I made a short animation retelling The Little Mermaid. It uses Grouper’s “Alien Observer” as the soundtrack and runs about four minutes. Most of the work was done in After Effects, with vector graphics drawn in Illustrator.
The structure follows a wavelet pattern described in Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode. Each of the four scenes follows the same shape: the mermaid seeks belonging with the prince, fails, then a flying saucer appears offering transcendence. She reaches for it and it vanishes. The pattern repeats with slight variations until the final scene, where the transcendence finally happens—she’s transformed into a saucer herself and flies off alone.
The flying saucers are meant to be the daughters of the air from Andersen’s original tale. The mermaid and prince are simple white silhouettes. For the saucer’s spotlight in the final scene, I used Illustrator’s charcoal brush pattern at half opacity. In the video it glows white while still revealing what’s behind it. The cliffs and mountains were hand-drawn in Illustrator using various brush strokes, colors, and matting techniques.
The waves move via a sine wave expression. Ocean and sky use gradient fills with rough brush strokes overlaid for texture. Most animated elements—water, clouds, the eerie rain in the final scene—use Wave Warp and Turbulent Displace effects. The sea witch’s appendages are just distorted shapes that materialize and reach, using After Effects’ puppet tool. Scene transitions are cuts or fades to black.
