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

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Sarcelle said:
Have you read the old school versions of fairy tales like the Brothers Grimm?
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Some (in German btw). They portrayed psychological disturbances in a fantasy way - before psychology was invented. Some of those fairy tales give a twist on those 10% of the population that are having some “issues”.

I can relate some “Tool” lyrics as extremely simplified versions of “healing approaches” the Grimm brothers tried in a more twisted complex literary fashion. (We can note that children weren’t suppose to read.)

The Grimm brothers actually put the theme of “justice” portraying the healthy (or “neural-normatives” as some call them today) as being the source of injustice.

A reread of their works reveals much more complexity than might seem.

(The paranoid nature of some “old school” fairy tales isn’t without reason given you hadn’t modern police or forensic sciences at that time. Or civil rights for that matter…)
 
What happened to the kids in the Pied Piper? Did he kill them?
 
I have a pretty old book of Grimm’s Fairy Tales obtained from one of my grandparents’ attics. I suspect it may have belonged to one of my older aunts or uncles. They are indeed gruesome. Kids suffer awful abuses and people die horrible deaths, or suffer dreadful tortures like having birds peck their eyes out, in just about every one of the 75 or so tales in the book.
Fortunately it doesn’t have illustrations. I see them as primarily morality plays along the lines of Hilaire Belloc’s “Matilda, who Told Lies, and was Burned to Death” which was a big favorite of mine when I was about 5.
 
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Tis_Bearself said:
I have a pretty old book of Grimm’s Fairy Tales obtained from one of my grandparents’ attics. I suspect it may have belonged to one of my older aunts or uncles. They are indeed gruesome.
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Well, yes this is true. It was a different time. Stories weren’t really written for children to make them happy but in reality to scare them. And in those days it made sense sort of. I mean, Hansel and Gretel scared kids from wandering into the woods, etc. Stuff like that.
Really the first children’s book of huge popularity that didn’t have this sort of theme was probably Lewis Carrols Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
 
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Alice in Wonderland is actually a pretty frightening book in places. Through the Looking Glass is worse yet. My mother tried to read the book to me when I was about 4 or 5 and stopped halfway through and refused to read any more because she thought parts of it were too weird and violent for a child.

All of children’s literature was more violent then, partly because children dealt more with actual violence and death. I had an uncle who died in the 19-teens in an epidemic of measles. He was 10 or 12 and his coffin was carried at the funeral by his classmates of the same age.
 
I still think Charlton Heston was the best Moses…(The Ten Commandments) even if he wasn’t Jewish…and spoke with an American accent.
 
Ariel’s red hair is iconic and that was THE movie of my childhood. I was sad for a minute, then worried I was being racist. Then realized it was all about the red hair for me. Then I felt dumb and kinda racist for assuming she wouldn’t have red hair. I’m not upset 😆

There are tons of reasons to change things about the story, but reproducing the 1989 version seemed like the goal.

I say make mermaid movies with every race, and different culutres and new fictitious cultures. For me, there is no such thing as too many mermaid movies. Some people might not dig it, but I have zero interest in all the comic book movies and thats all they’re making now.
 
I read all 129 posts to find something to spark outrage. The best I could do is that casting a black actress as a creature that is half human is 10% worse than one that is three-fifths of a person. This is an obvious attempt to prove that chattel slavery was a good thing and Disney is already busy looking a way to keeping all the white nationalists from seeing the film unless they pay double for their tickets.

Alternatively, I don’t care what color actress gets the role, and I don’t understand why anyone else does. It is fantasy people.
 
Yah. I was five when it came out. I think it was the first movie I ever saw at the cinema actually.
 
I think they were meant to be prose versions of morality plays.
 
That is interesting. Since I grew up before the Little Mermaid cartoon, I always assumed she was blond. This probably has to do with the famous Little Mermaid statue being in Denmark, and as everyone “knows”, Danes have blond hair.
 
Thomasbradley312 said:
Yah. I was five when it came out. I think it was the first movie I ever saw at the cinema actually.
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When my goddaughter was almost four, I won some tickets to Mulan in a radio contest. Angela had never been to a movie before and promptly fell asleep when the lights went out. Fortunately, my prize package included the soundtrack on a CD so she could catch up with what she missed, but her sisters did not let her forget it for several years.
 
I loved Belloc’s Cautionary Tales when I was young (and older, too 😊) but when I had children, I got it out of the library and was horrified that anyone would give them to a child to read!

(I was also horrified, when my oldest was learning to walk, of anyone’s allowing their child to cross the street alone until the child was 28 or so… hormones! Or why children need two parents 😉 )
 
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Thomasbradley312 said:
I was just curious what people thought regarding Disney casting a black actress to play Ariel in the upcoming live action Little Mermaid film?
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I opened the thread because of curiosity. Amazing. Isn’t she from Brazil, maybe Ireland, but couldn’t be from the United States because there are so many colors, so I had to find out why this would make a difference?

A mermaid, being part fish, would be a rainbow of colors, now that would have been artistic and no one would have to be curious about “why” the color.

Hope that makes sense,
 
Mulan is a good movie. Although I like all Disney Animated Films, some are definitely better than others, and also it seems like there are eras which are better than others. Snow White , Pinocchio, and Bambi were great, and then in the 40s there was a period where because of the war effort films were released but the budget was smaller of course, I’m not a big fan( Three Callaberos etc). The 50s and 60s had some great films. I personally wasn’t a big fan of the 70s and 80s until The Little Mermaid in 89, and then you had a line of movies that went through in my opinion, Tarzan in 99 that were great. This is often called the renaissance of Disney animation. Since then theres been some good ones but for the most part I feel like it is this 70s-80s average sort of era again currently. Frozen is the only one in the past ten years I have truly loved. Hopefully there will be another renaissance again. I wish they would go back to traditional animation honestly. I think it is more lasting than CGI. CGI has its uses but remember the beauty of some of the animation and knowing people drew it? Such an art. And I read when Winnie the Pooh came out in 2011 Disney had to call a lot of artists out of retirement to create it because most of them now don’t even know how to do that kind of traditional animation. It’s sad I think.
 
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All jokes aside, I do have a strange interest in learning about these kinds of origins of fairy tales/folklore and nursery rhymes. A lot of it goes over your head as a kid until you grow up to research the original versions, leading me to space out to process it all.
 
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