Disney’s 1989 film The Little Mermaid is the 28th entry in the Walt Disney Animated Classics canon. The canon is the studio’s official sequence of feature-length animated films produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios.
The film followed Oliver & Company, released in 1988, and preceded The Rescuers Down Under, released in 1990. Its success is widely associated with the beginning of the Disney Renaissance, a period of commercially and critically successful animated features that continued through the 1990s.
The numbering is sometimes confused with the phrase “Disney Renaissance,” which describes an era rather than a separate film series. The Little Mermaid’s position is 28th in the full canon, regardless of whether it is described as the first Renaissance film or the film that launched the period.