The Little Mermaid: Ariel's Undersea Adventure The Little Mermaid: Ariel's Undersea Adventure The Little Mermaid: Ariel's Undersea Adventure (stylized The Little Mermaid ~ Ariel's Undersea Adventure) is a dark ride attraction based on the 1989 Disney animated film "The Little Mermaid", located in Paradise Gardens Park at Disney California Adventure and in Fantasyland at Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom, where it is titled Under the Sea: Journey of the Little Mermaid (stylized Under the Sea ~ Journey of the Little Mermaid). The ride opened on June 3, 2011 at Disney California Adventure, and on December 6, 2012 at Magic Kingdom. In the early-to-mid-1990s, Walt Disney Imagineering
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