Since Halle's locs were over 24 inches long at the time of filming, Camille ruled against hiding them because "putting her in a wig was going to look crazy." Instead, she turned to another solution: wrapping hair around Halle's natural hair.
How did Halle Bailey do her hair for The Little Mermaid?
So, Helene used four shades (one auburn, one red orange and two shades of blonde) to give Ariel's hair a natural, sun-kissed dimension. The custom extensions were then hand-wrapped around Halle's natural locs and then additional tendril pieces were added to give Ariel's hair that ocean wave effect.
How much was Halle Bailey's hair in Little mermaid?
Halle Bailey's Hair in The Little Mermaid Cost $150,000
The original character was known for her signature long, red hair, and trying to honor that in the re-make while also showcasing Bailey's natural hair and locs was important to the production.
She ultimately used three shades of red to make it the perfect Ariel shade. Friend said because of the amount of color and its length, they "probably spent at least $150,000," because they "had to redo it and take it out."
Each shot was body tracked and then animated over the top. Everything from the clavicle down became CG, and of course digital hair was added to every actor as well as the animated body. There are a lot of very long shots in the film, many 30 seconds-plus, so often we'd use multiple live-action takes for one shot.
Real mermaids, died this morning in South Sulawesi Indonesian
Was Halle Bailey's tail CGI?
This wasn't the final product that we see in the movie, though, and Bailey didn't actually wear the tail for any of the scenes that took place entirely underwater. Instead, Bailey wore a motion-capture suit while filming and the movie's visual effects team later used CGI to digitally edit the tail onto her body.
The team behind The Little Mermaid also used nautical footage as inspiration to create the ocean scenery. In order to ensure that the actors looked like they were floating in the water, the crew used a technique known as "wet-to-dry". This involved a series of rigs, wires, tuning forks, and seesaws.
One theory is that each of Ariel's sisters represents different oceans that are home to various cultures and ethnicities. It's pretty problematic to have mermaids who all look the same representing such an expansive underwater world.
Camille Friend — the Oscar-nominated hair stylist who is best known for her work on Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Us, The Help, and more — is the visionary behind Halle Bailey's custom red locs in the live-action remake of The Little Mermaid.
Rob Marshall, the director of The Little Mermaid, said he cast her as Ariel because she had an “otherworldly sensibility”, and, instantly, you can see what he means.
“[Ariel still] has red hair, because that's a very iconic part of her, but I really did admire the fact that because I'm a Black woman and I have locs, [the producers] wanted to incorporate that into Ariel's look,” she told the outlet.
“I think out of everything, that's the thing that gets under my skin the most when people are comparing us because we are best friends, we're sisters," she said. "Sometimes we forget that we're not twins and it's like, don't mess with my blood.
While Halle keeps Ariel's signature red hair for the film, she decided to keep her natural locs for the role but dyed them a copper colour instead. And she looks so good. “It was super important for me to have my natural hair in this film,” Halley told Ebony magazine.
“I had done a photoshoot for Disney a few years back where Annie Leibowitz shot me as Ursula,” Queen Latifah told “GMA” in an exclusive interview. “So when this popped up, it was like, OK, a TV production. Alright … Once they explained to me the way that they wanted to do it, I thought it was interesting.”
Disney's Ariel is not the same as Anderson's little mermaid. The movie is loosely based on the fairy tale, so Disney has the freedom to give Ariel any skin color they want. In the 1989 movie, Ariel was born in the fictional underwater kingdom of Atlantica, which technically makes her Atlantican, not Danish.
Queen Athena is shown to be a stunningly beautiful and attractive mermaid with long, red hair tied in a partial ponytail, green eyes, and an aqua tail. Of all her daughters, her youngest, Ariel, resembles her the most.
Rather, Ursula's appearance is radically different from her family, and she sports tentacles that look like a permanent black dress. It's possible Ursula is not a mermaid in appearance because she and Triton did not have the same mother or father. If they're half siblings, Ursula's tentacles make more sense.
In this novel, Ursula is King Triton's younger sister who was betrayed by him as a child for choosing a tentacled form instead of a mermaid's tail, and grew up as a human in the town of Ipswich with an adoptive human father.
While it is known that her mother perished, there is no story attached to the event. However, much later, in 2008, an animated The Little Mermaid prequel revealed that Ariel's mother was crushed by a pirate ship during an altercation between humans and merpeople.
In Andersen's fairy tale, the Little Mermaid is described as follows: "her skin was as clear and delicate as a rose-leaf, and her eyes as blue as the deepest sea." And if you're wondering if Andersen's Little Mermaid had that signature bright red hair that has become synonymous with mermaids, the answer is unclear.
