‘The Little Mermaid’ | Anatomy of a scene

Hello, my name is Rob Marshall and I am the director of “The Little Mermaid”. So that’s about two minutes into the musical number “Under the Sea” which was the hardest musical number I’ve ever created because you have a live actor – I mean, it’s Ariel , played by Halle Bailey. And introducing dance into a sequence is so complicated because it has to flow. It should feel organic. He cannot feel applied. So right here, as the turtles start moving, then you see, OK, there’s a bit of dancing starting to happen. The tricky part about it was that I only had one live actor, I needed dancers or something to work with. And I took a page from Walt Disney’s playbook, and I worked with the Alvin Ailey Company. He had worked with the Compagnie Ballet Russe when he created “Fantasia”. And I thought that was a brilliant idea. So I worked with the Alvin Ailey company, I brought them to London so we could create all these sea creature movements on something so that our artists, our CGI artists, could use them as a model, which was amazing . And then we found all these sea creatures that naturally lent themselves to dancing. They are all real sea creatures. So there you have mimic octopuses and flatworms. Here we enter a bioluminescent world. We had the Alvin Ailey company using umbrellas and literally ribbons, streamers hanging from them so they could literally create this jellyfish idea. But all of this, every moment was choreographed. And it was so complicated because everything was done on accounts. It wasn’t like, well, let them do whatever they want. Every moment was strategically choreographed by myself, John DeLuca and our choreographers. [‘UNDER THE SEA’]: — music for me. The music is for me – There’s a moment that happens here right here – [‘UNDER THE SEA’]:-hot crustacean bunch–that, quite literally, the CGI artist said was the most creatures they’ve ever had on screen. But it was really about protecting and celebrating this beautiful number. Here is a nautilus shell that we tried to create at Busby Berkeley. But I really wanted to make sure that we did justice to this incredible number, but also that we brought a photorealistic and exciting world to life.