On The Little Mermaid DVD's making-of featurette, co-writers/co-directors Ron Clements and Jon Musker recall a statement one of Disney's corporate gatekeepers made in the early '80s: "We may bore you, but we will never shock you." That about sums up the state of the company pre-Mermaid. Traditional cel animation was floundering in Hollywood, because the powers that were had no faith that cartoons could be anything more than a specialty item for a shrinking family audience. And though The Little Mermaid was the opening salvo in what would become the Disney animation renaissance, the movie now looks surprisingly cheap. The story—about a mermaid who makes a deal with a witch to win the love of a human prince—is thin and under-imagined, the characters are over-rounded and cutesy, and the images don't have much depth.
