The Best Disney Remake of the Year Is an Anime ‘Little Mermaid’ Retelling

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After years where they essentially felt like a foolproof method of printing money, lately it’s appeared that the Disney live-action remake machine has rusted over. The incredibly unnecessary redo of “Moana,” released earlier this month, bombed at the box office, grossing only $43 million in its debut weekend. Its failure — which ugly trailers and a mere ten-year gap between source material and adaptation probably helped contribute to — follows a mixed 2025 for these remakes, where “Lilo & Stitch” hit it big but a discourse-cursed “Snow White” flopped hard. Naturally, Disney has responded to the failures of its live-action branch by…cutting hundreds of jobs from Pixar (coming off two successful films in “Toy Story 5” and “Hoppers”) in their latest round of corporate streamlining.

There are a lot of reasons why Disney’s adaptations of the company’s most beloved animated classics have long felt like the cinematic equivalent of rotted leftovers. There’s something inherently insidious in its insistence on telling the same story as their originals, as if these movies are elevated when they’re produced in live-action or photorealistic CGI instead of the original animation style kids first fell in love with. But even more insultingly, they’re just lazy: they coast on nostalgia and throwbacks to the original instead of justifying themselves as standalone films in and of themselves.

The thing is, it doesn’t have to be this way. Disney made its name on the back of fairy and folktales, retelling centuries-old stories and giving them a fresh new spin for modern audiences. These stories might now be popularly associated with the company’s versions — not a lot of people are going to remember that the original “Aladdin” is set in ancient China — but they’re inherently malleable and adaptable, able to be spun in bold new directions. Disney doesn’t necessarily need to be making these remakes dark and gritty — nobody’s expecting “The Ugly Stepsister” from this company — but there are ways for them to take stories they already adapted and make them feel new, refreshing, and surprising.

I thought a lot about the Disney remakes while watching “Goodbye, Lara,” a new anime series retelling of Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Little Mermaid.” Produced by the studio Kinema Citrus to celebrate the company’s 15th anniversary, the show is one of the rare anime with no (direct) source material from the manga world. Just three episodes into its run, there’s no telling where the plot, which is only just evolving, is headed. But from the little taste so far, the show is a pure delight: a series that threads a line between providing a wonderful shot of nostalgia and lighthearted fairy tale storytelling while still challenging our preconceptions of this classic story.

“Goodbye, Lara” begins in similar fashion to the foundational 1989 Disney animated film version of Anderson’s story, one of the most iconic fairy tales ever written. We’re introduced, in a kingdom under the seas ruled by merpeople, to an idealistic and sweet-hearted redheaded mermaid princess fascinated by the human world; in this version, Lara. But pretty quickly, the first episode zigs where we expect it to zag. The bulk of the original tale — Lara’s encounter with her sea witch aunt Grace, her emergence into the world of humans, her romance with a dashing prince — is sped through in the show’s first 15 minutes. And unlike Disney’s “The Little Mermaid,” it keeps the painfully bitter ending of the original, with Lara’s prince turning on her as she melts into sea foam.

From there, “Goodbye, Lara” veers into a completely original direction. From her death, Lara awakens in her home, finding that it has fallen to ruins as a result of her actions, with the merpeople placed in a deep sleep for centuries. Receiving one last chance from Grace to grow from her mistakes, she’s sent to modern-day Ōtsu in Japan as a human, with the instructions that if she can fall in love again she can save her people.

Where Disney’s live action remakes’ attempts at nostalgia bait often wind up looking wildly ugly in their translation from animation to CGI — something the company’s own redux of “The Little Mermaid,” with its computer sea creatures and murky waters, wasn’t exempt from — “Goodbye, Lara” is gloriously beautiful and instantly appealing from the very first frame.

Directed by Takushi Koide, the series models its art style after anime from the early ’90s, its characters designed with shiny wide eyes, expressive round faces, thick inking, and warm, simple coloring. Most of the series is still digitally made, but its opening sequence is cel-animated for a vibrant, hand-crafted effect. For a series that’s consciously a throwback and a modern-day fairy tale, it creates a warm feeling of familiarity, and it helps that the characters are also just quite appealing — Lara especially, with her long red hair and fin-shaped ears.

But “Goodbye, Lara” doesn’t just coast on vibes; it uses the framework of “The Little Mermaid” to tell its own story on its own terms, setting its characters up for a journey of self-discovery and coming-of-age that in its early going is already proving to be quite moving. Lara is a sweet and relatable protagonist, and her firm dedication to picking herself up and trying to pave her own life after heartbreak is a strong hook to propel the rest of the story forward. Already, the show is complicating our ideas about what the ending of this familiar tale looks like — characters like Grace the Sea Witch, initially presented as a one-dimensional villain, gain new shades over the course of the first few episodes, where she emerges in the present as a goldfish offering guidance towards Lara, who is slowly adjusting to this strange new modern landscape.

Perhaps most boldly, “Goodbye, Lara” seems to be building towards the question of whether the princess’ true love has to be a man. In the present, Lara meets Mari, a sarcastic and blunt high school tomboy who competes as a boxer. Their first encounter, where Mari punches the confused girl unconscious, is not exactly love at first sight, but pretty quickly she begrudgingly gives Lara a place to stay and starts developing a soft spot for her innocent nature. Barring a disastrous plot turn in later episodes, it’s pretty clear to see what the show is teasing between the two.

Looking at the Disney remakes’ own very mixed history with gayness, “Goodbye, Lara” and its apparent slow build toward a lesbian love story would only be more refreshing, foregrounding those elements and truly weaving them into the tale rather than just lightly sprinkling queerness in as an aesthetic. It’s also a tack that’s very appropriate to take for “The Little Mermaid,” which was written by the queer Anderson and has been interpreted by some scholars as an allegory for unrequited same sex love. That’s just a piece with what the show so far is doing best, and what Disney remakes could be doing more of, making something spiritually true, but also boldly new, out of a story everyone remembers.

“Goodbye, Lara” streams on Crunchyroll, with new episodes premiering every Monday.