The Little Mermaid may seem lacklustre next to other recent big-budget Black-led Hollywood productions, but for South Asian audiences, a children’s fairytale of this film’s proportions helmed by a brown-skinned Halle Bailey is a refreshing sight. The American and British press seem to be rating the film as mediocre at best, and certainly, there are some flaws. Yet, Halle’s skin colour immediately injects a certain politics into the retelling of the original 1989 animated film The Little Mermaid.
The new live-action version directed by Rob Marshall more or less sticks to the original film’s storyline, with some deviations – a teenage mermaid princess, Ariel, falls in love with a human prince, saves him from a shipwreck, and proceeds to trade away her beautiful voice to a sea witch to pursue her romance with the prince.
The animated film itself is a stark deviation from the fairy tale written by Danish author Hans Christen Anderson. In the Anderson story, the mermaid princess, smitten with love, trades not just her voice to the sea witch, but agrees to put up with unbearable pain–“every step will be as if treading on sharp knives”–so she may win the mortal prince an eternal soul like hers. According to the story, if she doesn’t manage to get the prince to love her, she can never return to her home under the sea and she will lose her own soul. The ending is far from a happy one.
Out of this sordid fictional history, comes director Rob Marshall’s adaptation of The Little Mermaid, in the midst of furious internet backlash that a brown-skinned woman has taken the role of a white-coded character. Reacting to the controversy prior to the film’s release, comedian and former host of The Daily Show, Trevor Noah, made an amusing observation. While repeatedly mocking the racism fuelling the backlash, Trevor pointed out with dripping sarcasm: “Stop being ridiculous. It’s imaginary. I hope the scandal doesn’t overshadow the rest of the story. The Little Mermaid is a beautiful story about a woman changing her core identity to please a man.”
It is this aspect of a woman’s agency and autonomy that the latest adaptation makes a passable attempt to grapple with, but fails in many ways. Ariel, in love, and suffocated by her father King Triton’s (Javier Bardem) hatred for humans, takes herself off to Prince Eric’s (Jonah Hauer-King) small island kingdom. Without her voice, like in the 1989 film, she is unable to convince the prince that it was she who saved him from the shipwreck. She has three days to win from him, “true love’s kiss” or be doomed to serve Ursula, the Sea Witch, for the rest of her days.
Telling yet another generation of young girls that “true love” can be found in a span of three days, and that it is okay to go ahead and nearly kill yourself/risk enslavement, is hardly a progressive move. In those respects, The Little Mermaid is a tale that belongs firmly in the past. Now that Disney has decided to revive the story, it must contend with elements such as this in a world that has made remarkable changes in how women-led stories are told. At one point, a rueful King Triton says, “You should not have had to lose your voice in order to be heard.” It is a touching moment, but also in keeping with Disney’s penchant for dropping quotable one-liners in its problematic films.
Triton makes an overdue attempt to correct his domineering nature and steps back while his young daughter makes her own choices, it would seem. It is still a film grossly outdated in its ideas. We are told Ariel is a teenager, but not how old precisely (in the Anderson story, she’s fifteen). Her happily-ever-after, culminating in a marriage at a young age, is unsettling.
Where the film shines is in its casting. The film is a musical, and Bailey, who is a part of the R&B duo ChloexHalle, brings her masterful singing voice and an endearing charm to this live-action Ariel. Her pairing opposite Hauer-King offers a far too rare kind of couple we have seen on screen–mixed-race lovers, of whom the woman is darker-skinned than the hero. The film is self-aware of the politics of skin and makes a determined effort to undermine conventional casting practices. Prince Eric, in this version of The Little Mermaid, is adopted, creating space for the role of the Queen Mother to go to a Black woman (Noma Dumezweni). The Queen’s sort of second-in-command and confidant of the young prince, Grimsby, is also played by a person of colour–Art Malik. If only these actors had not been weighed down by trite dialogues and characters with little depth!
Then there’s Ursula, played by Melissa McCarthy. While the actor does fittingly bring the animated version to life, the character of the Sea Witch itself has long been questionable. Over the decades, particularly in the section of the internet inhabited by modern-day witches (yes, this is a thing) who mix together feminism and pagan spiritualism, Ursulhas come to be seen as an icon for body positivity, caring little for regressive social norms. This liberated view is not one that, similar to its animated predecessor, the live-action shares.
The criticism levelled against Urusla’s vilification is not unwarranted. She wants the power King Triton has; she wants to be ‘Queen of the Seven Seas’ herself. And yet, the voluptuous-bodied witch (with dark-grey skin in the 1989 version), is cruel and conniving, while Triton, a controlling man, essentially has a good heart. Disney’s dated idea of a woman seeking power was offensive then, and is past retirement time now.
In terms of special effects too, the film doesn’t quite hit all the right notes. Most of the undersea scenes are generic, failing to create an enchantingly secret world. Given the timing of the release, it is impossible not to compare this with the otherworldly, ethereal beauty of Ryan Coogler’s Talokan, the Mayan-inspired deep sea city in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022).
The Little Mermaid, we can conclude, wins on a few noteworthy fronts, mainly the embattled politics of skin colour. For someone old enough to remember the original animated version, the film had me wondering during its best moments, how people with our skin tones would have felt as children, watching this film instead. That feeling particularly sticks in your throat when Halle Bailey’s Ariel leaps out of the ocean, singing, “It’s my time in the sun.”
The ideas and social norms that originally moulded The Little Mermaid, however, no longer belong on our screens. Here’s to hoping that diverse casting is matched by more stories that are still waiting to be retold in the future.
Disclaimer: This review was not paid for or commissioned by anyone associated with the series. Neither TNM nor any of its reviewers have any sort of business relationship with the producers or any other members of its cast and crew.