by Daniel Stephens

Created on: January 31, 2009

This labour of love for producer Brian Grazer, who wrote the story for Splash, is quite clearly shown in the very male fantasy of the undeniably beautiful woman coming out of nowhere and telling you she's in love with you. Actually, she comes out of nowhere and has sex with you in a car, a lift, the bedroom and on top of the fridge - is that the male fantasy or is there love in there somewhere? Regardless, it seems quite daring of Disney to take on such a picture - the very company whose production lot busied itself with nothing other than flies at the time, their live-action output continually producing myopic trash for kids such as The Spaceman and King Arthur, The Biscuit Eater, Gus and The Million Dollar Duck. This was a company who needed a hit, but it also needed to infiltrate an adult market that it hadn't been able to entice for several years.

Splash was certainly the movie to do so, but it also proved to be a landmark film in many respects since it gave the world Tom Hanks, as well as the now well-established production outlet Touchstone Pictures (which was to be Disney's new, more mature facet of their production house), and it put Ron Howard on the map as a viable director who clearly had talent. Yet, the film was still a daring move for Disney - a PG movie for starters, and Daryl Hannah was to be topless in the film, but they allowed Howard and Grazer to make the film they wanted to make, seemingly seeing what the film was really about at its core. Because Splash's most endearing quality is in its celebration of fantasy and believing in a dream, that in those things lies an innocence, a sense of adventure, and ultimately fulfilment - the very things Disney knew all about in its heyday, subtly preaching such virtues in a spoon full of sugar that makes the medicine go down.

The film sees Allen Bauer (Tom Hanks) contemplating his life when he wakes up on a beach one morning after drunkenly taking a cab to the coast as a consequence of another lovelorn conversation with his philandering brother Freddie (John Candy). He seemingly can't balance his love life with his commitments at work but after a freak boating accident he is saved by a beautiful woman (Daryl Hannah) who disappears into the sea. Eventually, he meets her again and while she can't speak English, she soon learns by watching television in a shopping mall. Of course, unbeknownst to Allen, this girl who he christens Madison, is a mermaid and she only has a few days to spend with him until she

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