Bright Young Women: The Legacy of Ariel and The Little Mermaid

  I had an experience one summer at a church youth camp that I reflect on quite a bit. We were participating in a “Family Feud” style game between companies, and the question was on favorite Disney movies as voted on by participants in our camp. (No one asked for my input on this question. Yes, this still burns me.) I think the top spot was either for Tangled or The Lion King, but what struck me was that when someone proposed the answer of “The Little Mermaid,” the score revealed that not a single participant had listed it as their favorite Disney film.  

            On the one hand, this doesn’t really surprise me. In all my years of Disney fandom, I’ve observed that The Little Mermaid occupies this this very particular space in pop culture: The Little Mermaid is in a lot of people’s top 5s, but very few people identify it as their absolute favorite Disney film. This film’s immediate successors in the Disney lineup (usually The Lion King or Beauty and the Beast) are the most likely to be credited as the company’s greatest by any given person.

Yet “Mermaid” has just always been the zenith of Disney animation for me. And despite the widely held notion that this film, like all Disney films, was manufactured for a preschool audience, the older I get and, yes, the more developed my film palette becomes, the more I find about this movie that just blows me away.

    When you look at, say, the film’s characters, almost all of its major characters represent a duality of two opposing characterizations, and much of the movie’s success comes down to how it finds the golden means. King Triton, for example, is caught halfway between being a noble ruler and loving father who just wants to keep his daughters and kingdom safe from an unknown entity, and an authoritarian whose grip on his daughter is partly a symptom of his unresolved bigotry. Ursula the Sea Witch—another fine line to be drawn. She has to be fun enough to bring the house down, but we also have to genuinely fear what she could do if she gets what she wants. This is the kind of nuance that critics of the mythology will never look for in the Disney library.

         Then there’s The Little Mermaid herself, Ariel.

You see just how thin the line is for Ariel in how polarized the conversation around her gets--in a way that goes beyond just the internet's fixation on Disney princesses. One side of the internet credits Ariel with ushering in a wave of Disney heroines who were active, even rebellious, while another side asserts that she embodies some of the most anti-feminist ideas put to film. The conversation offline isn’t necessarily kinder to her. I had many friends growing up who were not allowed to watch The Little Mermaid because their parents decided Ariel was a “bad example.” 

    Yet despite this, The Little Mermaid remains one of the hallmark icons of The Walt Disney Company. Even as the ranks of the Disney princess line start to overflow, Ariel is perhaps its most recognizable member (she's in basically every Disneyland parade). Despite being the butt of an ever-growing mound of internet punchlines, new generations of dreamers can't help but be drawn to her and her incandescent spirit. And I have to imagine that this really infuriates her detractors.

So here at the precipice of yet another cultural reevaluation of Disney’s The Little Mermaid, I’m here to again try to correct years of lazy attacks against the Disney mythology and argue that Ariel is not only the best Disney princess, she is a fantastic character in her right, one of my favorites in all of movie-dom. I don’t dare to dream that this essay is really going to turn the tide of the conversation–lovers of the animated film have been thoughtfully countering arguments against her for a long time, and the dialogue hasn’t really shifted. But I’ve also observed that Ariel has weathered this storm just fine for some time now. If all that this essay ends up adding to the conversation is more love for one of my favorite films–a film whose impact is under the surface yet impossible to miss, a film that fundamentally changed the course of not just Disney but animation as a medium–then I suppose I can live with that.

 

“My Favorite Disney Movie”

         I consider The Little Mermaid to be not just my top Disney film, but one of my favorite movies across any genre, brand, or medium. And I honestly think many more people would agree with me on this if they knew how to divorce The Little Mermaid from the ubiquity of The Walt Disney Company. Maybe you’ve heard “Part of Your World” so many times that you’ve forgotten how it’s actually one of the most enchanting assemblages of notes ever put to paper. (I’d recommend seeking out any of the piano covers of the song and just imagine you’re listening to this melody for the first time.) Even acknowledging that Hans Christian Anderson wrote the original fairy-tale back in the 1830s, the story as writ in the Disney film feels like it’s just always been there. Like, there’s an honesty to something like the image of Ariel reaching for the above world through her skylight that far transcends 1989. Perhaps that’s nostalgia talking, but I also had tremendous fondness for Quest for Camelot growing up, yet rewatches of that film as an adult are far less frequent and far less enjoyable, which to me speaks to a qualitative difference between the two films.

         Intrinsic to any conversation about this film is the impact that its success had on the animation studio, and this impact was immediate. For reference, Disney had been developing a feature-film adaptation of Beauty and the Beast around this time, originally envisioned as a dark non-musical film, but following the success of “Mermaid,” the project was refitted to follow that film’s trajectory, even transferring the same songwriting team Alan Menken and Howard Ashman to breathe musical life into the film. This prompted a change in direction in the studio, not just in how films were produced but also in how the public saw Disney Animation, resulting in a tidal wave of acclaim that the company is still riding thirty years after the fact. If you’re a Disney fan today, you certainly owe something to this movie. The same holds true if you’re a skeptic of Disney today. 

    Like a lot of what comes under the Disney banner, it’s common to dismiss the artistic triumphs of The Little Mermaid by virtue of it being Disney©. This perhaps speaks to how a faction of critics have never really been comfortable with adults engaging with “children’s entertainment.” From my experience, devoted critics of Disney fandom tend to see it as a body whose preoccupation with high sentimentality leaves it without the critical discernment and self-awareness to thoughtfully dissect these films as they roll down the production line. And when fans of the Disney library speak up in defense of their favorite films, this only seems to validate their preconception that Disney fans need to be rescued from their nostalgia-fueled blindness. 

I’m obviously coming at this from a place of deep abiding love for the film, and so the natural stance for me to take is the defensive one, but I’ll acknowledge the danger to this sort of reactive dialogue. The argument that a certain text does not deserve certain criticism can potentially slide into prepositions that a text should never be interrogated, which is never really the goal of enlightened discussion. Arguing that a film, in this case The Little Mermaid, does in fact present a healthy model of female dimensionality is not the same as arguing that the film has no limitations or could not have been improved in any way.

    I think it is worth noting, for example, that while The Little Mermaid is generally accepted as a “girl’s film,” the main cast consists of only two female characters against a list of at least five male characters, and that these two female characters are positioned against one another. This was actually very common for this decade of Disney. The female presence in Beauty and the Beast is comprised of only Belle and Mrs. Potts (and I guess the wardrobe and feather duster whose names change across spin-offs). Even girl-power touchstone Mulan technically fails the Bechdel test.

It’s worth discussing that even in media tailored for female audiences, it is common for male characters to take up most of the oxygen, and we can celebrate how modern efforts try to correct this. Look at Raya and the Last Dragon and Encanto, for example, two recent properties from Disney that have not just female protagonists but also many supporting female characters shaping the narrative. I also respect how The Little Mermaid remake tries to boost the story’s female presence by gender-bending Scuttle and adding Eric’s mother, Queen Selina, to the main cast. But even that caveat hardly discounts the victories that Ariel does exhibit within her story. Neither, I think, does it reveal a blind spot in Disney specifically.

Good Will Hunting (1997)

        The Disney Renaissance took place during a time in Hollywood where it was thought to be sufficiently progressive to have a single well-developed female character (often the protagonist’s love interest) in a largely male ensemble in a story that didn't necessarily hinge on their growth or development. A number of cinema titans like Martin Scorsese or Christopher Nolan have favored male-centric stories featuring minimal female presence. Yet even as these filmmakers are occasionally ribbed for this oversight, no one is challenging their cultural legitimacy or questioning the social intelligence of their fans.

Consider also that early Disney fairy-tale films, which tend to bear the brunt of this kind of backlash, actually had a substantive female presence. In the cases of both Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, the divide between male and female characters is roughly equal, even slightly favoring the female characters. (Snow White was admittedly a little outnumbered by her seven costars.) Yet you don’t see the feminist critics of The Little Mermaid leaping to the defense of these films.

    So it’s not that Disney fans don’t know how to unplug from the Matrix, it’s that they can sense that a lot of what passes as “critical dialogue,” isn’t really motivated by honest curiosity. It’s done to justify the ongoing belittlement of one segment of adult fandom, to make it easier to believe that childless grown-ups with annual passes to Disneyland are actually what’s wrong with society. When you feel you have a stake in a conversation you’re not really listening to, your assessments are bound to be off.

There are all sorts of arguments that get thrown toward The Little Mermaid and Ariel specifically, but most of these can be sorted into three main talking points: First, that Ariel changes herself for a man; second, that she is a helpless damsel in distress; and third, that she is simply an unlikeable character. None of these points really hold water (te, he) upon analysis, but it is through countering them that you get a sense for what Ariel's true legacy is.

 

What is Ariel’s Motivation Again?

        We’ll start with what is probably the most common argument lobbed against Ariel, namely that she changes herself for a man. As the argument goes, Ariel is so obsessed with pleasing this human hottie that she gives up her entire identity and fundamentally changes herself to get him to like her, and girls who watch The Little Mermaid will no doubt internalize the message that drastic makeovers with an eye for male approval are a rite of passage. This is reportedly the takeaway kids will inevitably latch onto even though it is explicitly established in the film that Ariel’s fascination with the human world long precedes her interest in Eric specifically ...

        I’ll lay my cards on the table and acknowledge that even within the framework of lazy Disney criticism, I don’t really have a lot of patience for this particular argument, despite the fact that it’s basically been internalized into the discourse by this point (or just as likely, because of that). See, for example, how this film’s remake, like most remakes before it, positions itself as a course correction from the animated film. In an interview with Empire UK, director Rob Marshall gave some credit to the animated film for doing its best, “A lot of people forget how modern she was, especially at that time in 1989,” but even here he can’t help but throw animated Ariel under the bus, explaining, “With our film, 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. That’s not how we play it in our film.”

    On the one hand, the film does put its female lead in a position where she trades her ability to speak for a pair of womanly legs. It’s valid to question that. But I don’t know how far we can get into that rabbit hole without bumping into the fact that Ariel is decidedly not the meek and submissive type. 

    

    No one who has actually seen The Little Mermaid associates the character of Ariel, the girl who dives into a hurricane to scoop the prince out of danger despite her dad deliberately telling her not to, with being an obedient little china doll. Ask any of the impressionable 7-year-old girls with Ariel dolls why she’s their favorite princess, and you’ll hear a lot about how Ariel is fun or headstrong. There’s a good chance that they like Ariel despite their parents telling them what a “bad example” she is. (More on that in a few sections.) We learn early on that Ariel questions the status quo and sidesteps convention, and you know who gets really irritated with Ariel for doing so? The patriarchy. Ariel is a girl who makes waves (okay, I'll stop now). And even when she's lost her literal voice, she never really loses that energy. If anything, that is part of what endears her to Eric.

    

           In that same fashion, the plot point of Ariel giving up her voice is no more insidious than it is mysterious. It serves a clear narrative function: Ariel losing her voice means she cannot deliver certain information to Eric (re: “I am the girl who saved your life”). Neither can she show Eric that hers is the singing voice that he has been pining over, and so Ariel has to earn Eric’s love not through the possession of any external factors but through a genuine connection that is built across their time together.         

        As it pertains to Ariel’s crush on Eric, it’s not just the fact that he looks like the holy unity of Henry Cavill and Jon Hamm. It’s also what Eric embodies that Ariel falls in love with. Eric is goodhearted, open-minded, and brave, the kind of person who would jump back onto a sinking ship to rescue his dog. These are qualities he shares with Ariel, which makes their match seem all the more natural. Eric is everything that Ariel sees in the human world, confirmation that this fascinating world is in fact a benevolent one. 

    And Ariel's desire to be human predates this infatuation or even awareness of Eric. That’s not conjecture or even subtext. That part of the story is very much on display. She sings about “walking around on those—what do you call ‘em? Oh, feet!” with the humans before she realizes one of those humans is Eric. This must have been a years-long obsession given just how stuffed that grotto is with human artifacts.

   Ariel giving up her life under the sea to be with Eric on land was a sacrifice, yes, but what exactly is she giving up? It's not her interests. It's not her favorite hobby. We know she is good at singing, sure, but Ariel herself doesn't seem especially invested in it. Ariel's actual passion is the human world--the thing she is giving up her voice to participate in. So Ariel isn't giving up her identity, it's her safety net. She's leaving behind a life of security in favor of the chance to self-actualize.

  Again, legitimate criticism is a healthy part of film discourse. But it’s not legitimate if it has no basis in the film. Rob Marshall and company might think they are reinventing the wheel by linking Ariel and Eric’s love to some larger statement on maturation and discovery, but we’ve understood the connection for a long time just fine. 

Is Ariel a Damsel in Distress?

         In hero stories in general, it is kind of expected for the protagonist to be the one to eliminate the threat. It would be somewhat dissonant for Han Solo to take out The Emperor. The fact that it is Ariel’s love interest and not Ariel herself who defeats Ursula, then, sets her hero's journey apart. The gender discourse of the day being what it is, a lot of critics have been quick to assign a “damsel in distress” bias onto Ariel as a character and the film at large.

       I came down really hard on the last argument because, no matter how hard some people look for it, there is no textual support for the claim that Ariel changes herself for a man. But I want to acknowledge that unlike in that case, the point about Ariel needing to be saved at the end does at least respond to the events of the film as they actually transpire—Eric is the one to ram a ship into Ursula, not Ariel. There was even a period where I counted this a rare flaw in the film, my one concession when I ran into these kinds of conversations, but as I get older, the fact that Ariel herself doesn’t make the kill shot feels less and less like a strike to me. If anything, the argument has started to feel problematic in its own way.

         I think it ignores first and foremost that Ariel has actually been playing lifeguard to basically every character in the film, including and especially her prince. Rescuing Eric from the storm is not just some irrelevant wrinkle in the narrative, that is the thing that sets the story in motion. And that's the central issue I have with this line of thinking: the very framing of this discussion already conditions the viewer to completely discount the female lead's participation across her entire story.

    If the argument comes down to whether the princess is an active agent within the narrative or whether she can hold her ground in a moment of crisis, then the film answers that question very early on. And it really is only in that climactic episode in which Ursula-zilla is summoning the full force of the ocean against Ariel specifically that she occupies this space of distress. Writing Ariel off for needing rescuing here rubs me the wrong way for the same reason I roll my eyes when people write-off Sarah Conner for having damsel in distress moments in the first “Terminator” film, like it reveals some uniquely feminine weakness if the leading lady doesn’t roll out of bed ready to single-handedly defend herself against an all-powerful entity deploying its full force with the singular goal of eliminating her. 

        Disney itself has felt obligated to counter this specific point for a while now. In the show's 2008 Broadway adaptation, for example, after Ursula nabs the trident, Eric shows up in his boat, and in the two seconds it takes for Ursula to whoosh! him away, Ariel grabs Ursula’s magic shell (her life source in this version) and smashes it. End of conflict. Triton even gets to drop an obligatory line about how “my daughter can take care of herself,” in case the audience was confused. (Disney has since reworked the existing book for the licensed stage musical, and in the current run, Eric plays even less of a role in the climax because if the love interest plays any part in saving the day, then the princess just has to forfeit all her girlboss points, I guess ...)

         I’m not here to protest Disney giving their best character more moments of power, but what you often get in these rewrites are scenarios in which Ariel is expected to carry the entire story by herself. And this kind of rests on the assumption that unless Ariel has held the sole responsibility for her happy ending, she hasn’t really earned it. This overlooks all the Harry Potters, Luke Skywalkers, and Bruce Waynes whose heroic arcs hinge on them earning allies who assist them in their times of need. Eric’s rescue of Ariel also creates a certain symmetry, completing a circle that was drawn when Ariel went out of her way to save him at the start of the film.

    This touches on a larger thematic conversation at work in this story. Good storytellers have always known how to anchor their films in larger questions of human morality or longing, something larger than the film itself. Guardians of the Galaxy rests on whether a bunch of social rejects can come together to find not only belonging but also heroism and nobility. Casablanca asks whether someone who has resigned to cynicism would give up the one thing that brings them happiness if the fate of the entire world hinged on their selflessness. What then is the major dramatic question of The Little Mermaid, and what answer is it giving in its climactic moments?

    The film introduces its themes and tensions in a sort of cold opening, Ariel’s first scene with the shipwreck, where we learn a lot about Ariel, not just her personality, but also what she represents in this film’s ecosystem. The first time we see Ariel, she’s sneaking around someplace that her father says little girls should stay away from. This she does with the belief that there is something exciting, even beautiful beyond the fences her society has drawn for her. She gets herself in trouble when she wanders into the territory of something large and hungry, and so we are left with questions that set the trajectory of Ariel’s story. 

    From very early on in the narrative, the locus of the tension is fixed on Ariel herself and whether she can survive the messes she gets herself into. Right from when she is swimming away from a killer shark, we are presented with several questions about Ariel and her story: where is this curious love of humans going to take her? Is this girl who can’t stop asking questions eventually going to get herself in trouble that she can’t just swim out of? Is Ariel’s openheartedness ultimately a strength or a vice?

And when her bargain with Ursula has earth-shattering consequences, it seems like we’ve gotten our verdict. It seems like Ariel’s free-spiritedness has backed her into a corner and that she is being delivered some cruel comeuppance for her disobedience … until Eric comes and saves the day. The takeaway here being that Ariel was right to follow her instincts, that the good that comes from her following her heart ultimately overpowers any forces that would seek to take advantage of her for doing so. And I understand questioning the creative decision to hand this responsibility to the story's secondary protagonist, but at the same time, I don’t think that Eric’s climactic act of heroism takes away from Ariel’s story. Actually, it kind of corroborates it.

         Ariel took a huge leap of faith not only when she took Ursula’s deal, but when she saved the life of someone her society had trained her to hate. At its core, the goodness of humans is the question that Ariel and Triton are warring over, and Eric is the counterargument to the narrative that Ariel has been questioning since day one. As we discussed in the last section, Eric is the sort of token for the goodness Ariel sees in the human world despite the narratives she has been served by her culture. He is the horse Ariel was betting on. He is the dice she is rolling. On one level, the climax is a test of the purity of the love between Ariel and Eric, but on an even deeper level, this confrontation is a test of whether Ariel was right to question the worldviews of her time and culture to begin with, and the answer is delivered in how her gamble with Eric pays off.

    Eric saving Ariel forces Triton to confront the error in his thinking that humans were “spineless, harpooning, fish-eaters.” Turns out, Eric is not only not a barbarian, he is not only a decent guy in his own right, he will literally drive into a whirlpool to protect the thing that Triton loves the most. The Broadway show attempted to get some mileage out of Triton being moved by Eric like trying to save his daughter, and that's what opens Triton's eyes to his own prejudice, but you can feel the difference in gravity between the two actions.

   I also can't help but think of how the original Hans Christian Andersen fairy-tale plays out. Your angry grandma librarian probably spitefully told you that Ariel actually dies in the original fairy-tale ("and serves the little brat right for not listening to her parents!"), but there's more to it than that, enough that I don't think Ron Clements and John Musker somehow lost the point of the story when they chose not to kill off Ariel at the end, or when they chose to let Ariel be the recipient of grace rather than its partitioner.

    In the Andersen text, the conditions of the sea-witch's spell are such that if her prince marries someone else, the mermaid will die the morning after. This is more or less what happens, except that the mermaid is given the chance to reverse the spell and save her life if she kills the prince instead. Of course, she cannot bring herself to do it, so the morning the mermaid is marked to die, she jumps into the ocean ready to accept her fate, but she is caught in the embrace of the "daughters of air" (angels, basically) who carry her up to heaven where she will have the chance to earn exaltation through her own goodness.

    As a reader, you watch this poor little girl take this giant leap of faith only to be subjected to the worst heartbreak, and just when it feels like her misery is going to dissolve her into nothingness, the heavens break and she is spared from her fate owing to the purity of her heart. The text reads,

    You, poor little mermaid, have tried with your whole heart to do as we are doing. You have suffered and endured, and raised yourself to the spirit world by your good deeds, and now, by striving for three hundred years in the same way, you may obtain an immortal soul." 

    The little mermaid lifted her glorified eyes toward the sun and, for the first time, felt them filling with tears.

    Is Ariel being saved by Eric somehow in the spirit of Andersen's original story? And was that actually Disney's intention? Possibly. 

    There are a lot of small details from Andersen's work that make it into the Disney film, enough that you can tell that the writers actually read the story. The mermaid fawning over a life size statue of the human prince, the polyps guarding the lair of the sea witch, that's all there in the original writing. I can't tell whether their ending was intended to be somehow in the spirit of Andersen, but I think that both endings carry the same weight either way. 

    Here's this girl who has crossed worlds to find some place she feels at home only to be left heartbroken by a world that is unkind to the pure in heart. Just when you think she's going to pay the price for her gamble, she is saved at the last moment, her goodness finally recognized, and it is a deeply cathartic experience. I'm not saying that because it happened a certain way in the Andersen thing it has to happen that way in the Disney thing--I am saying that if you understand why it's meaningful to have the mermaid saved by the angels, you also understand why it's meaningful to have Ariel saved by Eric.

    In the context of this narrative, Eric saving the day works as a resolution because a human loving a mermaid so much that he would move heaven and earth to save her is not something Ursula in all her malice and coldness would have anticipated. It is not something Triton would have anticipated. It is not something Sebastian the crab would have anticipated. Ariel was the only one who saw humans as good. Everyone has told her "You are foolish for believing this. You are going to get yourself hurt believing this. Just sit down and play with your starfish like a good girl." The level of catharsis, then, when the subject of Ariel's love swoops and in completely skewers that argument, crashes a ship right into it, proving once and for all that Ariel was right to believe in something no one gave her permission to, that this human was worthy of her act of mercy and defiance, and that she was motivated by something far deeper than teenage angst, is considerable. Significantly more, I'd say, than Ariel throwing a seashell on the ground.

I’m not going to be so dogmatic to say that there is nothing to the thought of letting Ariel be the one to defeat the villain of her story or that this story beat just could not have worked. But at the same time, discounting Ariel’s recurring acts of heroism just because Eric sailed in to save the day in a moment of crisis reveals its own kind of glass ceiling. There is, after all, an abundance of documented instances of her going out of her way to help others, often risking her life to do so. It’s honestly warped how one character can spend so much time rescuing their friends from sharks, sea-witches, or dinner forks and still somehow be written off as selfish or incompetent.

But I guess that’s its own thing …

 

Ariel's Judgment Day

In light of the film’s 30th anniversary, Glen Keane, one of the lead animators for Ariel, shared this anecdote that I found very telling:

“We had the opening night and showed the movie. Afterwards, my mentors, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, who have now retired… I was very interested to hear their reaction. I ran up to them and I asked ‘So, what’d you think?’ and Frank and Ollie have always been very honest, but never really free with compliments. Ollie said ‘Well, we wouldn’t have done it that way,’ and I said ‘What do you you mean?’ ‘Well, Glen,’ Frank said, ‘There were just some expressions that were kind of ugly.’ and Ollie said ‘That’s right, she was ugly. If you look at Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty or Snow White, every frame of that film she’s pretty. The princesses were pretty.’ And I was strangely really happy to hear this. I realized that anytime I had a choice to go pretty or real, I always chose real. Even if it means for a few frames you have to scrunch the face up somewhere. It wasn’t necessarily appealing, but it was real.”

        I wanted to start this section with this insight from Keane because it gets at the heart of what has always made Ariel such a rich character. Anytime it comes down to Ariel being polished or authentic, she always errs on the side of authentic. And a lot of that comes down to how Ariel is one of the rare Disney heroines to have a proper character flaw.

         As a point of reference, a character flaw just means some imperfection or handicap that stops said character from getting what they need, and there is a whole gradient to how testy that can make your character. On the extreme end, that character flaw can reveal some deep moral failing, a toxic trait or belief that the character has to overcome (e.g. in The Searchers Ethan must overcome his contempt and prejudice toward the Comanche tribe) but a character’s “flaw” doesn’t have to be some marker of missing or underdeveloped virtue (e.g. in Aliens Ripley must overcome the trauma she accumulated from her first encounter with the xenomorph). Correcting a character flaw can see a character undergoing a radical change in motivation (e.g. Jake in Avatar switching teams to fight alongside the Na’Vi), or it can just entail a shift in perspective (e.g. George Bailey acknowledging his own worth at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life). I outline all these examples to show that there is a near unlimited range of compelling ways to give your character an arc or to make them seem relatable. And so when patterns start to emerge in how certain classes of characters are allowed to behave, you have to start to wonder why.

         If you look at the modern run of Disney heroines, many of them have “flaws,” sure, but they’re flaws that don’t really make these princesses less likable. Contemporary princesses are said to be “relatable” because they possess outward markers of imperfection like clumsiness, but this is not really a personality trait or even a belief. For characters like Moana and Rapunzel, their “flaw” comes almost exclusively from the question of self-confidence. That’s not in and of itself a bad thing or even an interesting thing. That is, after all, something a person can struggle with. But the unwillingness to engage with other complexities of the human experience in their female characters comes with an underlying assumption that a girl who has anything more disagreeable than simple self-esteem issues isn’t worthy of sympathy.

         I bring this up here because Ariel comes with considerably more baggage than the Disney leading ladies of today. The two strikes that are most held against her are the fact that she is disobedient to her father and that she falls for Ursula’s ploy to take over the ocean. Neither restlessness nor naivete are exceptionally uncommon traits for a sixteen year old girl still figuring out her place in the world, but the internet sure has some strong feelings about this mermaid. 

        If you were like me, you probably spent most of your adolescence arguing with your friends that it wasn’t really Ariel’s fault that she behaved this way, that she had no other options but to behave the way she did. Maybe you tried to pin it all on Triton for being overbearing. It’s really only from adulthood that I realize that these conversations just took for granted that a character like Ariel needed an ironclad excuse to behave in a way that was anything less than Saint Mary. Like it’s some travesty of human behavior that a girl caught between the crossroads of growing up should experience some trial and error. I had to defend Ariel against lines about, “What does she have to be so unhappy about anyways? She’s a mermaid princess, for crying out loud!” all while knowing how this kind of character type is see as humanizing, even endearing, in a character like Tony Stark.

Perhaps there’s something to be said for protagonists in children’s media having a somewhat lower tolerance for character flaws, but at the same time, you don’t exactly see parents up in arms about Simba abandoning his kingdom to starvation for years on end while he works through his business. The public shows a lot more concern in the example being set by the characters their daughters are watching than their sons. (This double-standard never really goes away. Becoming a lord in the criminal underworld and being complicit in the deaths of multiple people can turn someone like Walter White into one of the most fascinating and enlightening characters of all time, while having a nervous breakdown and dropping out of school for a semester can forever stain the reputation of someone like Rory Gilmore.)

        An interesting case study of this phenomenon can be seen with Elsa in the first Frozen film. Disney’s film is loosely based on the fairy-tale of “The Snow Queen,” also by Hans Christian Andersen, a story in which a young girl must rescue her best friend from the icy fortress of the titular character. In the earliest drafts, Frozen cast Elsa as a villain character, following the vein of many tellings of “The Snow Queen.” After it was proposed that the snow queen and the main heroine be played as sisters, Elsa gradually lost her malicious edge. The development of Frozen saw a whole gradient of Elsas with varying degrees of thorniness. One early telling had Elsa spitefully freeze Anna’s heart in the first act, and Anna’s quest became to seek out her sister and implore her to undo the curse. But even when it became clear that Elsa wouldn’t resemble anything like a “Disney villain,” some early drafts of Elsa still had some edge to her that you don’t see in the finished film.

There’s a deleted song, for example, titled “Life’s Too Short,” set during Anna and Elsa’s interaction in the ice castle. (In the finished film, this is the reprise of “For the First Time in Forever” where news of Arendelle being snowed-in triggers a sort of panic attack in Elsa, and that is ultimately what freezes Anna’s heart. Not any latent feelings of resentment, just good old fashioned righteous concern.) In that earlier draft, this interaction was much more confrontational than what we see in the final film. Anna’s bid for her sister to come home and fix things unearths some long-gestating feelings of resentment, which reveals how neither sister really understands how the other feels, and this culminates in both sisters lashing out at the other before Elsa loses control and accidentally freezes Anna’s heart. This sequence basically read as two siblings having a realistic sibling’s spat, but that’s not the version we got, and I find that very telling.

        I don’t have this on any authority, but this has the earmarks of a situation where some executive leaned in and pushed the filmmakers to keep the sisters “sympathetic” by defanging this interaction. This is in line with what a lot of audiences seem to want from their Disney heroines. They don't really see Disney Princesses as characters in their own right so much as role models for little Chloe, and they consider it a betrayal if Anna or Elsa model any behavior that is anything but strictly self-sacrificing. This is the kind of mindset from which we get things like Emma Watson’s Manic Pixie Dream Belle, and a whole train of heroines who are only kept from perfection by the technicality of low self-esteem. This isn’t a knock against the Rapunzels and Moanas of the more modern Disney, who bring their own value to the conversation, but it is curious that in a time Disney claims its leading ladies are bursting through barriers, the expectations for the behavior of their female characters have never been stricter.

         Exceptions to this norm exist. The further away a given heroine is from the “princess” moniker, the more likely that character is to grapple with some genuinely thorny character traits. Judy Hopps in Zootopia is allowed to work through latent prejudice. But it's worth noting that in order to make these character traits permissible in a leading lady, Disney has to make Judy extra competent and extra altruistic. And, again, Judy is not a branded princess.

        I’d argue that this is different from what we were seeing with the princesses of Walt’s age because, as we discussed in the Belle Complex essay, Snow White and company were framed as aspirational, absolutely, but not necessarily relatable. Contemporary princesses are. Kids are expected to look at someone like Rapunzel and see her moral perfectitude and imagine that their own worthiness is contingent upon exhibiting a similar kind of moral rightness. And when parents chain someone like Ariel to the pillory for experiencing even a sanitized version of adolescence, I imagine we’re doing a disservice. 

This also overlooks that Ariel actually displays a lot of behavior that can be described as virtuous, even heroic. Ariel exhibits qualities of courage, of independent thought, of hope, of charity. She gently razzes Flounder for being a bit of a scaredy-cat, but she’ll also drop everything to save him from the jaws of a shark. I return to basically the entire story hinging on Ariel looking past the prejudices that her society has taken for granted and bridging the gap between two divided worlds. These qualities are all situated in a larger context for Ariel as a character, one that looks at both strengths and weaknesses without judgment. 

Room (2015)

        When you look at some of the most celebrated and groundbreaking female characters in recent years, as well as what made them so compelling, you don't necessarily see that much conversation on how "powerful" they are. There’s an incentive for things like more female superheroes, yes, but in the larger discourse, there’s less of a demand for female characters who always score the winning goal or who always know the right thing to do. The current frontier is crafting female characters who are complex, who get to explore the frightening parts of the human condition not purely as mascots or role models, but as human beings. Where the conversation is usually fixed on how far we’ve come since The Little Mermaid or how it opened the doors for "real feminism," this is one area where Ariel is far outpacing her successors. 

But anyone who really loves Ariel can tell you that much. And they have for a while. Everyone loves Ariel because she feels so human.

 

Ready to Stand

As we gain more distance from The Little Mermaid, and as Disney’s own attempts to create strongfemalecharacters become only more cookie-cutter, Ariel’s unapologetic humanity feels all the more refreshing. The kind of emotional depth and nuance you see in something like Ariel, as with all of Disney’s best characters and stories, runs directly counter to the crude rhetoric with which the internet malcontent wants to discuss her. Perhaps this is why, even as Ariel remains one of Disney’s most in-demand characters, they never really know what to do with her.

We’ve also been able to guess for a while that the remake is going to have Ariel be the one to take out the Sea Witch. Not the worst change ever, but seeing where it sits in with the larger tradition of Disney “improving” their princess characters for the 21st century, it feels yet again like Disney is playing to the lowest assumptions of Ariel’s character. I don't feel like it's bold of me to say that the crowd was “offended” by, say, Ursula telling Ariel that “it’s she who holds her tongue who gets her man,” just aren’t interested in things like context or irony, and they will not be placated by Disney modifying the lyrics to “Poor Unfortunate Souls.” (Neither, I think, will these lyric changes actually further any feminist causes.) For how obsessed Disney has been over Ariel reportedly changing herself just to impress some detached entity, they have never hesitated to mutilate her if they think it'll make Twitter like them.

   This is a point I have brought up many times before in previous Disney-centric essays. Disney likes to define its output by how its most vocal skeptics see them, and as long as Disney keeps prioritizing the approval of its harshest critics, the negative space will become overwhelming. Tossing bread at the ducks won't make them go away.

    And yet, you do occasionally run into individuals who understand the core of The Little Mermaid story.  In his review at the time of the film's release, Roger Ebert declared “Watching ‘The Little Mermaid,’ I began to feel that the magic of animation had been restored to us.” He specifically highlighted the invigorating music, Ariel’s activity in her story, and the work of the animators “who are free to realize even the most elaborate flights of imagination.” Allan Heinberg, screenwriter for Wonder Woman, described Diana’s story by comparing it to Ariel’s: 

“The story as I see it is The Little Mermaid, specifically Disney’s incarnation. This is a woman who has been raised in a very protective, sheltered life, she’s curious about what life is like outside and she wants to have her own experience. She wants to be where the people are.”

Directors Ron Clements (left) and John Musker (right)
with voice actress Jodi Benson (center)

    I think that maybe the most remarkable thing about this movie to me is that this masterpiece somehow came together in a time where no one, not even the executives, were really asking for it. Animation had been mostly dead in the U.S. ever since Walt Disney passed away over twenty years prior, and if adults today face some funny looks at the grown-up table if they’re outed as an animation-lover, they’ve got nothing on the working class of the 1980s. It was people like Howard Ashman, John Musker, and Ron Clements who really pioneered the idea that a sincere animated fairy-tale could touch adults and children, and their efforts paid off. (If you’re not familiar with the history behind “the Disney Renaissance,” I’d strongly recommend checking out Waking Sleeping Beauty on Disney+.) It's little wonder that Ariel's yearning and hopefulness feels so authentic. That was the state of Walt Disney Animation in 1989.

It's hard to imagine these days, but the Disney empire wasn't always the force of nature that it is today. Once upon a time, the company was struggling to keep its head above water (okay, now I'm done). It took a bright-eyed mermaid who dreamed of walking on land to capture the hearts and imaginations of audiences. As a devoted Disney disciple, when I engage with the studio's modern output, I'm never really impressed by cleverness or filmmakers who are trying to outsmart the studio's own legacy. I'm mostly looking for the sincerity and tenacity of a mermaid who, even as her world told her to keep her head underwater, reached for the light. That might not be the kind of strategy that always gets you points on social media, but that is how you build a legacy that is worth reliving in the first place.

                --The Professor