The Little Mermaid Was Right To Exclude 1 Song From The Live-Action Remake

Warning! SPOILERS about The Little Mermaid ahead.

2023’s The Little Mermaid cutting one popular song from the original Disney classic makes sense for the remake, despite the tune’s distinct style and memorable inclusion in the animated movie. When The Little Mermaid was released in 1989, the film earned praise both for the animation and the songs. The music eventually earned three Academy Awards nominations for the 1989 animated feature, successfully launching the period that would ultimately be known as the Disney Renaissance. Though The Little Mermaid live-action remake made changes, it kept all but two of the songs that made the original animated movie widely beloved.

The reasoning behind 2023’s The Little Mermaid cutting “Les Poissons” cited the music number’s comedic nature, making it a “Saturday morning cartoon section,” according to director Rob Marshall. While that style worked within the animated movie, providing extreme comic relief fitting for Disney classics, the studio’s live-action iterations have largely moved toward a more realistic approach. Still, with the song humorously showing the perspective of the castle’s Chef Louis in relation to the sea life as food, “Les Poissons” risked clashing with the dramatic tone 2023’s The Little Mermaid employed, especially when it came to the movie’s real villains.

“Les Poissons” Wouldn’t Fit The Little Mermaid 2023’s Realism

With the character of Chef Louis entirely absent from 2023’s The Little Mermaid, his song “Les Poissons” doesn’t have reason to exist in the animated feature live-action remake. Still, even if Disney hadn’t made the decision to cut the character completely from the movie, the musical number would have been difficult to adapt in 2023’s The Little Mermaid. Indeed, while the tone of “Les Poissons” is overall comedic in pitting Sebastian against the bloodthirsty chef, the 2023 movie’s live-action realism couldn’t have treated the brawl similarly. Doing so would have given a dark, substantial fright to Sebastian, seeing that Chef Louis violently attempted to kill him multiple times in the original film.

The entirety of “Les Poissons” highlighted how Chef Louis only saw sea life as food, enumerating multiple recipes while violently and repeatedly gutting fish and stuffing crabs in 1989’s The Little Mermaid. While that would have complemented the picture King Triton painted of humans as cruel, selfish, and dangerous, it would have been slightly too graphic given Sebastian’s importance in Ariel’s story, his realistic portrayal, and how much Ariel – and the audiences – cared for the crab. The gruesomeness of the scene wouldn’t play as comically in 2023’s The Little Mermaid, either clashing with its realism or becoming too horrific if it were adapted realistically.

Related: The Little Mermaid’s New Kiss The Girl Lyrics: What Changed & Why

The Little Mermaid Continues The Live-Action Sanitization Of Disney Classics

While Disney’s live-action remakes of its classics tended to be adapted so faithfully that their purposes were often questioned, the darkness typical of many of the original Disney classics was lost. The Little Mermaid deleting “Les Poissons” from the live-action story confirms this tendency, as the violence in the scene from the original, albeit played off as comedic, mirrors many other classics’ darkness. Whether the disturbing Pleasure Island in Pinocchio, Bambi’s distressing death scene of the titular character’s mother, or even Cruella de Vil’s plan to essentially skin puppies to make a fur in One Hundred and One Dalmatians, Disney’s animated classics didn’t shy away from implying horrific violence.

Live-action remakes like 2017’s Beauty and the Beast, whose villagers storming the castle scene incite laughs more than fear, instead tend to gloss over the darkest, scary scenes from the originals. Even if the reason behind it were the pursuit of a more realistic adaptation, the live-action remakes risk losing what made the classics’ villains truly despicable and fear-inducing, similar to the impacts of the potentially dire consequences of the protagonists’ mistakes in the Disney classics. 2023’s The Little Mermaid maintains this Disney live-action trend by entirely deleting the cruel Chef Louis and “Les Poissons.”