'Honest Trailers' Treats the Live-Action 'The Little Mermaid' With the Contempt It Deserves

There’s something powerfully emblematic about Disney’s rampage of live-action remakes of the company’s classic animated films. An oppressively powerful corporate colossus, smothering all competition, legislative bodies in its pocket and audiences browbeaten into submission, a goose-stepping procession of cultural vandals draining out every last drop of color from a once-vibrant landscape, feasting on the blood of a shambling corp—… Well, I think you get my point. I’m not a fan of these things, though at least they reflect our particular eve-of-the-apocalypse, late-stage-capitalism vibe very well.

Then again I was never really a fan of the original Disney classics, either. To be fair, that’s largely because I refused to watch them. To be an angry contrarian Communist, you have to start early, so even as a child I made a point of not seeing The Lion King, Bambi, or any of the other films, whether older or newer. I’ve seen a bunch of them by now, and I can admit that some are obviously better than others, but it still isn’t my thing. Despite avoiding the live-action remakes like the plague, however, I did somehow end up seeing the recent The Little Mermaid one—and what a miserable, grinding experience that was. Two hours of my life sucked down and lost in a dark, colorless abyss, surrounded on all sides by grotesque CGI monstrosities and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s painful verses. Poor Halle Bailey, giving her absolute all to a film that should have never seen the light of day. I don’t even want to think about it anymore. So thank you to the guys over at ‘Honest Trailers’, who can take the baton from here: