Video: ‘The Little Mermaid’ | Anatomy of a Scene

Hi, I’m Rob Marshall, and I’m the director of ‘The Little Mermaid.’ So that is about two minutes into the musical quantity ‘Under the Sea,’ which was essentially the most difficult musical quantity I’ve ever created as a result of you might have one reside actor — I imply, there she is Ariel, performed by Halle Bailey. And introducing dance right into a sequence is so difficult as a result of it has to really feel seamless. It has to really feel natural. It can’t really feel utilized. So proper about right here, because the turtles begin to transfer, then you definately see, O.Ok., there’s a bit of little bit of dance beginning to occur. The difficult half about this was as a result of I solely had one reside actor, I wanted some dancers or one thing to work from. And I took a web page out of Walt Disney’s playbook, and I labored with the Alvin Ailey Company. He had labored with the Ballet Russe Company when he created ‘Fantasia.’ And I believed that was such an excellent concept. So I labored with the Alvin Ailey Company, introduced them to London so we may create all these sea creature strikes on one thing so our artists, our CGI artists, may really use them as a template, which was unbelievable. And then we discovered all these sea creatures that truly lent themselves to bounce naturally. These are all actual sea creatures. So proper there you might have mimic octopus and flatworms. Here we’re transferring right into a bioluminescent world. We had the Alvin Ailey Company utilizing umbrellas and, actually, ribbons, streamers hanging from them in order that they may actually create this concept of jellyfish. But all of this, each second of this was choreographed. And it was so difficult as a result of the whole lot was executed on counts. It wasn’t kind of identical to, nicely, let’s simply allow them to do no matter they need. Every second of it was strategically choreographed on my own, John DeLuca, and our choreographers. [‘UNDER THE SEA’]: — music to me. Music is to me — There’s one second really developing right here proper right here — [‘UNDER THE SEA’]: — sizzling crustacean band — — that, actually, the CGI artist mentioned it’s essentially the most creatures they’ve ever had ever onscreen. But it was actually about defending and celebrating this lovely quantity. Here’s a nautilus shell that we tried to create a la Busby Berkeley. But I actually simply wished to be sure that we have been doing justice to this unbelievable quantity but in addition bringing a photoreal, thrilling world to life.