The Little Mermaid (1989) - 45 mistakes

Continuity: When King Triton destroys the stone statue of Prince Eric, you can clearly see that the statue's face explodes and breaks into pieces as well as the rest of the body. However, at the point a few minutes later when Arielle decides to meet the seawitch Ursula, she caresses the statue's face as a whole again.

Continuity: In the beginning when Ariel is watching the sailors dance on the ship the dog comes over and licks her face, but she wipes off the wrong cheek.

Continuity: When the wedding is taking place, the priest's cross turns upside down for one frame.

Continuity: After Eric's wedding, Ariel arrives at the ship without shoes, then she receives her voice back and just before they try to kiss, she's wearing shoes.

Continuity: When Grimsby is presenting the statue of Eric to the prince, one of the crew's shirts changes colour from white/black stripes to blue/black stripes.

Continuity: When Ariel is in the Prince's guest bedroom, the covers suddenly appear over her.

Continuity: When Sebastian is in Ariel's cavern with all her treasures, he accidentally gets his legs caught in a thimble. You can see it from the front, but when they show a shot from the back, it is gone.  In the following shot from the front, it is back on again.

Continuity: Ursula's lipstick disappears from her lips right before she applies it.

Audio problem: When Ariel's sisters are singing in the beginning of the movie the yellowish sister's mouth doesn't move when she says her name.

Continuity: During the "Kiss the Girl" song a bunch of fish swim up underneath the boat, and the water is seen to be very deep. After the boat is knocked over however, Ariel and Eric are standing in the water which now appears to be only a few feet deep.

Continuity: When Eric first washes up on the beach and Ariel is singing to him/stroking his face, she has no fingernails. In the next scene she does.

Continuity: When Eric first washes up on the beach and Ariel is singing to him, she looks to her left when she hears Max barking, but Max and Grim are actually coming from her right.

Continuity: When Sebastian is hiding from the chef under a lettuce leaf in the kitchen, at first he is behind a bunch of stuff on the table. In the next shot, all the stuff is gone, and he's alone on the table.

Continuity: When Ariel is at dinner with Eric and Grimsby, her fingernails are not painted when she picks up the fork, but are painted pink when she puts it down.

Factual error: After Ariel is changed into a human, she swims frantically to the surface for air, and when she comes up she does the magnificent throwing her head back and splashing water everywhere - we've all seen it. But this would mean she would have to actually tilt her head further down in the water before breaking the surface, so she could then throw it back- something that makes no sense for a person who's about to drown, and wants air as soon as possible. Can't have been a "hair in face" problem - her hair was streaming out behind her underwater, so wouldn't have been in the way if she'd broken the surface face first.

Continuity: When Ariel is swimming back home from her treasure collecting trip at the sunken ship, she has her pink bag. Then the eels' eyes merge from watching her to Ursula's bubble globe thing Ariel doesn't have it anymore. Then when the scene switches back, she has it again.

Continuity: When Ariel and Eric kiss during the wedding ceremony, the wedding barque is thronged with people, but when Louis the cook chases Sebastian, the deck is suddenly bare of any and every person, including the happily married couple. Quite a flash-wedding.

Factual error: At the end of the film, when Ursula has Triton's powers, she creates an enormous whirlpool that pulls wrecked ships off the ocean's floor. Prince Eric boards one of the ships that is being swept along with the whirlpool's currents, then turns the rudder hard to steer the ship into Ursula. Not possible - in order for the rudder to change the course of a ship the vessel must be moving faster than the current.

Continuity: In the first scene involving Ursula, the shrimp don't appear in her opened case until she reaches down for one.

Continuity: When Flounder swims through an anchor at the start the anchor has round edges, but when the shark bursts in the anchor has flat edges.

Continuity: When Ariel is singing to herself in the bathroom, she swims to a mirror on the wall and plays with her hair and there's no flower next to the mirror on the wall. But in the next shot there's a flower on the wall which she puts in her hair and then gives to her father.

Continuity: When the crown falls off Triton's head it has eight prongs, instead of the usual five.

Continuity: When Ariel and Eric are in the boat together before their attempt to kiss, Ariel's hair is down. But in their shadows on the water, her hair is in a ponytail.

Continuity: Before her wedding to Eric, Ursula talks to herself in front of a mirror and then steps on the makeup table, cracking a perfume bottle. The problem is that the bottle wasn't on the table on the previous shot.

Continuity: When Ariel is at dinner with Eric and Grimsby, she begins to brush her hair with a fork. The prong number of the fork changes from shot to shot. Sometimes three, sometimes four.

Continuity: When Ursula turns King Triton into a seaweed thing, his crown is a normal crown design. When Ursula then picks it up it has turned into a tiara and stays like that for the rest of the film.

Audio problem: When Eric and Ariel swim to each other, she says, "Eric, you've got to get away from here." He replies, "No, I won't leave you," but his lips don't move. (Regardless of the reason, still a mistake.)

Continuity: When Ariel and Flounder are going into the shipwreck at the start, Ariel goes through the porthole and Flounder follows. In the frame where he gets stuck, his front fins are trapped firmly outside the porthole but in the next shot inside the boat, they appear inside instead of outside.

Continuity: Ariel's hair is the same in just about every scene except one: when Flotsam and Jetsam come into her treasure trove when she's crying, and convince her to see Ursula. Then, the ends of Ariel's hair (even her bangs) take on the same spiky appearance as the eels' fins.

Factual error: When Louis the cook chases Sebastian in the kitchen, Sebastian hides in a cabinet full with plates and bowls which reflect the rabid cook's image. However, in both real and mirror-reversed image, his actual right arm (with the mallet) is raised up high.

Continuity: When Sebastian is arriving at the concert, he gets pulled upside down by his Goldfish. When he flips his shell back over and sits in it again, on his left side he has two legs sticking out... then as he starts moving one of the legs just disappears.

Revealing: When Max and Eric first approach Ariel and she is behind a rock, there are no footprints in the sand.

Other: When Ariel is at the dinner table with Eric and Grimsby, Ariel takes Grimsby's pipe and blows it in his face, yet when he wipes his face there isn't any black stuff on his hankie.

Deliberate "mistake": While trying to rescue Ariel at the end of the movie, Eric harpoons Ursula's arm, leaving a black cut. But in the following shots of Ursula, the cut is gone. (Due to Disney's practice in not leaving injuries onscreen).

Deliberate "mistake": When Eric's ship blows up, his statue bobs up and down. A statue this weight would not be able to bob up and down for even a second. It would just sink straight to the bottom.

Continuity: In the scene when Ariel saves Eric after the ship has exploded he has boots on yet when Ariel has brought him up onto shore they are off, they couldn't have fallen off since they in that time period men wore boots that have to be taken off to at least to the heal and Ariel is tying to save him so she wouldn't take the time to get them off, and leather tends to tighten up when thoroughly soaked so that is another factor to why they shouldn't have come off this also happens at the end of the film after Ursula has been killed.

Continuity: After Scuttle takes the fork to his feathers his feathers are all puffy but then a few frames later they are suddenly back to normal without him doing anything.

Continuity: In the scene when Vanessa gets covered in starfish, she then is bounced up and down by a seal, the star fish are gone.

Continuity: When Ariel goes to the surface to show Scuttle the fork, he first sees her through the telescope (which is the wrong way round). When you see Ariel through the telescope, she appears to be surrounded by the sea but when Scuttle takes away the telescope she is close up and right next to the rock he is on. Surely the rock would have seen through the telescope underneath Ariel not ocean.

Continuity: During the hurricane, Eric's ship is tossed violently around on the waves. But when Ariel is thrown back into the water and the ship is seen from below, it's barely moving at all.

Revealing: When Ariel turns into a human for good at the end, Eric kisses her and then they are shown at their wedding. The last shot of the movie is the same shot as this one.

Continuity: When Ariel is trying to escape from the shark in the sunken ruin, she dashes out of a porthole without her bag of treasures. Then as she swims away, the bag is suddenly in her hands again.

Continuity: When Ariel and Flounder first come to Scuttle, he drops an anchor and falls below. When he does this, a few feathers fall out of him. But the feathers never land.

Continuity: During "Kiss the Girl", Ariel is wearing a large bow in her hair. It disappears at one point when the shot shows her and Eric's silhouettes on the water.

Audio problem: In the beginning, when Flounder and Ariel are exploring the sunken ship, the ceiling caves in on Flounder. He swims toward Ariel and yells her name but his mouth is closed.