Posted on 07/03/2019 3:18:30 PM PDT by EdnaMode
Disney’s forthcoming live-action Little Mermaid is set to star actress and singer Halle Bailey, of the R&B duo Chloe x Halle, as Ariel, Variety reports. That means that one of Disney’s most iconic princesses is going to look quite different. This Ariel will be black.
That’s a giant deal, and not just because Ariel is a popular Disney princess with arguably the best “I Want” song in the Disney canon. Ariel is also the princess whose character design set the mold for the astonishingly homogenous run of giant-eyed, small-nosed Disney princesses we’ve met since The Little Mermaid debuted in 1989.
In 2015, a Tumblr user named Alex made a post titled “Every woman in every Disney/Pixar movie in the past decade has the exact same face.” She traced the face shapes for male and female characters from the past 10 years of Disney/Pixar movies, and she found that while the men had a variety of face shapes — square jaws and short noses! round jaws and long noses! the list goes on — the women’s face shapes were nearly identical: they all had round cheeks, giant round eyes, and tiny button noses. In extreme close-ups, it was almost impossible to tell the difference.
(Excerpt) Read more at vox.com ...
Eh, can’t say I’m surprised that they would go in this direction by turning Ariel into a black lady for no real reason, considering that, aside from there being a really annoying tendency to replace redheaded characters with black characters (which you can see here: https://disq.us/url?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpbs.twimg.com%2Fmedia%2FD-lvQHjWkAAPwFI.jpg%3Al7kBQel8ybmJw1hEcDS_3mt2bBk&cuid=4216909 ), the film is being helmed by none other than Lin-Manuel Miranda, aka the hack playwright responsible for randomly turning Alexander Hamilton and his family into black people despite their actually being white. Still pretty disgusting and stupid that they’d resort to such cheapness, though. Not like there’s a lack of abundance of people who could more than look the part of Ariel. There’s the lady who portrayed Kim Possible in the live action film, Lindsay Lohan (who BTW actually did have red hair at one point), Madeleine Pestach, or even Ashley Bridget (you know, the lady who portrayed Abby Johnson from the movie Unplanned), any one of whom could have portrayed Ariel and come close to looking like her animated version.
But no, they decided to just replace her for virtue-signaling “diversity points”. Almost a bit ironic, really, as The Little Mermaid long ago saved Disney from bankruptcy, yet with this latest stupidity, this actually may be one of the final nails in Disney’s coffin, if not THE final nail in Disney’s coffin. Say what you will about Emma Watson and her portrayal of Belle, at least she actually LOOKED like the character she portrayed far better than Ariel by Hallie Bailey did to the source material. Geez, Ariel already got a lot of flack and disrespect as it is anyways, with her getting demonized far too often, now they just up and out change her ethnicity for no real reason?!
Wasn’t Winnie the Pooh very iconic, though, especially given his constant merchandising and being one of the few characters to have a perfect attendance record in Kingdom Hearts or close to that? I’m pretty sure it would have at least been a decent hit at the box office without The Deathly Hallows Part 2.
And yeah, from what I gather, it was convoluted (though I’d argue it’s less convoluted than with Frozen especially after the whole “Hans” business. And quite frankly, I was not fond of that plot twist considering just how far out of left field it was, never given ANY foreshadowing. It looked like it was taken straight out of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty.). If there’s any consolation to P&TF, at least it treated marriage and traditional femininity in a positive light (not counting sequels, I think the last film to actually treat marriage as a positive was The Little Mermaid, as starting with Beauty and the Beast, they tended to demonize marriage as a woman’s worst nightmare thanks largely to that hack Linda Woolverton, and IF they ever decide to have a character marry, it’s strictly within DTV sequels. And as far as traditional femininity, that Charlotte lady was depicted in a very positive light and was very traditionally feminine, clearly being allied with Tiana and being her best friend. Contrast that with, say, the triplets from Beauty and the Beast. They’re the closest to girls who are traditionally feminine and actually support traditional marriage, and the film demeans them by depicting them as dumb blondes and even had as their official name “the bimbettes”, obviously trying to list them as bimbos just for even supporting traditional marriage and being traditionally feminine.).
As much as I hate to admit it, the executives at Disney kind of made a smart move with this. They’ve made this film critic proof. How? you may ask....
No matter how badly this film turns out, the critics cannot dare say anything against it. Why can’t they? Because any criticism of this film will be instantly portrayed as racism.
Think about it....
Can she swim?
That’s an excellent point. That’s exactly what happened with Black Panther.
To be fair, at least Black Panther actually WAS black from start to finish in the original comics, so it at least worked well in terms of staying true to the story. It’s not quite the same thing as what they did to Ariel. A better example would be closer to Captain America getting a race lift to African American or Hispanic in one of the movies.
It’s not Halle Berry, it’s Halle Bailey. She’s a singer and considerably younger than Berry.
Laurence Olivier played Othello.
Lot of white players, but now they're all from Europe.
You are correct. Thanks for correcting me.
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