SignificanceThe Little Mermaid is an important film in animation history for many reasons:\n\nIt marked a return to the musical format that made Disney films popular from the 1930s to the 1970s, after a test run with Oliver and Company the year before. It featured seven original songs by composer Alan Menken and lyricist Howard Ashman, who also served as the film\'s producer. \n\nIt had the most special effects for a Disney animated feature since Fantasia was released forty-nine years earlier. Effects animation supervisor Mark Dindal estimated that over a million bubbles were drawn for this film, in additionto the use of other processes such as airbrushing, backlighting, superimposition, and some flat-shaded computer animation. \n\nThe Little Mermaid was a box office success and grossed over $200,000,000 worldwide. \n\nThis film marked the first use of CAPS (Computer Animation Production System) in a Disney feature, seen in the movie\'s final scene. CAPS is a digital ink-and-paint and animation production system that colors the animators\' drawings digitally, as opposed to the traditional animation method of tracing ink and paint onto cels (see Traditional animation). All subsequent 2D animated Disneyfeatures have used CAPS instead of ink-and-paint, with Home on the Range as the last one. \n\nThis film signaled a renaissance in Disney animation; the films were popular and financial successes, causing Disney\'s feature animation department to begin significant expansion, from about 300 artists in 1988 to 2,400 by 1999. In fact, The Little Mermaid was Disney\'s first significant animated success since The Rescuers in 1977. \n\nThe Little Mermaid won the 1990 Academy Award for Original Music Score. \"Kiss the Girl\" and \"Under the Sea\" were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Song; the Oscar went to \"Under the Sea.\" \n\nThe soundtrack, riding high on the heels of the film\'s popularity and the Academy, Golden Globes and Grammy Awards, went triple platinum, an unheard-of feat for an animated movie at the time. \n\nAllegations of Sexual Innuendo\n\nIn the film, King Triton lives in a castle of gold, along with his daughters. The castle is displayed in the artwork for the cover for the VHS cassette when the film was first released on video. Close examination of the artwork, as well as the film, shows an oddly shaped structure on the castle, closely resembling a penis. Many have alleged the remarkable artwork to have been an intentional act by a disgruntled animator. However, Disney, and the actual person who designed the cover insist it was an accident, resulting from a late night rush job to finish the cover artwork. The questionable object does not appear on the cover of the second releasing of the movie.\n\nThe second allegation is that a clergyman is seen with an erection during a wedding scene, specifically the scene where a brainwashed Prince Eric is about to marry a disguised Sea Witch. The clergyman is a short man, dressed in Bishop\'s clothing, and a small bulge is slightlynoticeable in a few of the frames that may be the stubby-legged man\'s knees, but the image is small and is very difficult to distinguish. The combined incidents led an Arkansas woman to file suit against The Walt Disney Company in 1995, though she dropped her cause two months later.\n\nThe question iscompounded by allegations of sexual innuendo in other Disney movies, including The Lion King, Aladdin, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and Disney\'s 1999 recall of original releases of The Rescuers due to the discovery of two photographs of a nude woman in the background of two frames of the movie. axel, donald, final, goofy, hearts, ii, kingdom, mix, organisation, ps2, riku, roxas, sora, xemnas, xiii