Anyone else think this is better than The Lion King?

If it weren't Disney's best movie, it would not have succeeded in actually ending the string of commercial and critical bombs in the box office (and in fact, if anything, it would have been remembered as the film that KILLED Disney). It's not like they haven't done other films before The Little Mermaid. They tried Black Cauldron, that bombed (and Katzenberg's edits certainly didn't help it get out of being a bomb either and if anything is what ensured it became a bomb), Robin Hood, which actually was unique in not only having the cast be animals, but actually HAVING Prince John himself be the direct main antagonist (in most stories, he's the bigger bad, while the direct antagonist was usually the Sheriff of Nottingham), and THAT not only ended up bombing, but also was particularly infamous for reusing a LOT of animation. The closest to a major box office and critical success Disney had prior to TLM was Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and even THAT was at best a joint venture, not something purely Disney.

And of course The Little Mermaid was judged by and based on its own merits. How else would it have managed to be a huge box office success ESPECIALLY after a long string of failures? Because people judged it by its merits.

And while I am particularly fond of TLM because it being my first movie barring The Hunt for Red October, my defense of The Little Mermaid and praise for it as well as my agreeing with Eko that BatB only got its praise because of The Little Mermaid's success has absolutely NOTHING to do with whether I envy BatB for overshadowing The Little Mermaid (heck, I don't even need to worry about it overshadowing TLM, because if anything, TLM overshadows it based on the massive amount of sales it generates without even needing the Disney Princess label). Even if I utterly hated The Little Mermaid or ANY Disney film or even ANY films in general, I still would have agreed with Eko on that front, and let's face it, Belle's design was actually derived from the same source as Ariel's, and even Maurice shared similar features to King Triton (namely the gray eyebrows and white hair with facial hair).

EDIT: I might as well add something else: When the writer of a film when trying to prop her main protagonist up does so by belittling her predecessors like claiming that, unlike Belle, they only had marriage and love as her goal, or outright lied about them even such was especially the case with Ariel (like when she claimed Ariel only gave up her voice and family for a man she just met, even when the film more than made clear that she already wanted to experience humanity long before she even knew Eric existed, let alone met him, and if anything, all Eric did was give her a nudge in the right direction), it's pretty clear the writer lost the argument regarding whether the character she wrote was even remotely good. And quite frankly, I still say it was a mistake to rewrite BatB to push a Simone de Beauvoir-esque feminist moral that had absolutely nothing to do with the intended moral of the tale. It's about as bad as the Maleficent film in that respect.