When you have a three year old girl, you find yourself re-watching a lot of movies you haven’t seen in a while, especially Disney. I saw The Little Mermaid when it first came out, in 1989 (I was seven) and liked it, though even then I was aware that it was intended more for girls than boys. Watching it again now, with an adult perspective, I’ve figured out why – and it’s more than just Disney’s incessant and slightly irritating marketing of the “Princess” concept.
The release of The Little Mermaid marked the beginning of what’s been called the Disney Renaissance, a series of films in which the study broke out of the slump it had been in since the seventies. The renaissance continued with Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and The Lion King. How long the streak continued depends on your opinion of movies like Mulan, Pocahontas, Tarzan and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but the core of the period is those first four films. The torch was largely passed to Pixar after Tarzan, and Disney started making stuff like Dinosaur and The Emperor's New Groove, meh.
Of the four, the best is arguably either
Beauty and the Beast or
The Lion King, but an informal poll of women in my life indicates that
The Little Mermaid had the most long-term influence. It’s that influence that I want to explore here. There is a considerable amount of analytical writing on the Disney oeuvre available online, and much of it takes a negative view of the films' influence, a prime example is
this piece by Chey on
Helium.com. While I agree that early exposure to these cultural artifacts has an effect, I disagree with the view that these effects must be negative, and
in se reinforce the "patriarchal myth".
The Little Mermaid’s power rests in buried psychosexual messages that ultimately provide a positive guide for adolescent girls’ development. To start with, the central event of the movie – Ariel’s transformation from mermaid to human – is a clear metaphor for sexual awakening. The important conflict is how that awakening is handled by Ariel and by those around her. It’s become a common game to spot supposed subliminal sexual messages buried in the frames of Disney movies – like the famous tower on Triton’s palace, or the dust that swirls around Simba in
The Lion King. I’m not interested in such facile pastimes. Instead, I want to go deeper, and discuss symbolic and even archetypal characters and objects that give
The Little Mermaid its intense hold on the imagination.
