Why I’m Going to See The Little Mermaid (2023)

In 1989, when I was a toddler, my family moved from Israel to the United States. At the time, the Latest and Greatest Thing in toddler entertainment was Walt Disney Pictures’ brand-new, revolutionary film, The Little Mermaid.

When the movie came out on home video, my mom decided she should buy a copy for her kid, and one day she brought home a VHS cassette that would change my life forever.

With a simple animation style and an understated soundtrack, The Little Mermaid centered around a young blonde mermaid named Marina, and her dolphin friend, Fritz. Marina’s older sisters are all allowed to swim to the surface of the ocean, but she is too young. So one day, Fritz blackmails his uncle, a blue whale, into sneaking the girl up to the surface, where she saves a prince who falls overboard during a storm.

Knowing she can’t see the prince again as long as she’s bound to the ocean, Marina ventures to visit the Sea Witch, fighting a giant tentacle monster along the way —

Oh, have I lost you yet? Yeah, my mom got the wrong movie. What she had purchased was the 1975 film, Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, produced by Toei, one of Japan’s largest animation houses.

Now, while it still took itself some liberties, the Toei film adhered more closely to the original short story than the later Disney film. Some of you may already know where this is going. Marina trades her voice for legs, meets the prince, is chased by wolves, and then finds herself heartbroken as the prince falls in love with the nun who discovered him on the beach after Marina had done all the hard work of actually saving him.

Marina’s sisters, missing her badly, trade their hair to the Sea Witch in exchange for a knife. This knife could be used by Marina to stab her prince, and in killing him, it would return her fins to her. But if she declines to stab, then she must become foam on the waves.

Imagine being four years old in 1990 and being forced to confront the concept of suicide at the hands of a 15 year-old Japanese cartoon.

Anyway, after I was done crying, my mom went out and bought the version of the film that she was supposed to buy in the first place. You know, the one where the mermaid had red hair and was named Ariel and was friends with a flounder and a singing crab and Buddy Hackett.

To this day, I feel a deep possessiveness over the Disney film. There was this wave around 10 to 15 years ago of people cynically dissecting Disney films and the princess archetype in ways that ignored the actual contents of the films it tried to criticize. Even among fans, Ariel is often portrayed as a bit of an airhead, flowing where the current takes her.

But Ariel is a woman who is ahead of her time. Her entire society is built on xenophobia, and she is the lone voice saying “maybe let’s not be xenophobes?” She studies and catalogues a foreign culture so thoroughly that she literally builds a curated museum and then dismissively refers to it as “my collection.” When explicitly forbidden from studying her passion, she finds a way to study it anyway, sacrificing her family, her voice, and the only way of life she’s ever known.

For a kid who would grow up between cultures, who would grow up neurodivergent, who would eventually leave her home for the other side of the planet essentially at the first possible opportunity… the character resonates.

And the character resonates so well with so many people because so many people feel misunderstood, feel that they’re held back by institutional rigidity, feel that if they could only overcome this hurdle or that hurdle, somehow things would get better.

Which, regardless of what other creative liberties may have been taken with the story, is at the core of what made Hans Christian Andersen’s original tale so compelling. That’s the part that Disney stayed true to.

In the original story, the mermaid’s plight was a direct metaphor for Andersen’s attraction to a male friend who did not reciprocate his feelings. It was about Andersen yearning to have something that would ultimately be denied to him. In the 1989 film, in a different generation with different needs, Howard Ashman wrote “Part of Your World” as a direct metaphor for the fact that he and his partner could not marry, while all of his straight friends could.

Yearning to have something that seems to come so easily to others. Having it in your own way, instead of the pre-determined way.

How is this not also the story of Black America? How is this not also the story of a people who are caught between their African heritage and the European culture into which their ancestors were forced? The story of a people who want to, need to, deserve to be valued the same as those around them, but have been asked every step of the way to shed a part of themselves in exchange?

Now, I have my reservations about Disney’s live-action re-makes, in general. But this is the one film in that series I’m deliberately going to see. Because whether the mermaid has blonde hair or red hair, white skin or dark skin, whether her companion is a dolphin or a flounder or a CGI flounder, I think that underlying message will stand.

If there is something that you feel is integral to who you are, if there is a thing that you do not have, but which you need in order to feel fulfilled, it does not matter how many nay-sayers there are out there. It doesn’t matter how much power or influence they might have. It doesn’t matter if they control every aspect of your life. You are going to do every single thing in your power to obtain it, anyway.

You cannot deny who you are.