The Little Mermaid (franchise) a meet and greet characters. Ariel appears in "Sofia the First: The Floating Palace", a television special that was aired as part of the series "Sofia the First" and released on Region 1 DVD on November 24, 2013. Disney Comics released a four-issue "The Little Mermaid Limited Series" comic series and two issues of "Sebastian from The Little Mermaid" comics in 1992. Marvel Comics released its own title, "Disney's The Little Mermaid" in 1994, which ran for twelve issues. All the comics are prequels to the film, and feature Ariel still a mermaid living under the sea. A series of
The Little Mermaid (1989 film) shots failed because the machine was reputedly in dilapidated condition. The multiplane shots were instead photographed at an outside animation camera facility. "The Little Mermaid" was the last Disney feature film to use the traditional hand-painted cel method of animation. Disney's next film, "The Rescuers Down Under", used a digital method of coloring and combining scanned drawings developed for Disney by Pixar called CAPS/ink & paint (Computer Animation Production System), which would eliminate the need for cels, the multiplane camera, and many of the optical effects used for the last time in "Mermaid". A CAPS/ink & paint prototype was used