Little Mermaid’s BTS Filming For Under The Sea Has Everyone Shook Over Its Absurdity

The Little Mermaid‘s “Under the Sea” sequence looks entirely different before the CGI is added. The new film, which premiered in theaters on May 26, stars Halle Bailey as the young mermaid Ariel, who trades her voice to a sea witch in exchange for a pair of legs with which to explore the human world. The live-action Little Mermaid remake retains most of the original musical numbers from Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, including the iconic “Part Of Your World,” “Under the Sea,” “Kiss the Girl,” and “Poor Unfortunate Souls,” along with new songs co-written by Menken and Lin-Manuel Miranda.

On Twitter, Michael Cook shared a snippet of the making of the “Under the Sea” sequence from The Little Mermaid. The snippet shows Bailey sitting atop a person entirely covered in a greenscreen suit who crawls across the floor to simulate her being carried through the ocean. Next to her is a small figurine of a crab simulating Sebastian, who is also on top of a crawling human, with four other crawling figures around them. This has prompted numerous silly reactions. Check out the original post and select responses below:

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How Much Of The Little Mermaid Is Live-Action?

While the widely used term for Disney’s slate of reboot titles is “live-action remakes,” that is not always the case. For instance, 2019’s The Lion King is an entirely CG-animated movie despite being photorealistic. The 2016 The Jungle Book is a similar case, with most of the environments around Neel Sethi’s Mowgli being provided by CGI.

The Little Mermaid remake is about half-and-half. This behind-the-scenes glimpse reveals just how much of Ariel’s underwater environment is fabricated by computers. Considering the fact that her surroundings, animal companions, and at least half of her own body are replaced with computer renderings, it’s safe to assume that the bulk of the underwater sequences are almost entirely computer-generated.

However, once Ariel gets on land and explores the human world, as well as her relationship with Prince Eric (Jonah Hauer-King), that’s when the shots largely become live-action. Computers were still likely used heavily in the rendering of background production design, but at the very least, the humans and costumes onscreen are real and tactile. While this behind-the-scenes glimpse into The Little Mermaid can be quite silly, the way it is transformed by the time it reaches the screen offers interesting insight into just how much on screen is actually real at any given time.

Source: Various (see above)