All things girlie …. 

Life is a little crazy when you have all girls. I always pictured myself with the quintessential 2.5 kids – one boy and one girl. Instead, God decided to bless me with three very unique and very independent girls. My life is filled with bows, makeup, dress up, princesses, mermaids, and unicorns. But it is also filled with Baseball, art projects, cochlear implants, doctors appointments, wrestling, and the ministry. 

One of our favorite past times as a family of 5 is to go to the movies. It actually goes back way further than us having kids and needing something to do on a super hot summer afternoon or a rainy saturday night when the kids were driving us nuts (you know what I’m talking about). My husband and I met at Valley Forge Christian College. Now, as I’m sure you could imagine – there was not a whole lot to do on campus, especially for those dating. So the movie theater was it – we would go every weekend to see a different movie. It became a part of us and a part of what we love to share with our girls. We are movie freaks, there i said it. 

One of the “series” if you will that I am going to start here is our family movie nights! We have 2 Disney trips coming up – one in July and one in September – and i will be sharing all of the fun that we do when counting down for Disney trips! 

But i digress, let’s get back to really why we are here. We love movies. We love Disney. We love princesses. We love it all. My oldest, N, is about to be 10 years old and her FAVORITE character out of all of Disney is Ariel. So when we heard that the new live action Little Mermaid was being released in theaters on our last day of school we knew exactly what our movie loving family had to do to kick off summer! 

Let’s just say – it was a BIG THUMBS UP from our crew. Now on a level of 101 Dalmatians to Aladdin (Aladdin hands down is our favorite live action remake) I would go ahead and rank Little Mermaid right around Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, and Jungle Book. It didn’t blow Aladdin out of the running, but it was BEAUTIFULLY done. Now, without giving away spoilers if you haven’t seen it yet … are there some questionable differences, sure. But you’re going from 1990’s animation to full on live action and CGI, there’s going to be major differences. 

The song that Prince Eric had was amazing, my husband and i are still singing it over a week later. And as for a rating from my girls aged 5, 7, and 9 – it was an absolute thumbs up to the point my 9 year old wants it to be on Disney+ or readily available for us to buy so she can watch it over and over and over again. Halle really truly felt like Ariel and my 9yr old’s only complaint was that her hair was not red enough (again going from animation to “real life” difference). I have heard complaints that Prince Eric is the “hottest” Disney prince and they did him dirty by casting Jonah Haeur-King … I say pish-posh. For me, he was the exact embodiment of Prince Eric – he was fun loving, carefree, adventurous, curious, and played him amazingly well. (And his looks weren’t terrible either.)

And can we stop for a minute and talk about Melissa McCarthy as Ursula. I mean, hello mama! If you know, you know … Ursula is supposed to be wicked and misunderstood and the hands down true villain and Melissa did exactly that. 

There are so many Easter eggs and nods to the animated film as well that I truly feel like I need to watch the movie maybe 3 more times to even be able to catch everything that I missed the first time just being amazed by the beautiful masterpiece that it was.  

All of this to say, for my family Little Mermaid was an absolute hit and we will definitely be watching it again and again and again. And we cannot wait until July for our trip to Disney World to see Ariel in Hollywood Studios! Kudos, Disney, Kudos. From my 5 we say job well done.