Disney’s ‘looks-like-me’ movement politicizes entertainment.
Everything is social engineering in the new live-action version of The Little Mermaid. It changes Hans Christian Andersen’s Danish fairy tale — a touchstone of Western culture — and revokes its preeminence, reworking its amphibious Scandinavian heroine’s image to resemble that of a biracial American teenager (Ariel, played by pop singer Halle Bailey) that suits contemporary, racialized politics.
This new version of The Little Mermaid reboots the unaccountably popular 1989 animated version to illustrate that Disney’s indoctrination credo is no longer only for entertainment. This is how Millennial industries teach stealth lessons on racial identity that also reject Western tradition.
But The Little Mermaid’s lesson plan is disingenuous. When smiley, mop-stressed Ariel saves shipwrecked human passengers and sees Prince Eric (Anglo-Saxon Jonah Hauer-King), she is awestruck. Her infatuation traduces the complexities of interracial, interspecies, and cross-cultural attraction. Screenwriter David Magee (Life of Pi, Finding Neverland), dismisses Andersen’s cultural foundation — the original invocation of Christian faith, warning against the dangers of vanity. (In 1989, Ariel’s transformation story was interpreted by one waggish critic as a pre-feminist Faustian myth.) But Magee’s notions about racial integration are vapid.
Magee and director Rob Marshall follow Disney’s multicultural program to win diversity, inclusion, and equity (DIE) points. (Ariel’s six mermaid sisters — presumably from six different mothers — represent global ethnicities.) This virtue-signaling merely clutters the fantasy — as do the underwater F/X, designed to impress viewers with Avatar-style distraction.
Ariel’s Pinocchio-like desire to be an ambulatory human, joining Prince Eric, lacks the relatable specifics of social integration that distinguished Neil Jordan’s superb Celtic mermaid myth Ondine. Such details matter if Disney is being honest about its hope-and-change agenda, or if a fairy tale is to work as a spiritual, psychological, or moral metaphor. Instead, The Little Mermaid follows the formula of Disney’s Black Is King (2020), Beyonce’s racialist showcase and live-action reboot of The Lion King, and of Disney’s and Marvel’s pandering Black Panther movies.
There is, indeed, a revoke-and-change agenda in this specious “family” extravaganza. Disney transforms its 1989 animated version of Andersen’s story in such a way that its enchantment is deracinated. More care has gone into aquarium-style realism than into considering what the fantasy of otherness means. By teaching lessons in revamped biracial identity, The Little Mermaid also instills the new segregation.
An ABC-Disney promotional program featured a black child who says, “She looks like me,” in response to the film’s advertising hype. And that’s the essential intent of using Bailey’s Ariel as an emblem of Disney’s anti-Western “diversity.”
It’s not just anti-Western, it’s also anti-art — against the idea of culture that connects us to others. The Little Mermaid is the ultimate example of selling racism to the public under the pretense of “looks-like-me” representation.
At least Bailey is no Quvanzhané Wallis (the child who was nominated for an Oscar for Beasts of the Southern Wild), whose unprepossessing presence almost single-handedly wrecked the black remake of Annie. Bailey sings and cavorts amusingly; when Ariel frolics with her marine playmates, Bailey uncannily imitates that moue of animated Disney princesses. Her real-life smile improves on the awful, cartoony The Princess and the Frog (2009): That was Disney’s first black-exploitation cartoon, made on the presumption that viewers need mirror images of themselves — even cartoon images with ersatz musical stylings.
Here, new tuneless songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda don’t disguise the project’s dull, Hamilton-based political correctness and race-baiting. None of it justifies the ironies of Ariel’s anthem, “Part of Your World,” which sentimentalizes her anthropomorphic, transhumanist longings. That song doesn’t belong in a film that promotes the era’s social fragmentation and repeats fatuous antagonisms — burlesqued by Melissa McCarthy playing the sea world’s villainous white-witch octopus Ursula. McCarthy’s disingenuous imitation of the drag queen Divine is the experiment’s necessary token Disney queer.
Woe to us if this racialized The Little Mermaid is a hit. It’s more proof that if Hollywood succeeds in pushing its “looks-like-me” movement of cultural narcissism, there will be no turning back from segregation.