Hypothesis: best way to adapt animated musicals into rides is to focus on one key element and one key song and restrict yourself to telling the story with that framework more or less. Tbh this is probably the best approach when adapting any piece of media, but especially musicals.
7 Dwarves Mine Train (Heigh Ho, mining)
Peter Pan (You can Fly, Flying pirate ship)
Mr. Toad (merrily on our way, crazy taxi)
It was at this moment she realized just how few animated musicals have been turned into rides. Sorry for the mr. toad stretch.
Not to say that the retell the story thing can't work. Tbh frozen and Alice manage to do it pretty well. But as I pointed out in the mermaid essay, the whole purpose of songs in musicals is to elongate time and story beats. They take something that would last 10-15 seconds in real life and turn it into a 5 minute number. But most rides are at best 5 minutes long. And so if you want to feature a half dozen songs in your ride to relive all the moments, you're stuck with like 45 seconds at most per song and tbh probably less than that. It's hard to make anything that actually feels cohesive with that pace.
But if you only focus on one song (maybe two) and use that to tell your story then you actually have ample time to marinate in the mood. I've said this before but rides and songs are actually VERY closely related to each other. They're similar lengths and tell stories in ways that are predominately visceral and emotional. One of the best ways to create a ride is to focus on the one emotion it represents and a journey through that emotion.
So what does Peter Pan do? It uses the you can fly song and does theme and variations on it while focusing on the experience of flight and tells the entire story from that lens. Same for mine train.
All this is to say on the ask that was going around a while ago, that I think the best way to adapt the little mermaid into an attraction would probably be to make it entirely based on under the sea or entirely based on part of your world. Maybe at most use part of your world as bookends on under the sea.
And with all the fuss about encanto being prime fodder for a ride I would offer the same advice. Casita, a magical house, is the biggest character in the film. Tour the house and the family solely through the lens of one or two songs and desperately avoid the temptation to dive too deep into the plot.