There’s a new live-action version of Disney’s The Little Mermaid coming in May 2023.
The film will star R&B singer and Grownish actor Halle Bailey as the new Ariel, Awkwafina will play Scuttle the seagull, Jonah Hauer-King will be Prince Eric and none other than Melissa McCarthy will play Ursula – although the role has been slightly reinvented so she will be Ariel's "evil aunt".
Watch the teaser trailer for The Little Mermaid, coming to cinemas in May 2023. Post continues after video.
For Bailey, the experience of playing Ariel was something she deeply resonated with.
"Her sense of longing, her searching for herself, was something that I could resonate with. She knew where she wanted to go, and she wasn’t going to let anybody stop her," the actor said in Variety’s 2022 Power of Young Hollywood issue.
Understandably, how the tale will play out has been kept under wrap by Disney.
And to be honest, that makes us nervous. Because while the Disney movie is a classic boy-meets-fishgirl romance, if the writers stick closer to the original source material we’re all in for a downright disturbing viewing experience.
Written in 1836 by Hans Christian Andersen, The Little Mermaid fairy tale has less seashell bikinis, friendly Jamaican crustaceans and true love, and more… torture, monsters and suicide. (Although, special mention to the serial-killer vibes of Ariel’s ‘collection’ of shiny, sharp objects in the Disney version.)
For the sake of desensitising ourselves, just in case, here are the most unsettling aspects of the OG story.
Dead mermaids turn into foam.
The Little Mermaid’s nanna tells us that while merpeople might have a life-expectancy of 300ish years, once they cark it, they evaporate into seafoam. You know, that scunge that’s stirred up by waves.
Also, they have no soul. So there’s that.
The sea witch lives in a bone house in a forest of demonic plant-people.
We know her as Ursula, the poor, unfortunate soul whose electric-blue eyeshadow/red-lip combo is almost as hideous as her personality. In the original tale, though, she’s just ‘the sea witch’; a sorceress who lives in a house made of bones. Human bones. Human bones from sailors who died tragically at sea and sunk to the bottom, allowing her to collect their remains and turn them into scaffolding.
Oh, and you’ll like this bit. Her skeleton house sits in the middle of a forest of trees and flowers called “polypi”: “…half animals and half plants; they looked like serpents with a hundred heads growing out of the ground. The branches were long slimy arms, with fingers like flexible worms, moving limb after limb from the root to the top.”
These devil plants also collect bones, and they strangle mermaids to death.
The sea witch lets toads eat from her mouth.
Just that.
The Little Mermaid has her tongue cut out.
In the Disney version, Ariel pays for her time on land (and shot at romance with Prince Eric) by giving Ursula her voice. In the Danish short story, TLM pays with her tongue. As in, it's hacked out of her mouth. Permanently.
And the feet she gets in exchange feel like they're "treading upon the points of needles or sharp knives" every time she takes a step. (Girl clearly needs to learn some negotiating skills.)
The Prince is a colossal d**k.
After The Little Mermaid makes her bargain, goes to the 'world above' and meets the handsome teenage prince, she ignores her stabby feet and does a pretty dance for him. He likes it, because hormones, and says "she should remain with him always, and she received permission to sleep at his door, on a velvet cushion".
A bit of time passes, and he decides that he loves her "as he would love a little child". In fact, he keeps calling her "my dumb child" and "dumb foundling", despite the fact that she has a perfectly good name... oh, wait. She doesn't in this one. But still.
THEN he ends up marrying some other woman, and has the sheer audacity to tell the little mermaid, "You will rejoice at my happiness; for your devotion to me is great and sincere".
Alright, mate.
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The Little Mermaid dies because she can't bag a husband.
Part of the little mermaid's deal with the sea witch is that if the prince marries someone else, she will cark it the following day. TLM's sisters end up striking a bargain to save her — their hair in exchange for a knife, which they must give to TLM to use as a murder weapon against the prince. If she kills him in his marriage bed, she can have her fin back and return to the sea.
Of course she won't, because Stockholm Syndrome love. And instead leaps overboard, taking her own life.
Oh, and she doesn't even become sea foam. Instead, she ends up being taken away by some ladies called the 'Daughters of the Air' (sounds like a cult, but sure), who promise her that if she flies around doing good deeds for 300 years she might get a soul after all.
The end.
Happy nightmares, children.
This article was originally published on July 5, 2019 and has since been updated with new information.
Feature Image: Disney.
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Top Comments
I've often been surprised at what children find scary these days. I had a kid hiding behind my desk so he couldn't see the screen when we were watching Madeline one lunch time, another who was terrified of The Numbertaker on Numberjacks and another who didn't want to see the Musica Viva performance based on Hansel and Gretel because she was afraid of the witch.
I think it's likely that in HCA's day, stories like TLM would have been considered just fine for children. He probably would have found the Disney version overly sanitised and wondered what all the fuss was about. I'm not sure it's a positive thing that kids' entertainment has become so mild, without any hints of anything frightening or sad.
I also think that things were different then, the time of public executions and floggings with whips at schools and prisons - so yes things are more sanitised now but its not always necessarily a bad thing? Maybe its going too far the other way - I do love Miyazaki films as I find they have a good balance and retain the bittersweet elements without being over the top scary or "Disney Happy".
Interestingly, there is a big conversation going on in academia about the rise in children’s gothic and what has been lost to children by sanitising, censoring and removing scary and sad stories from their hands.
This perspective might provide a useful balance to the content here. It at least provokes thought.
I still have some of my books of fairy tales, and a few of them are quite dark. The Little Match Girl, The Red Shoes, (Hans Christian Andersen was a dark fucker!) the original Rapunzel where the Prince falls into a patch of thorn bushes and is blinded. And yet I loved them so much, I was never scared or upset by them. (Although I’ve never been able to bring myself to buy a pair of red shoes!)
The thinking is that it gives children somewhere to channel their fears an by removing it we leave them more fearful.
No red shoes here either :)
I use to read them all as a kid, too, they never upset or scared me, either. In fact, although I love the Disney version of Little Mermaid, I remember being a bit disappointed that they had left some of the more hardcore elements out of the movie!