Happily Never After: The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea

Far from better down where it’s wetter.

“The Little Mermaid” is perhaps the single most seminal work from the House of Mouse regarding the legacy of every sequel I have not only looked at already but will be analyzing in the future.

Released in 1990, the film received a wide spread critical acclaim and financial success that restored some much needed luster to the Disney name and paved the way for the following Disney Renaissance.

The Mermaid Princess of the underwater kingdom of Atlantica has always had a fascination with the world above water but after saving a prince from a watery grave, she becomes determined to experience land regardless of her overprotective father’s wishes. To receive the legs necessary to traverse the surface world, Ariel makes a pact with the sea witch Ursula that leaves her with 3 days to gain a kiss from her prince and restore her voice as Ursula herself makes plans to usurp Atlantica’s throne and eventually rule over land and sea.

Ariel’s coming of age narrative about the sacrifices and difficulties of leaving a home that actively loves her and seeks to entice her to stay featured a bit more complexity in its themes and morals than typical Disney fair of the last decade or so up to that point, which, combined with breath taking production values, kicked off a much needed creative revitalization of their animated division that would define their approach and audience to their very day.

As for the movie itself, although something of a reevaluation of the film with a modern feminist bend criticizes the decision to have a teenage girl abandon her life to pursue romance with a man she knows for less than a week and not undeservedly so, there’s an undeniable charm and relatability to the entire scenario of a parent learning to release the leash of their growing child, punctuated by one of the better villains of the Animated Cannon in the form of Ursula. “The Little Mermaid” has a well earned legacy that its sequel probably would have failed to live up to even if it had decided to swing for the fences and actually tried to.

Although the final product is considerably less of a slouch than many of the disasters of this line that I’ve already covered as well as those lurking right around the corner, “The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea” isn’t exactly much less of a blow off.

Set several years after the first film, Ariel has settled into married life and motherhood with her husband Eric and her daughter Melody.

In a role reversal of the first film, Melody has lived a sheltered life on land with a fascination for life at sea that has stayed with her as long as she has lived. This proves inconvenient for Ariel, who has gone out of her way to shield her daughter from her Atlantican heritage after Ursula’s sister Morgana has threatened the life of the young princess as an infant in retaliation for her sister’s demise.

With years of lashing against her figurative shackles, Melody escapes to the beach and makes a deal with Morgana for the mermaid tail that she’s always wanted for an opportunity to explore the sea unfettered, forcing Ariel to race back to the home that she said goodbye too in order to protect her beloved child.

The story of “Return to the Sea” rife with potential of drama and conflict; familial rivalry, children coming of age, adult reflection on the past from a newly gained perspective, situational shame in one’s heritage, the importance of analyzing the past for the good of the future, the futility of revenge, etc.

They’re all powerful ideas to contemplate. If you’re fascinated by them, be prepared to do that elsewhere, because absolutely none of it shines through here.

If “The Lion King 2: Simba’s Pride” was the well conceived and ambitious project on paper that just didn’t come together properly in execution, “The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea” is quite possibly the closest I’ve encountered amongst these films to a text book definition of half-assed; they literally took a concept and filled out the requisite running time with no thought or effort put into the framework that they were using.

Ariel being the first Disney Princess to have to directly grapple with themes and trials of motherhood? Never addressed.

The best moments of the film come about when you can see her clearly struggling to keep her daughter save despite how much it kills her to have to resort to the same dictatorial approach that her father used to protect her. Rather than analyze her perspective and reflect on this however, perhaps in an effort to justify why one would think the best way to shield a child from the past would be by denying them intrinsic knowledge to who they are, Ariel immediately returns to her sea legs, or lack thereof, in a race against time to a home that seems really accepting of her lack of visitation, which just leads to more bland adventurous set pieces in her iconic mermaid character design.

Perhaps we can gain insight into Ursula’s presence beyond the plot of the first film by following her sister, right? No such luck.

It becomes clear very early that Morgana only exists to provide Pat Carroll with returning voice work despite having her character killed off in the previous installment. You could have added in a Marvel-esque post credit stinger to “The Little Mermaid” in which Ursula’s hand suddenly rises from the watery depths and replace Morgana’s character model with her own, and not a single piece of the film, be it writing or dialogue, would have to be altered for the accommodation.

With any grander sense of using mythology to spice up the plot efficiently snuffed out, it falls to the spin-offspring child of adventure Melody to hold down what’s left of the film and it goes about as well as you would expect a 12 year old girl with no sense of the world around her nor specific end goal outside of the vague promise of “adventure” while swimming to hold down a feature that is mercifully short at 75 minutes long that feels like nothing has been accomplished outside of her making the standard Disney comic relief duo of mismatched species.

Just about the only praise that I can really give the movie is that it did seem to set a noticeable production standard for the direct to video Disney sequels from this point forward. By no means is the movie a show stopper but it does benefit from technical competence, animators that know how to use lighting to their advantage, a strong voice cast, and an editor that could have helped cut the movie to effective dramatic impact if the screenplay had any worthwhile impact to begin with.

From here on out, the animation appears to become more and more consistent as well when compared to the whiplash of tones, technique, and quality that the films have had up to this point. Very few of these movies succeed in looking theatrical but unless they were directly conceived of and packaged with a television release in mind, they don’t look much worse than the ultimately average animation quality of this film.

I honestly don’t know whether or not to condemn “Return to the Sea” for wasting such prime material by clearly not even trying to take advantage of its own premise, or praise it for managing to make its hour and 15 minutes of nonsense clear, concise and to the point for a feature that’s rather forgettable but never really painful. It never even reaches “Simba’s Pride” levels of frustrating because it just doesn’t try as hard and thusly fails to fall as far in the places that movie did fall flat.

Whatever nugget of a great idea may have existed in the concept of “The Little Mermaid II” however, the end result just about exemplifies the levels of laziness in favor of an easy cash grab to be typically expected from this entire direct to video venture.

Then again, Melody’s blasé little outing is an outright passion project compared to the stupidity that the Tramp’s kid is up to.