Here's the full Empire UK article from the magazine's latest issue. Among other things, it confirms there'll only be three new songs in the movie and not four as previously reported.
Giving Ariel a new voice
Rob Marshall on helping The Little Mermaid swim into the modern day
If there’s a prevailing myth about The Little Mermaid’s Ariel, it’s this: she has gone down, rightly or wrongly, as the Disney Princess who quite literally gave up her voice to be with a man she’d barely met. In its most simplistic form this might be true — nary a word has our mermaid hero uttered to the handsome Eric before she signs a monkey’s-paw pact with sea-witch Ursula, swaps her flipper for legs, and totters ashore to find him.
But that was never the whole story for this character, who, even before encountering Eric, long dreamed of leaving her life under the sea behind to — quite literally — step into a whole new world (wait, different Disney film). “A lot of people forget how modern she was, especially at that time in 1989,” says Rob Marshall, the director tasked with delivering a 21st-century Ariel in Disney’s upcoming live-action Little Mermaid remake. He believes that her headstrong nature is timeless. “The power that she has inside is something that leads her to build a bridge with this other world. That contemporary theme has always felt like an antidote to the divisions we feel today in the world, and a reminder that we’re all one.”
For any avoidance of doubt, though, the trajectory of Ariel 2.0 is set to be a little different. “With our filming we’ve been able to expand upon that. She doesn’t give up her voice for a guy — that’s something that was sort of baked into that original,” Marshall explains. “That’s not how we play it in our film. She wants so desperately to be part of this other world and wants to prove — to her father and to everyone — that there’s nothing wrong with [the people there].”
In this case, ‘she’ is Halle Bailey — the astonishingly gifted singer (one half, alongside her sister, of R&B pop duo Chloe x Halle) who leapt to the top of Marshall’s list when casting a Disney icon in the flesh. “It’s that funny thing with Ariel — you need someone who has a lot of fire and strength and power. At the same time, there has to be an innocence too — that she’s a girl, she makes these rash decisions,” says the director. “There was an innocence and a purity to [Halle] as well as having fire. It was this strange combination. And, of course, this magnificent voice.”
That voice, this time, won’t just be belting out ‘Part Of Your World’. Ariel gets one of three new songs, penned by Alan Menken and Lin- Manuel Miranda, with a tune titled ‘For The First Time’. “It’s about her experiences the moment she hits land,” reveals Marshall. “We needed to create a number that could almost work as a montage, so we could take her through that experience — coming onto the land, what it’s like to put on shoes, have legs.” He describes the moment as stangely relatable. “Anybody who has a different experience, it’s wondrous and scary at the same time.” Three decades later, Ariel is ready once again to take a big, bold step into the future with those brand-new legs. BEN TRAVIS
Ursula is late '60s, early '70s at least. Back then, WDAS actually cast a person based on how they fit the character rather than changing the character to fit the voice actor like they have since Lasseter came on the scene. 
In the animated movie, I always had the vibe that she was long past her glory days, and the loads of make up added to that(as if was trying to hide the ugliness).
