What do you think of Disney casting a black actress for Little Mermaid?

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ZEISS Apologizes for Ariel Photoshoot After Social Media Backlash

ZEISS has issued an apology after a promotional photoshoot featuring its latest Otus lens struck a negative chord with a large number of the brand's
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ZEISS has issued an apology after a promotional photoshoot featuring its latest Otus lens struck a negative chord with a large number of the brand’s followers on Twitter, who accused the brand of being sexist.

The offending photoshoot from Animefest 2019 featured model Katka Kavanova dressed up as Ariel from the classic Disney film The Little Mermaid holding the new ZEISS Otus 100mm f/1.4.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1144601396307800064

But while ZEISS may have thought the post was harmless, many users on social media saw it yet another instance of a camera company using a woman as a prop to sell gear to a majority male audience. Some commenters pointed out that Ariel didn’t even have the lens attached to a camera[…]
 
What would people say if Disney chose to portray Pocahontas as a race other than Native American or Mulan as a race other than Asian?
 
Holly3278 said:
What would people say if Disney chose to portray Pocahontas as a race other than Native American or Mulan as a race other than Asian?
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Well, that seems pretty different. Pocahontas was a real person who was actually Native American, and her ethnicity is an important part of her story. Ariel is not only not a historical figure, she is not even human, and thus has no human ethnicity. (I don’t know anything about Mulan.)
 
Just being a bit picky and pedantic here so I apologize in advance.

There is no such thing as an Asian race.

Asia covers countries from Israel to Japan. Not all Asians look Chinese. There are those from the Near East, Middle East and India who look very different from Chinese. Even within East Asia also called the Far East, there is a difference.
 
I’d bet my life that Disney’s first priority when casting this role was ensuring that a minority got the part. I wonder if they let any white actresses try out, to be quite honest.

At least they didn’t go full-blown woke and cast a transgender mermaid.
 
Tolle_Lege said:
I wonder if they let any white actresses try out, to be quite honest.
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I’d be willing to be there weren’t any actual auditions. The casting group probably sat down with the producers and threw out names of famous beautiful people and made a short list of who they might cast.

After considering the pros and cons of each actress/singer, they probably placed their top choices in order and started contacting agents and negotiating terms.

The lead roles of these movies are certainly not open casting calls.
 
What do I think? That Disney has lost its creativity. They are making movies just to make money, and they are not creating anything really new. Re-fried movies seems to make them money.
 
Sarcelle said:
There is no such thing as an Asian race.
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You could go even further. DNA studies have shown that humans are so closely related that the concept of different races is meaningless biologically. There is more diversity in a single troop of gorillas than in the entire human population of the earth. Race is a social construct, but gender is not. Somehow, different segments of the populations get it wrong on both issues.
 
Gender is actually a linguistic designation for inanimate objects, but some people took exception to sex having meaning, so we have increasingly misapplied the use of gender.

“She is a great ship” is an application of gender.

“She went to the store” is an application of sex.

Treating stereotypes of women as essential to womanhood, like dresses, heels, and makeup, is sexist.
 
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My take on the whole Ariel race-change thing is that it is an extremely transparent and lazy attempt at pandering. This wasn’t a case of casting the best actress who auditioned, it was a deliberate choice.

Hans Christian Andersen was a Dane, his fairytales are Danish, set in a Danish world. The Little Mermaid tale is a danish story set in and around Denmark. The characters are going to be Danish or appear Danish. Even taking into account that mermaids are mythical creatures, it makes little sense that Ariel would be a black woman. Genies are mythical creatures as well. Why didn’t they cast a white guy as the genie in Aladdin?

Disney is remaking The Little Mermaid (and all their other remakes) because people are already invested in the previous material. They should therefore be faithful to the previous material. Otherwise just make a spin-off tale and call it something different. My understanding was that Princess and the Frog and Frozen were good movies. Why not keep that up. That is my take on it.

Anyways this is probably just a marketing ploy by Disney, just like with Marvel and ghostbusters, to stir up interest in a movie that wasn’t receiving much press by talking about how all these people were maligning it for racial reasons.
 
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FirstFiveEighth said:
Gender is actually a linguistic designation for inanimate objects, but some people took exception to sex having meaning, so we have increasingly misapplied the use of gender.
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People had used the word “sex” for biological classification and would use “sexual intercourse” to refer to the action. In the 1960s or 70s someone did research on a person whose circumcism had gone horribly wrong. The research convinced the parents to have sexual assignment surgery and raise the child as a girl. He referred to the child as being “gendered” female. There were quite a few things considered problematic with his research including the researcher persuading the parents to raise the child as a girl. The child was understandably upset when he found out the truth and ended up killing himself. But the effects of the research persist.

As you mentioned people started using “gender” as a synonym for “biological sex” and we started to see the word “sex” used more to mean “sexual intercourse.” But it isn’t uncommon for the above mentioned research to be referenced to establish an earlier usage for “gender” as a label applied to humans for a role or position that one takes in social interactions.

At the end of the day though word usage is democratic and a convention subject to change over time, geography, and from one community to another. Whether from misunderstanding or from willful choice if enough people use a word a certain way the usage becomes recognized. The word “literally” is a good example of this as it is now almost an autoantonym and used as a label for a concept that is near opposite of earlier usages
 
FirstFiveEighth said:
Why didn’t they cast a white guy as the genie in Aladdin?
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From Wikipedia:
The film stars Will Smith, Mena Massoud, Naomi Scott, Marwan Kenzari,

Aladdin and Jafar are played by people of Middle Eastern descent. (Mena Massoud, who plays Aladdin, immigrated to Canada with his parents who are Coptoc Christians.) Will Smith is African American, and Naomi Scott is of English and Ugandan descent.

So only 2 of the 4 min characters are played by people with Middle Eastern connections, and those connections are from the northern part of Africa. According to your logic, all the characters ought to be played by people from Saudi Arabia…

And why aren’t these movies being made in the native languages of the writers of the original stories?
 
Annie said:
Aladdin and Jafar are played by people of Middle Eastern descent. Will Smith is African American, and Naomi Scott is of English and Ugandan descent.

So only 2 of the 4 min characters are played by people with Middle Eastern connections, and those connections are from the northern part of Africa. According to your logic, all the characters ought to be played by people from Saudi Arabia…

And why aren’t these movies being made in the native languages of the writers of the original stories?
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I think you are taking my statement too literally. The actors do not have to literally be from the Middle East, but they should try to find people that look like they are from the Middle East. For the Little Mermaid I said “appear Danish”. We have to also take into account the availability of such actors and actresses with the requisite skill as well. How many good actors and actresses of Middle Eastern decent are running around Hollywood? I don’t know but I imagine it’s not loads.

As for language- Disney is an American company, making films for Americans, who speak English. No one has ever argued that any film should be filmed exclusively in the language of whatever setting it is in. That is not practicable nor beneficial to the audience. We all understand that there is a bit of a suspension of disbelief that has to happen to bring us into the story. Some movies even do this explicitly where they start off in another language then morph it into English, so the viewer understands that they have entered this other world. Think Valkyrie or The 13th Warrior. The most we can push that is accented English voices. However, I am sure that the released version in other countries are dubbed or subtitled in the language of that country, if that is truly a concern for anyone.

I brought up the genie because people were arguing that since mermaids are mythical creatures it doesn’t matter what they look like in the context of the story. I am simply asking that, if that is the case, would a white guy have been an acceptable casting choice to play the genie? I thought Will Smith did a great job. But what if it was Paul Rudd or Will Farrell? Would that take away from the story or would people not care? I’m not sure, but I am pretty sure Disney was looking to cast someone who at least looked like they could reasonably live in that geographic area, and I don’t have a problem with that.

Mermaids, especially the ones referred to in The Little Mermaid, are not creatures of African myth, but European myth. I would not expect mythical African beings to look like white people.

We can also look for example at The Lord of the Rings series directed by Peter Jackson. Basically everyone in that story are mythical creatures. Yet for casting they only chose people who looked European. Why? Because it is a fantasy tale set in a kind of alternate European past. I believe Peter Jackson actually took some heat for not casting a black woman as an elf. May have even been a lawsuit. Yet he successfully defended his decision by referencing the source material.
 
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I guess I see it from a different point of view, as I explained above, and I see maintaining the racial make-up of the cast to Andersen’ alleged vision to be about as important as keeping it in the language he thought of them as speaking.

EtA: however, I think that creative goals also play in, as they did with LotR. OTOH, I remember watching a movie with a medieval tournament where they playing We Will Rock You (or similar), and it took a while, but I ended up liking the idea.
 
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Fair enough. I am not overly concerned about it. I simply think it is deliberate pandering on Disney’s part, which if that is the case I think is silly. The question by the OP was, what do you think. If I was the director I would try and keep it as close to the original story as possible. That is all.
 
Annie said:
EtA: however, I think that creative goals also play in, as they did with LotR. OTOH, I remember watching a movie with a medieval tournament where they playing We Will Rock You (or similar), and it took a while, but I ended up liking the idea.
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Certainly. You are referencing “A Knight’s Tale”, which is historically atrocious but I think a really fun and enjoyable movie despite being a history buff. It depends on what the point/direction of the movie is.

Another thing I find silly is the filming of historical English/British folklore, dramas, or old Shakespeare plays with people who are blatantly out of place. For example, there is a recent adaptation of the King Arthur story where Lancelot is a black guy, another (or maybe the same) where Genevieve is a black woman, a Robin-hood adaptation where Maid Marian is a black woman, and various other characters are all very clearly not Angles, Saxons, Normans, Danes, or Celts living in medieval Britain. A recent adaptation of one of Shakespeare’s “King” plays (Richard the II or III I think?) where the bishop is a black guy. It is just jarring, inaccurate, unnecessary, and blatant pandering to multiculturalism. IMO.

ETA- I am talking specifically about large companies making films/shows, not the high school drama club or broadway or something.
 
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I think it can be blatant pandering, or if done well, the opposite or inclusionary. Yeah, those people were Danes or Celts or whatever, but what made them that way? It was not their looks per se.

I just don’t see how we can say, the US has a culture derived from many lands and woven together and then say, but only people who come from certain ancestors can participate in the portrayals of the stories.

I like the way the Church accepts into Herslf other people’s culture, knowing that She is bigger than skin color or man-made culture.

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