The Little Mermaid (Soyuzmultfilm, 1968)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, September 2) my husband and I watched two half-hour videos on YouTube together. My selection was the latest episode in A Month in the Life, a fascinating series that goes month-to-month to tell the complete history of The Beatles. This one covered April 1965, when The Beatles were moving around Europe and also hanging out at Twickenham Studios in England (where they infamously began the Let It Be project four years later) filming what came to be known as Help!, and John Lennon wrote the title song. In one of his last interviews Lennon said he’d written that song literally as a cry for help, and later Paul McCartney said that he’d never realized at the time that that’s what John meant by those words. Charles’s choice was an unexpectedly fascinating half-hour short version of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid made in 1968 in the Soviet Union (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8n6qlEc4gc) by director Ivan Aksenchuk. It begins with a framing story by writer Aleksandr Galich that is set in modern times; a tour bus is traveling through an unnamed city when it passes a statue of a mermaid, and the tour guide (Anatoliy Papanov) explains that this is the titular Little Mermaid of Andersen’s tale, and proceeds to narrate it. It’s a surprisingly grim and downbeat story of a little mermaid (Nina Gulyaeva) who dreams of the world above the sea and ultimately encounters a prince (Vladimir Troshin) whose ship has been wrecked at sea. The little mermaid instantly falls in love with him and sings him a song (which I had guessed was poached from a Russian opera but was actually written especially for the film by its composer, Aleksandr Lokshin, with lyrics by writer Galich) that instantly brings him back to life and causes him to fall in love with her, too. The mermaid contacts a sea witch (Yuliya Yulskaya) for a potion that will change her mermaid’s fins into human-style legs so she can live and move about on the surface, but the witch warns her that not only will the legs hurt her every time she uses them, but as a price for the potion she will take the mermaid’s voice and render her mute. Once she undergoes the transformation and seeks out the prince, he’s affectionate towards her but treats her more as a sister than a lover.

When the prince is required as a matter of state to marry the princess from a nearby kingdom (Roza Makagonova), he mistakes her for the mysterious creature who saved his life, especially when he once again hears the song associated with his rescue. The mermaids’ sisters give her a sort of bomb (in Andersen’s original it was a knife) and says she must set it off to kill both the prince and his new bride so she can regain her mermaid form and return to the sea. (In Andersen’s tale she only had to kill the prince.) If she doesn’t use it by sunrise, she will instantly die and become sea foam. Alas, the little mermaid can’t bear to see the prince die and so she doesn’t use the bomb; instead she disintegrates into sea foam. There’s some confusion as to how the original story ends; a number of YouTube commenters said in the story she’s allowed to live for 300 more years (the normal life span of a mermaid, Andersen tells us) and then at the end of that time she will gain an immortal soul and be able to ascend to heaven like a human. Others said that was a happy cop-out added later at the insistence of Andersen’s original publisher and the utterly tragic ending of Aksenchuk’s and Galich’s movie was the one Andersen originally wanted. (Apparently manuscripts survive in Andersen’s handwriting with both versions.) The opening scenes reminded Charles of the cartoons Terry Gilliam used to do for Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and it’s well known that Gilliam was profoundly influenced by Eastern European animation (it was seeing Czech filmmaker Karel Zeman’s 1962 part-animation, part-live action film The Fabulous Baron Münchhausen that inspired him to make his own disastrous version in 1988). Once we get into the story of the Little Mermaid proper we get rich, vivid colors of well-designed animated characters. I hadn’t either read The Little Mermaid or seen another film at least nominally based on it (including the 1989 Walt Disney animated version, which has an even sappier “happy ending” than the one Andersen’s original publisher forced on him in which the mermaid and the prince get together after the sea witch, named Ursula in the Disney version, is speared to death by the bowsprit of a wrecked ship), though this afternoon I downloaded Andersen’s story (with the “she has to wait 300 years but gets a soul at last” ending), and so the events of this story were genuinely surprising to me. I hadn’t really wanted to watch The Little Mermaid last night but I was quite charmed by it (thank you, Charles!) and it was a nice enough enchantment that made a quite lovely nightcap.