Filmmakers Ron Clements and John Musker discuss the remastering of the newly released Little Mermaid DVD.
By Jake Friedman
*Originally published in the November, 2006 issue of Animation Magazine.
When fans speak, the Mouse listens. Disney’s most requested title, 1989’s The Little Mermaid, is joining the select list of Platinum Edition DVDs this month to make it Disney’s 8th in the collection. Produced at a time when there was talks of cutting Disney’s feature animation all together, Mermaid heralded a new age in Disney’s animation, paving the way for other heartfelt, Broadway-inspired projects like Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King.
This DVD collection contains commentary by co-writers/co-directors Ron Clements and John Musker, as well as composer Alan Menken. The second disc also offers a digital simulation of a Little Mermaid theme park ride that never saw fruition, narrated by the original imagineers. There’s also a new documentary chronicling the ascent of the Disney company’s executive staff and the spearheading of Mermaid. Dozens of interviews, from actors to animators to members of the executive board, offer a window into the making of the two-time Oscar-winning (Best Song and Score) film with delicious anecdotes and archival home footage.
(c) Disney
“Nothing’s been added or deleted from the original film. It’s still the same as you remember, but just some little mistakes have been cleaned up,” notes Clements, who along with Musker, was closely involved in the remastering of the movie. “The film was the last to use hand-painted cels. We had some issues with the color,” says Musker, “as we shot the film on EK Stock instead of three-strip Technicolor, partially as a money-saving technique. But then we couldn’t get the colors looking the way we wanted to, and it was leading to all sorts of problems. All the different shades of red were turning into one color. It wasn’t until this DVD restoration that the colors look like what we wanted.”