The children’s classic, The Little Mermaid, as portrayed by Walt Disney Studios is wrought with feminist ic stereotyping and chauvinistic ideas. Even in animation, there are those that not only strive to push the limits of decency, but also sway the minds of the innocent viewer in the direction of their way of thinking. In watching the animated film in its entirety, the evidence is clear. The opening sequence begins with the playful world of the sea creatures, and rapidly shifts to a contrasting first impression of humans as sea faring males that like to sing of fairy tales and display wooden women on their ships like a deer head hung on their wall. While singing their macho sailor songs of mermaids and such, they are completely oblivious to what it is like “under the sea.” Apparently, women are not seen much differently in the world of our heroine, Ariel. The first real glimpse of this under water world introduces the viewer to a world where females are put on display to entertain the king, like a cross between a harem and a Broadway musical.
The star of the show, the beautiful, unrealistically proportioned Ariel and her angelic voice were not present. She wanted more and went searching for it. Accompanied by the young male fish Flounder, she comes across many treasures. The treasures she would find, were named by Scuttle, and old male bird, pretending to be a know-it-all, but is really a know-nothing. Upon her return, the immature Flounder busts her out for going to the surface, enraging her father. Even Sebastian, the crab and court composer seems to feel that women should do as their told.
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The next appearance of our seafarers shows a more attractive side to the human men. Ariel was instantly attracted to Prince Eric. As the crew celebrate, a hurricane hits, and the ship is destroyed. Many of the crew perish, and had Ariel not been there, Eric would have been among the lost.
She safely pulls him ashore. While hovering over the unconscious prince, she professes her love for him and her desire to be human. Poor Ariel, everyone’s a control freak. Even Ursula, the overweight, bitter, (sea lesbian) sea witch wishes to possess her. Ariel further rejects the fun-filled life of luxury, and King Triton destroys her stash of “gadgets and gizmos,” which pushes her to unconventional means to an end. Ursula proposes the possibility of Ariel becoming human.
Her very movements scream of pent up sexual frustrations and vengeance, seducing the naive heroine. Ursula bellows out that men are not interested in what women have to say, but instead are coerced by body language. Ariel follows suit by exchanging her claim to fame, her beautiful voice for a three-day pass as a human. She is then left to be carried ashore by her male counterparts, unknowingly naked from the waist down, with no voice to ask for help. Had it not been for a washed up sail, the approaching Prince Eric might have got a lusty eye full. Her first attempt at body language lands her in his arms.
In Eric’s kingdom, the human women are portrayed as unattractive servants, gossiping like cackling hens. When Ariel’s male guidance steers her wrong, she turns heads (and almost stomachs) at the dinner table. At the close of the first day, Ariel falls asleep as Sebastian attempts to teach her the proper body language to use to get the all-important kiss of man. The next day, her friends are insistent that the man is supposed to make the first move, and attempt to set the mood with a little song and dance. Meanwhile, the body language preaching sea witch calls the defenseless Ariel a tramp. The second day ends and our heroine remains only temporarily human.
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As he plays his soft music on the beach, the sea witch ensnares Eric using Ariel’s voice and a conjured body. On the third day, she awakens to the news of a wedding, but soon finds it is not her own. Upon frantically emerging from her room, she finds Eric with another woman, whom he believes to have saved him from the shipwreck. Upon hearing the news of Ursula’s deeds from Scuttle, Ariel returns to the ocean in an attempt to reach the wedding ship, and is again left to the mercy of males to get there in order to stop the wedding.
When the action shifts to the ceremony, even the priest has a lustful mind of Eric’s newfound beauty, or so the animators would like us to believe. Ariel arrives, regains her voice, and Eric returns to her side. Maybe he was looking for the whole package after all. It’s all fun and games until someone loses their legs. Ariel did not meet the requirements of her contract with Ursula, so she returns to her mermaid form, and is returned to the ocean. King Triton and the sea witch squabble over ownership of Ariel.
Apparently, in the end, Ursula’s taste is not only for ownership over females, but exchanges Ariel for her father, making herself ruler of the sea and the power makes her even more attractive. She verbally revokes the ideas of true love, while being destroyed by the long hard piece of wood wielded by the scorned Eric in an attempt to save Ariel from being zapped by the mean old pitch fork shaped cane of Ursula that had been used previously by her father to destroy her most prized possessions. “Ding, dong, the witch is dead.” Ariel is a mermaid, and Eric is once again on land. She mourns the apparent loss of her love, while her father contemplates what to do with her. In the light of fatherly decency, King Triton returns Ariel to human form, this time fully clothed. Thanks to the wonderful animators at the Walt Disney Corporation, we are left with this tale of fantasy love and stereotypical mayhem.
Are these the types of ideas we want our children to embrace or act out in play? It appears that some “poor, unfortunate souls” haven’t quite embraced the thought of allowing women to speak for themselves and make their own waves in the sea of life.
