Disney’s New Live-Action The Little Mermaid Is Just a Corrective for Past ‘Mistakes’ - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Disney’s New Live-Action The Little Mermaid Is Just a Corrective for Past ‘Mistakes’
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The new live-action remake of The Little Mermaid is just the latest stop on Disney’s apology tour. We’re sorry, they’re trying to tell us, for all the horribly offensive things we said in your childhood. Please pay us a boatload of money so we can show you how wrong we were.

But what exactly are they apologizing for? The original Little Mermaid film came out in 1989 to universal acclaim. Roger Ebert called Ariel “a fully realized female character who thinks and acts independently, even rebelliously, instead of hanging around passively while the fates decide her destiny.” Janet Maslin of the New York Times gushed that Ariel was “a spunky, flirty little nymph,” while Kathleen Carroll of the New York Daily News approvingly dubbed her “a rebellious redhead.” Here, these critics were saying, was a Disney princess for the modern age. A feminist princess. (READ MORE: The Diplomat: A Tense, Turgid Talkfest)

But a lot has changed since 1989. These days, it’s a truth universally acknowledged that the original Little Mermaid was horribly anti-feminist. And most people will give you the same three reasons if you ask them why. First, Ariel becomes human just to be a with a man she met minutes before. Second, in order to do this, she gives up her voice. So that, third, she can use her body to win her man.

These views entered the modern consciousness in the years between 1989 and now via feminist critics who decided that this movie didn’t fit with their own personal philosophy. “She morphs herself into a human at the age of 16 to go be with some dude she saw on a boat?” asked Sarah Bregel incredulously in 2012. Ariel “gives up her special voice,” wrote Hilary Sheinbaum, also in 2012. The Little Mermaid is about a girl who has to “get a pair of legs so that she can snare a man,” wrote Chloe Angyal in 2013.

This new Little Mermaid is essentially the sort of correction they run in a newspaper the following morning when they’ve gotten a fact wrong or spoken out of turn. Except it’s over two hours long, 34 years too late, and was obviously shot in front of a green screen. Additionally — and more importantly — the feminist critics were (and always have been) wrong, and the changes Disney made actually make everything worse.

In order to counteract the fact that Ariel allegedly becomes human to get with a guy she just met, this new Mermaid makes Ariel (Halle Bailey) intensely interested in human stuff rather than humans themselves. In the 1989 version, Ariel loves the stuff because she’s obsessed with the human world and humans themselves. In this version, Ariel has never even been to the surface, she just swims around collecting human artifacts she finds in shipwrecks. She doesn’t seem at all interested in humans — a notion that is solidified when she finds herself in Eric’s castle and finds Eric’s own collection of random stuff (he’s a hoarder too apparently) and is captivated. Making a deal with a dangerous sea witch for stuff is apparently much more feminist than doing it to be with the man you love.

Worse, to correct for the fact that Ariel gives up her voice, this version makes Ariel’s voice an actual siren song. (You know, the thing that lures sailors to their deaths.) What the critics have never understood is that, in the original, Ariel’s voice is a metaphor. It’s a symbol for her true self — the essence of her. That’s why Ursula, the sea witch, has to take it away. Without her inner core, Ariel doesn’t succeed in making Eric fall for her in the three-day window. It’s only when her “voice” is returned that he knows her for his true love.

But this new film takes Ariel’s voice literally. It implies that Eric’s love for Ariel derives from the fact that her voice has magical powers. Now, Ariel is basically entrapping Eric (Jonah Hauer-King) in just the same way as when Ursula uses Ariel’s voice to put a spell on Eric near the end of the movie so he’ll marry her instead of Ariel. Do Eric and Ariel actually love each other in this version? If their onscreen chemistry is any indication, I’d have to say no. Also, Eric has basically been hypnotized by Ariel’s magic voice (rather than falling for her true self) and Ariel’s only into the guy’s artifact collection. So, yes, much better, thank you for “fixing” that.

The most concerning issue for Disney was clearly the notion that Ariel has to use her body to win Eric — and that Eric therefore has license to just “kiss the girl” whenever and however he wants. To solve this problem, Disney changed some lyrics to the song “Kiss The Girl” to combat the fact that “people have gotten very sensitive about the idea that [Prince Eric] would, in any way, force himself on [Ariel].” They also cut an entire verse from Ursula’s villain song “Poor Unfortunate Souls” (including the iconic line “And don’t underestimate the importance of body language”) to remove all trace of the idea that Ariel is now left with only her body with which to seduce her man. Inexplicably, they also make it so Ariel now forgets entirely that she has to kiss Eric as part of the bargain she made with Ursula (Melissa McCarthy). All this leaves Ariel with less agency, not more. Robbed of any purpose or mission, she basically spends the last third of the movie wandering around Eric’s castle picking up knick-knacks and wondering what on earth she’s doing there.

What’s left is a soulless, humorless slog from one beat of the original narrative to the next as Disney doggedly and obviously follows along behind trying to pander to the (incorrect) criticisms that have grown up around this movie since its original release. Sorry Disney, we don’t want to be part of that world.

Faith Moore is a freelance writer and editor, and a stay-at-home mom. She has been published in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Daily News, The Federalist, and The Daily Wire, among others. She is the author of Saving Cinderella: What Feminists Get Wrong About Disney Princesses And How To Set It Right, which is available on Amazon.

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