Quit with the babies’ bottoms already! Further, since we are given to understand that mermaids don’t actually have human bottoms, the abundance of them in this cartoon comes across as being not only strange, but unseemly. Babies are precious and all, but enough!
The underwater parade is quite nice, in that formless, plotless, conflictless sense that I’ve already and overly talked about. The idea of the octopuses that walk like elephants is lovely. There’s a climactic whale, and I don’t think he makes much dramatic sense. But he is completely prefiguring Monstro in Pinocchio. Same sneeze and everything. Sometimes you can really see how these films, in addition to being their own delimited commercial selves, were also serving as laboratories for the features that they had started making. You can sure sense a coming change in commercial strategy.