The Little Mermaid (II) (2023) User Reviews

Animation bad but the story is good

[lisafordeay · 5/10 · 3 September 2023]

Who doesn't remember the days when studios would copy and paste from other famous studios. Well in 2023 we had not one but two Little Mermaid films. One with up and rising star Halle Bailey and Jonah Hauer King,and the other being Asylum's mockbuster The Little Mermaid.

This version features the voice talents of Sonya Krueger,Courage,Alex Lizotte,Steve Guttenberg (yeah that Steve Guttenberg from Police Academy fame),Dee Wallace,Myrom Kingery and Maria Eliades.

Serina(Krueger) is a naive mermaid who's best friends with a turtle named Sheldon(Lizotte). She loves going to the surface as she is in love with a prince named Lucas(Courage). So she does the unthinkable and goes to Revina the sea witch(Wallace)and trades her voice for legs. So Serina has a year(yeah not 3 days this time folks)to get the prince to fall for her or she will be banished for all eternity. Will Lucas marry Princess Dhara (Eliades)or will he discover that it was Serina who saved him from the shipwreck?

Overall it wasn't a bad film. The animation is a hit and miss(there's even an animated Jason Momoa in this as King Maris voiced by Myrom Kingery). The real surprise was Steve Guttenberg who voices Lucas's overbearing father King Jasper and he was the only voice actor I knew in this film.

What makes this film different to the Halle Bailey and Jodi Benson version is it adds the original origins of the Han Christian Anderson version (where there is no sea witch turning into a beautiful woman named Vanessa only instead it's another Princess who the prince thinks was the one to save him and not the mermaid.

Give it a watch as it's on YouTube now and Amazon Prime.

Animation 0/5 Story 3.5/5.

A.I. is soulless

[bbennett-46036 · 1/10 · 12 June 2023]

This sad excuse of a movie is just another poor cash grab. Asylum does not care about quality, all they wanted was to jump on the little mermaid remake bandwagon. The animation looks like it was all generated by ai and no one went in to correct any animation errors, there are countless times where the characters move in unrealistic ways and the amount of clipping is abysmal. The water effects are non existent, the mermaids look like they float mid air, not swim underwater. The lighting is bad. The voice acting is bad, if it even is voice acting and not ai generated. The character models looked like their hands were burnt to a crisp.

This is a sad excuse for a children's movie and even kids deserve better than this.

A nice re-telling for the kids.

[goodellaa · 7/10 · 10 June 2023]

This will be a good movie to watch at home with little kids, so you can chat with them about the action in the movie. There is one great learning opportunity here: the way the sea witch goes about using the desires and weaknesses of mer-people to get them painted into a corner, then offers an even worse deal to try and fix it. She is always adding some difficult provision to the agreement during negotiations, and she has a fresh scheme going every time she encounters anyone. Real life is like that sometimes. Mostly the message seems to be the power of love and niceness. Not everyone will be happy with the animation style, which is so simple and almost video game-like it seems unfinished in places. Not the usual thing for those used to animated features made be a brigade of artists and technicians. The credits here are remarkably brief. It gets better as it rolls along, with lots to look at and no boring bits. There are stylistic touches that are very likeable, and loads of beauty. The story is nice and should work for the little ones. It answers their questions, never assuming that they can guess or fill in where an adult might. The story really does progress, too, building dramatic tension until ... don't want to give it away. When a child asks, "Why don't they just (fill in the blank)?" Because the story does not have to make sense. But this ending pretty much does make sense! The hopeless situation comes to a happy ending and all is great.