REVIEW: 'The Little Mermaid'

You could make an argument that The Little Mermaid—the original from 1989, not the remake released this weekend—is the most significant movie made in the past 35 years. It changed the course of motion pictures by establishing a market for animated features that had never really existed before. In the decades since, what with Disney and Pixar and Dreamworks and Illumination, the animated motion picture has become the most reliable box office performer the cinema has ever seen. The Little Mermaid single-handedly revivified the Walt Disney Company, which had become inert and hidebound and had been making rotten movies for two decades following Walt's death in 1966. The change in direction was so significant that by 2019, Disney had become without question the dominant force in American popular culture and the most powerful movie studio since MGM's heyday in the 1940s.