It is a performance of such emotional honesty that the lacking of such in Emma Watson’s Belle and Mena Massoud’s Aladdin now feel markedly exposed. When, early in the film, Ariel belts out Howard Ashman and Alan Menkin’s still spellbinding Part of Your World, Bailey delivers not just pitch perfect vocals but a gut wrenching integrity. The racist backlash that flared alongside Bailey’s announcement to the part always felt heinous but now must seem ludicrous to all but the most questionable of critics.

If anything, it is the casting of Jonah Hauer-King that feels a tad misjudged. That the Old Boys star is a mighty talent is without doubt. His Prince Eric is a winsome charmer and fine match for Bailey’s Ariel. The two have chemistry. Where things tremor is in the film’s failure to ever truly justify the role of a white, European prince in a very deliberately Caribbean kingdom. Theatre legend Noma Dumezweni is Eric’s adoptive mother, Queen Selina, and Art Malik her Prime Minister, Grimsby.

While David Magee’s script dips a toe in the paddling pool of racial discourse, the approach is a graduate of the Bridgerton school of diversity. Some have decried the casting of Melissa McCarthy on similar grounds, bemoaning Disney’s failure to cast a drag performer in the role of the sea witch Ursula. Perhaps this is an opportunity missed – Ruben A. Aquino based the original animated design on the late queen Divine – but it’s hard to critique the rapacious energy of McCarthy in delivery. It’s her best work in years, even in the face of some dire first half exposition monologising.

In spite of an opening Anderson quotation, which hints at a darker retelling of the original tale, the film that follows is more or less an in tact expansion on the 1989 model. Ariel is the wayward youngest daughter of Javier Bardem’s King Triton. While her elder sisters happily fin the line, Ariel dreams of a better life up where the people are – no matter what calypso crab Sebastian (Hamilton’s Daveed Diggs) has to say about life ‘under the sea’. And that’s even before she clocks eyes on Prince Charming – here with added personality. Subtle shifts in tone and song lyrics do much to emphasise Ariel’s agency in her own choices and limit Eric’s relevance to the sacrifices she makes. Played up are the magical qualities of a mermaid’s song – the siren’s call – and that it is this, rather than her voice, as a symbol of her self and individuality, that Arial gives up for a chance at livin’ la vida human.

Also added are three fresh songs from Menkin and Lin Manuel Miranda. Eric gets a new power ballad, not so far removed from the one given Dan Stevens’ Beast in the Beauty remake, and Ariel a showcase for Bailey’s lighter side. Best of the trio is gifted Awkwafina voiced gannet Scuttle; a quirky rap number to tickle younger audiences before things get heavy. It’s textbook Miranda. His too must be the sense of place that washes through the film’s oceanic tone and vibrant visuals. Beneath the waves, pinks and blues pop from the screen, which overflows with only the most colourful of sea creatures. Even Ursula boasts bioluminescent tentacles. Above, island life’s a breeze and not a cartoon lion in sight. Bardem alone appears to be having no fun. You can’t win them all.

T.S.