Under the Sea

Over Spring Break, I watched The Little Mermaid with my nine-year-old sister, Ellie (or Ell Bell, as she's better known). Let me start by saying that this was my absolute favorite film as a child. Even when my family was so broke that we resided in a trailer home, I had tons of Ariel memorabilia--towels, Christmas ornaments, clothing, even the Ariel and Eric dolls. I was astonished that this was Ell Bell's first viewing of the film, but am pleased to note that she really liked it!



Going from Sleeping Beauty to The Little Mermaid was quite a transition. Though Mermaid utilized much of the same technology used in Sleeping Beauty, it's very obvious that it was made thirty-some years later. For one, Ariel is a far more active and fully developed character. Though only half woman, Ariel is much more human than either of her predecessors, Princess Aurora or Cinderella. The end goal for Ariel is to get her man, much like the rest of the princess films, but she's very smart and even mischievous in achieving this goal. Whereas Cinderella obeys her evil stepmother and is only surprised by a dress for the ball from her mouse friends, and then her fairy godmother, Ariel seeks out the means to achieve her goal, even when it means disobeying her father. It also turns out that her decision to consult with the sea witch was incredibly stupid, so she's a fallible woman to boot!
After viewing the movie again with Ell Bell, I read an article by Laura Sells entitled "Where do the Mermaids Stand?" taken from the book From mouse to mermaid: the politics of film, gender, and culture by Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas, Laura Sells. I'll admit that I ceaselessly rolled my eyes while reading this. As a young woman whose just seen the prior princess films, I refuse to believe that The Little Mermaid is destructive to girls. In order to spare us all a rant, I've decided to cut down what I think are three valid critiques and a few which I feel are invalid, possibly borderline ludicrous.

The three critiques Sells points out that I agree with are...
1) Ariel's number one goal is to find a man, which is a bit sad since she is a very smart character. I will agree with Sells that it seems as though Ariel is passed from one patriarch to another in her immediate marriage to Eric (and let's just note that she's sixteen in the film while we're at it. I know it was set in some sort of past time period, but still). I also applaud Sells for calling the initial feminist reaction to the film (disgust over Ariel's consuming desire for Prince Eric) "reductionist", because it is. There is an element of pain to this story, the pain of leaving one's family to create a new life with a husband, something most women experience.
2) The portrayal of Ursula is that of a woman who has power and autonomy, and is somehow monstrous in this independence. Disney's female villains have often struck me as sheer evil (versus more nuanced characters in movies for older audiences), but again this is so much worse in the prior Disney films, where the "good" girl is a passive waif and the "villainess" is a twisted demon, that I can't entirely get behind it. Ariel does seem to have some power over herself in disobeying her father throughout the film.
3) Ariel is "upwardly mobile", that is, she desires to be a part of the human world because she seeks independence and freedom. I completely follow Sells examples of this theme in the film, song lyrics like "bright young women sick of swimmin'/ready to stand" in "Part of Your World", or Ariel's obsession with human things, to name just two.

Now onto the things I did not agree with from the Sells article

1) Sells criticizes the Disney-fication of Hans Christian Anderson's original mermaid tale for many reasons, one of the larger ones being because it allows for happy ending, and not the original ending, which was the mermaid's death after failing to capture the prince's love. Are you KIDDING me? This is a movie made for children. It's laughable to even suggest that Disney end the film that way.
2) Sells references gendered symbolism a couple of times in the article. I'm totally down to pick apart symbols within a film, but her examples are ridiculous to me. The two that stood out most were, first, the quick reference to the mast of the ship that killed Ursula as "phallic", and the more lengthy discussion of Ursula's dwelling as "womb-like". I found Sells explanation and dissection of both of these symbols interesting, but implausible. For one, how can you impale someone, as Ursula is in the end, with something that is NOT phallic? Swords, knives, bayonets, knitting needles...all long and unyielding. If Ursula had died from asphyxiation after a plastic bag had been put over her head, would that have been more "feminine"? Ursula's cave presents a similar dillema. Where do you live in the sea (or anywhere in nature, really), if you do not live in a recessed, or "womb-like", space? Should she have resided at the peak of a sea mountain?
3) Sells spends several paragraphs dissecting the relationship between Ursula and Ariel. She describes Ursula's instruction to Ariel during the number "Poor Unfortunate Souls" as much like a drag performance, and claims that Ursula is teaching Ariel how to "perform" her gender. I find this interesting, but, like the other portions of the article I have not mentioned, find it a bit extreme. I cannot get on board with thinking that the writers of this film wanted to portray Ariel as pro-colonization or matricidal, or that several layers of meaning are hidden beneath the film. Again, it is an animated film for family consumption, and mainly children at that.

While I can't agree that the makers of The Little Mermaid had serious symbolism and meaning in mind when producing the film, I do entertain accusations of sexual imagery, mostly because they are, well, entertaining. Prior to doing this project I'd heard of the myth that the minister in the wedding scene with Ursula was experiencing an inappropriate erectile issue. Based on the Wikipedia article for the film, this was actually an animator discrepancy, as the artists intended for that bulge to be the squatty man's knees (it's unclear from which of Wikipedia's many sources for this article that this explanation came). The other, more hilarious and distinct sexual image is a very phallic portion of King Triton's palace on the cover of the original VHS release. Evidently some woman tried to sue over this "obscenity", but the matter was settled out of court, and the image was re-drawn in subsequent releases of the film. The golden member in question is shown below...



Regardless of the problems that one may have with The Little Mermaid, it is THE animated film of the eighties and one of Disney's finest animated full-length films. Interestingly, it also was the first commercially successful Disney film since Walt Disney's death in the mid-sixties. The Little Mermaid garnered much success for the studio, including two Academy Awards for its outstanding original music, and ushered in the "Disney Renaissance", the era of great Disney animation that I grew up in.
More to come later this week, likely a rant about the Disney vault is in store, since I'm struggling to find somewhere to rent Beauty and the Beast, a seventeen year old movie.