Disney's The Little Mermaid Changed The Original Story

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Source: screenrant.com/little-mermaid-original-story-changes-horror/

The Little Mermaid Wisely Changed The Original Horrifying Story
BY
AMANDA BRUCE
AND
ROBERT PITMAN
UPDATED 1 DAY AGO

The Little Mermaid has been a beloved Disney classic since it was first released, but the original fairy tale tells a much darker story.


A blended image features images of Halle Bailey in Disney's live-action The Little Mermaid

SUMMARY
The original story of The Little Mermaid is much darker than the Disney version, featuring gruesome elements that wouldn't fit well in a family-friendly film.
The mermaid in the original story has no soul, and can only gain one if a human falls in love with her, which does not happen in the end, leading to a tragic afterlife for her.
The sea witch's home in the original story is surrounded by menacing half-human, half-plant creatures and is made of human bones, showcasing the darker tone of the original tale.

The Little Mermaid is a beloved Disney animated classic, but the original The Little Mermaid story is incredibly dark, and Disney was right to change some of the more horrifying aspects. The Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale is a very grim story, featuring all kinds of gruesome elements that wouldn't fit well into a family-friendly animated film. Disney's version of the tale is now more well-known than Andersen's, with the darker details being stuck in the original story.


The Little Mermaid is a 1989 animated film that follows Ariel, a young mermaid princess, as she trades her voice for a chance to travel to land in order to experience the world of humans. In a time of financial struggle for Disney, The Little Mermaid revitalized the company, kicking off an era of massive hits known as the Disney Renaissance. The movie is still culturally relevant today, with The Little Mermaid getting a live-action remake that introduces a whole new generation to the story (with a few more changes). However, even many of the film's initial viewers don't know about The Little Mermaid story's dark origins.


The Original Little Mermaid Story Is So Much Darker


Flounder and Ariel in Disney's animated The Little Mermaid

Although the Disney version is pretty lighthearted, the original The Little Mermaid story was so much darker. Like in the movie, Ariel's deal with the sea witch involves giving up her voice for legs. However, there is one catch. As the sea witch explains, every step the little mermaid takes will feel as if she is walking on sharp knives, making her time on land excruciatingly painful. The mermaid has to repeatedly go to the sea to cool her feet in the water because of the pain she's in throughout the story. When she does that, it's also the only time she is able to see her family from afar since they didn't know until after she made the deal with the sea witch that she would be leaving them.

While there are a lot of similarities to Disney's animated and live-action movies, there are slight differences even among the similarities. Though there are plenty of aquatic creatures in Andersen's tale, they are not friends who speak with the mermaids but are instead treated like pets. That's not unlike how the little mermaid is treated by the prince when she ends up on land either. He cares for her and wants to keep her close to him, but unlike the live-action movie where she's treated to her own room, she's given a small bed to sleep just outside his bedroom door as though she's a pet he wants to keep an eye on.

One of the darker aspects of mermaid myth, and something that is touched on in Andersen's original story is the siren song of mermaids. Andersen doesn't see mermaids luring men to their deaths, but the little mermaid's sisters do make bets with one another about which ships will sink and which men will learn about the sea by drowning in it. That's very dark for The Little Mermaid, but something the live-action movie incorporates by giving Ariel the gift of the siren song and having humans be actively concerned about mermaids luring them to their deaths. Disney's animated movie did not incorporate that aspect of the mermaid's story.

The original ending of The Little Mermaid is also dark. So many aspects of the original Hans Christian Anderson story would not have fit into Disney's vision for a family-friendly movie. It's no wonder that certain aspects were hinted at without being fully expanded on in both the animated and live-action versions of The Little Mermaid from Disney.


Mermaids Have No Souls In The Fairy Tale


Halle Bailey's Ariel and Jonah Hauer-King's Eric in The Little Mermaid.

One of the ways that The Little Mermaid’s original story is dark compared to the Disney adaptation is that Hans Christian Andersen’s story pays particular attention to the souls and the potential afterlife of the individuals in the story. Death is an ever-looming part of Andersen’s tale, which is why it’s noted that the mermaid herself has no soul.

In fact, it’s pointed out that only humans have souls. Creatures like mermaids can only gain a soul if a human being falls in love with them, which seems like an unfair point for the mermaid. The titular little mermaid wants to spend her life and afterlife with the human prince that she falls in love with. He, however, doesn’t fall in love with her. Instead, he falls in love with the woman who finds him on the beach after the mermaid saves his life. That woman turns out to be a princess and the one he marries in the original tale.

Without the prince falling in love with her, whom the little mermaid has spent all of her time focusing on and getting to know, there is no other human given the chance to fall in love with her. She spends the story never achieving her dream of getting a soul and having the human advantages of an afterlife away from Earth. Instead, her afterlife involves being a spirit of the air who has to help humans by doing good deeds for a few centuries before she might be granted a soul.


The Sea Witch’s Home Is Particularly Dark


Melissa McCarthy as Ursula first look in The Little Mermaid trailer

Both the animated version of The Little Mermaid and Disney’s live-action version hint at just how evil the sea witch of the story can be. The creatures Ursula keeps in her home in the animated version are revealed to have formerly been mermaids who didn’t follow through on their deals with her. In the live-action version, there’s the skeleton of a mermaid outside of her home that Ariel doesn’t see. Anderson’s tale of The Little Mermaid has an even darker take on the sea witch’s home.

Andersen has the sea witch’s home surrounded by “polyps,” which are meant to be half-human, half-plant creatures. They actively reach out and try to grab the mermaid on her journey to visit the witch, and she has to keep out of their grasp to stay alive. The path to the home of the sea witch is littered with bodies of mermaids who were strangled by them. If that’s not dark enough for The Little Mermaid’s original story, the sea witch doesn’t just live in a cave or an abandoned ship, but a home made of human bones.


The Little Mermaid Is Expected To Kill The Prince


The Little Mermaid Ariel and Prince Eric washed up on the beach

A drastic difference between the Disney version of The Little Mermaid and Anderson’s much darker original tale is that the mermaid in Andersen’ story doesn’t have the same amount of time to get the prince to fall in love with her. In fact, the timeline is drastically different. While Ursula gives Ariel three days to get Eric to fall for her or she forfeits her voice forever, the sea witch in the fairy tale doesn’t give the little mermaid a specific amount of time. Instead, the idea is that if the prince falls for someone else instead of the mermaid, the mermaid forfeits her life instead of just her voice, having only 24 hours to live.

When the mermaid finds that the prince has fallen for another princess in the original story, the little mermaid's sisters realize that she is in danger, and they all go to the sea witch to make a deal on her behalf. They all give up their hair in order to get a magical dagger from the sea witch. If the mermaid kills the prince through the heart with that dagger, she won’t die on the 24-hour deadline. Once his blood touches her legs, they’ll become fins again, and she’ll be able to go back to her life as a mermaid instead of dying as a human. The mermaid, however, loves the prince so much that she wants him to be happy with his new bride. She chooses to die instead.

Andersen’s original The Little Mermaid ending is so much darker than Disney’s as a result. While she makes an incredibly selfless decision and becomes a spirit of the air, it’s still a tragic ending for the character who doesn’t find love or a welcoming life above the water. She has a vastly different experience with a much darker side of humanity than Ariel does.


Why Disney's Little Mermaid Had To Change Hans Christian Andersen's Story


Ariel and Eric sitting in a small boat in Disney animated The Little Mermaid

The Little Mermaid ends on an incredible downer, with the main character getting what's far from a happy ending, instead, she dies and ends up stuck in purgatory. This absolutely would not have worked for the Disney adaptation, causing the 1989 film to have to change some elements. Things like the walking on knives detail would have been way too dark for the film's target audience of kids. On top of that, the dark ending would have gone against the film's lighthearted tone.

Disney's The Little Mermaid changes were also required due to Andersen's story structure. The original story adds so many details to Ariel's deal with the sea witch that just don't help the story. The detail of Ariel feeling like she's walking on knives doesn't have a thematic purpose, meaning that Disney had to condense the original darker fairy tale for the good of the story. Luckily, this paid off, with Disney's The Little Mermaid still being much more popular than the original.

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Source: www.tor.com/2023/09/25/disneyfying-the-little-mermaid/

SFF BESTIARY
Two Versions of a Classic Fairy Tale: Disneyfying The Little Mermaid
Judith Tarr
Mon Sep 25, 2023 11:00am Post a comment Favorite This


Screenshot: Disney

I’m a bit skeptical about the recent Disney trend toward rebooting animated classics as live-action films. I understand that CGI and effects have advanced tremendously, and the animated versions have been around for a generation or two or even three. The older ones can use some serious updating, culturally as well as technically. Still, they are favorites, and it’s hard to accept a new take on what one’s loved for, like, forever. Which in the case of The Little Mermaid, is long enough that good lord, it can’t be that old. 1989!

To further muddy the waters, the live-action version got caught in the middle of the latest round of culture wars. Even before it was released, the announcement that the role of Ariel had been cast with a Black actress caused no end of furor.

If anything, that made me more interested in it rather than less…

Disney has its faults, and they are legion, but it has made a concerted effort over the years to diversify its properties. They’ve taken to heart the dictum that representation matters. They’ve also moved to “age up” the live versions, aiming them at an older audience, with a more complex story as well as more elaborate effects.

Animated Ariel is a fairly straightforward creature. Pretty redheaded White girl with streamlined green fish’s tail, and a little frill at the join, implying a sort of tutu. The standard shell bra one gets used to seeing in mermaids. (So… they nurse their young?)

She has six sisters (one more than in the Andersen story), and they all have names beginning with A. Her father now has a name as well, King Triton, and he carries a trident, which seems to contain much of his power. The sea witch is named Ursula, and she is a very bad creature—a classic Disney Villain, right up there with Maleficent and Cruella de Vil.

The prince’s name is Eric. He has a bit of backstory now, and his own set of sidekicks to go with Ariel’s loyal fish companion, her father’s spy/guardian crab, and her wisecracking seagull friend: Eric has an elderly manservant/parental spy, and and Old English Sheepdog named Max. (So that’s where the sheepdog in Song of the Sea comes from—he just doesn’t make sense in an Irish lighthouse otherwise).


Credit: Disney

Live-action Ariel follows the plot of the animated film fairly closely, but she’s a much more detailed creature than animated Ariel. Her tail is a beautiful thing, multicolored and multi-frilled. Her bra seems to be part of her body, especially if you look at her sisters; it’s scaled like her tail, and seems to grow out of it. In short—more fish, somewhat less human.

Her six sisters are equally elaborate creations. They’re widely varied as to ethnicity, matching the ethnicities of the humans whose lands border the seas they represent. They have something resembling personalities, and appear to have lives of their own, though not nearly as much as the sisters of the Czech film—those have husbands and children, arranged for them in proper royal fashion.

I do wonder if they all have different mothers. Otherwise they make very little genetic sense as offspring of Javier Bardem’s King Triton. This is a fantasy, but still.

Prince Eric here gets the first scene, with a large and boisterous crew on his trading ship, one of whom is determined to harpoon any mermaid he may imagine he sees. Humans of Eric’s kingdom, including its Queen, hate and fear the sea and its gods and the creatures who live in it, but Eric has a different view. Like animated Ariel, he is fascinated rather than repelled. He doesn’t want to kill them.

Live-action Ariel is enthralled by what she sees of human flotsam under the sea: artifacts from shipwrecks, which she has collected in a secret cave. Unlike animated Ariel, she has never breached the surface. Her father has forbidden it, after her mother was killed by a human—as the sailor on Eric’s ship tries to do in the opening scene. It’s a very big deal when she disobeys her father and comes up to see Eric’s birthday fireworks, and falls instantly in love with him.

She still has her entourage of critters: fish, crab, and since she’s been confined to the world under the sea, the bird, Scuttle, is now a gannet, a diving bird that can stay underwater for several minutes a time. A gull can’t do that.


Credit: Disney

Eric for his part has a quite lovely gentleman’s gentleman, much nicer than the animated version, and a charming floofy sheepdog. His kingdom is an island with real-world financial and political problems, and he is a foundling, adopted by the King and Queen—which explains why, as played by Jonah Hauer-King, he looks like Adam Sandler’s cuter younger brother, and the Queen is the wonderful Noma Dumezweni.

We’re well into fantasy worldbuilding territory now, with names, backgrounds, and spectacular setting and visual effects. We’re also in modern fantasy plotting territory. Andersen’s sea witch takes the Little Mermaid’s voice and effectively her life basically because she’s a witch and that’s what witches do. They work terrible spells and exact terrible prices.

Disney’s sea witch is a patented fantasy villain. Her name is Ursula, she has a bad case of sibling rivalry with her brother Triton, and she’s been exiled for bad behavior. She plots not only to escape from her prison, but also to take over Triton’s kingdom.

Ariel’s fascination with humans plays right into her tentacles. Ursula lures her in, pretends sweet sympathy, and strikes a different bargain than the original witch. She takes Ariel’s voice, but magics it into a necklace and keeps it. Ariel gets three days to convince the prince to kiss her—but not just any kiss. True love’s kiss: the Disney special, as seen in everything from Snow White to Enchanted. If she fails, she turns back into a mermaid and, as Ursula cackles, “You belong to me!”

Animated Ariel doesn’t suffer much past the loss of her voice. Live-action Ariel offers a real-world explanation for the pain that the original suffers when transformed into a human: the constriction of a corset and the agony of fashionable shoes. To further make things interesting, Ursula takes away Ariel’s memory of the bargain; she doesn’t know she has to get that kiss. Because Ursula is evil, you see. Ursula cheats.

But Ariel’s sidekicks come to the rescue. They do their best to get the shy prince to “Kiss the Girl.” They almost succeed—but Ursula isn’t having that. She doubles down hard.

She shows up in the form of a pretty young girl with Ariel’s voice. Eric is literally enthralled. He’s all set to marry her, and Ariel is doomed to be a mermaid and belong to Ursula.


Credit: Disney

But! Her father saves her! What Ursula really wants is his trident. He sacrifices it, and himself, to save Ariel. It’s too late for her human form; she’s a mermaid again. The humans now know the truth of what she is, and Eric is freed from the spell.

Their love is true. Eric loves her as a mermaid as well as a human.

Ariel goes to her father’s rescue. So does Eric, as ineffectual as he is in the sea. It’s the spirit that counts.

There’s a great deal of howling and splashing and surging and flashing of the trident. While Eric distracts Ursula, Ariel kills her. Then her father is restored to life, and Ariel gives him back his trident.

In the live-action version, Triton is reconstituted and it’s all good, but it misses a touch that makes the animated version more poignant. All of the horrible creatures on the path to Ursula’s lair transform into merpeople. She’s been systematically destroying them. Ariel has saved them all.

I suppose that was too much to ask of the CGI budget, but the live-action version loses something by it. We do get to see a whole crowd of merfolk at the end, mixed in with the humans in boats and on shore, when we’re treated to the Disney-princess Happy Ever After.

Animated Ariel gets turned back into a human by her father, a great sacrifice for a fond parent to make, and sails off on Eric’s ship. Live-action Ariel gets the same treatment, but with extra moral fiber. She and Eric are headed into “uncharted waters,” to explore the world and, somehow, save it.

It’s very much a romance, with no question of souls or the difference between the lives and deaths of merfolk and humans. Ariel falls in love, she has to have him, she gives up everything to get him. Just when she thinks she’s lost it all, Daddy makes sure she gets what she wants. It’s not even that great a sacrifice for her to be human; in fact she promises in the live-action version to see everybody on the next Coral Moon. (Does she get turned back into a mermaid for the occasion? Does everyone come up the surface to visit Ariel’s ship?)

The biggest loser is Ursula. She has no redeeming features. She’s pure evil ambitious villain. She does awful things to both Ariel and Triton. She lies, she cheats, she steals.

And yet she’s magnificent. In both animated and live versions, she’s the one merperson whose nonhuman half is a cephalopod. She’s splendid, gleaming, glittering, tentacled wonder. (Six tentacles, i.e. squid, rather than eight, which would be an octopus.) Apparently her animated version was based on the drag queen Divine—and truly, in both versions, she is.

Count me in Team Ursula. The merpeople are nice and the humans do try, but Ursula has style. I have heard rumors she’ll be getting her own story a la Maleficent. I do hope so.

[veu]

Source: collider.com/the-little-mermaid-disney-hans-christian-andersen-story-differences/

Disney’s ‘The Little Mermaid’: The Biggest Differences Between the Movie and the Original Story
BY
KENDALL MYERS
UPDATED 1 DAY AGO
Who said the original is always better?


The-Little-Mermaid-Halle-Bailey-Hans-Christian-Anderson-Image by Annamaria Ward

THE BIG PICTURE
Disney's remake of The Little Mermaid is different from the original 1989 classic, but it is still recognizable and effective in appealing to a larger audience.
Disney made significant changes to the story, including new characters and a different storyline, but these alterations improved the film and made it more family-friendly.
Despite the dark and tragic aspects of the original fairytale, Disney's alterations, such as adding magic and rewriting the ending, made The Little Mermaid a better and more satisfying love story.


Disney has been on a long stretch of remaking their animated movies. As fans enjoyed the massively successful live-action The Little Mermaid when it hit Disney+ earlier this fall, they noticed differences from the 1989 classic. With some music reworked to better fit modern standards, it's clear the remake isn't exactly the same. But it's easy to forget that the animated The Little Mermaid isn't the original story. Long before Walt Disney's studio became famous, Hans Christian Andersen first wrote about a mermaid who fell in love with a human prince. Published in 1837, along with a collection of other fairytales, this story was called The Little Mermaid. Though Disney's film is based on Andersen's tale, they are drastically different. Like most of their fairytale-based films, Disney forged their own path, portraying a "Disney-fied" version of the story. Sanitizing the story for a younger audience meant removing many elements and adding some pieces of their own. Disney also rejected the tragic ending in favor of a happily-ever-after for Ariel (Jodi Benson) and Eric (Christopher Daniel Barnes). Without these significant changes, the story everyone knows today wouldn't exist, proving that sometimes, changing a story is for the better.

Even with the changes Disney made, the story is recognizable. The youngest daughter of the sea-king longs to see the human world, eventually developing the desire to become human herself. She saves a human prince from drowning and falls in love with him. Desperate to be with her prince, the little mermaid trades her lovely voice to a sea witch for legs. But she still needs the prince to fall in love with her. Yet many elements of the story are unfamiliar to fans of Disney's film. Though it looks different, Disney's changes were effective and opened the film up to a larger audience. No parent would take a small child to see an accurate version of Andersen's story. Disney added talking fish, singing crabs, and other fanciful moments that brought extra charm to their retelling. In doing so, Disney improved upon the fairytale, becoming the story's more recognizable version for a good reason.


the-little-mermaid-mondo-poster
The Little Mermaid (1989)
A mermaid princess makes a Faustian bargain in an attempt to become human and win a prince's love.

Release Date November 17, 1989
Director John Musker, Ron Clements
Cast Rene Auberjonois, Christopher Daniel Barnes, Jodi Benson, Pat Carroll
Rating PG
Runtime 1 hr 23 min
Main Genre Fantasy

What Happens in the Original 'The Little Mermaid'?
Not all the things Disney changed from the original story were with the goal of making the story less dark. They took out characters and added new ones in. In the fairytale, there's no Flounder (Jason Marin) or Sebastian (Samuel E. Wright). Instead, the mermaid's friends are her older sisters. And her designated caretaker is her grandmother. Yet making these characters sea creatures rather than mermaids heightened the magic in The Little Mermaid, giving positive examples as well. It's also worth acknowledging that, in the fairytale, all the sisters are fascinated with the surface world but can only visit after they turn 15. In the film, Ariel alone wants to see the world above, but it's forbidden by her father. This change makes Ariel unique as the heroine and gives her something to fight for even before meeting Eric.

Unlike Disney's Ariel, her fairytale counterpart is extraordinarily graceful on land. This attribute catches the eye of the prince, but Ariel's clumsiness brings a layer of humor to the film. Yet perhaps the strangest part that doesn't appear in the movie is the concept of human souls. The mermaid loves the prince, but she wants to marry him in order to receive a human soul that mermaids don't have. They live long lives but dissolve into sea foam at the end, rather than having an immortal soul. The film cut this concept, giving Ariel the ultimatum of three days to raise the stakes instead. It's a major change but makes the goal easier to explain in the limited time.

Why Did Disney Change 'The Little Mermaid' Story?



Disney is well-known for turning fairytales into family films. After all, no stepsister mutilates her feet to fit into the glass slipper in Disney's Cinderella. Yet, as one of the darkest fairytales, The Little Mermaid needed extra work. The fairytale makes it a point that the transformation and every step the heroine takes on land is painful, like walking across knives. Knowingly, she agrees to the pain and the condition that she can never return to the sea, whether or not she marries the prince. This mermaid faces the additional stipulation of her own death should her prince marry someone else. Conversely, Disney's Ariel believes that if she doesn't get Eric to kiss her, she will return home. The constant pain and threat of death certainly raise the stakes, but they also make the story darker. Removing these elements was an easy choice, yet the fairytale had more problematic sections to deal with.

One of the most recognizable parts of the story, no matter the version, is the mermaid giving up her voice to get legs. In The Little Mermaid, Ursula (Pat Carroll) uses magic to reach into Ariel's throat and extract it. But the fairytale takes a different route. For payment, the sea witch cuts out the mermaid's tongue, leaving her unable to speak. The slight change makes for a much messier story. But the poor mermaid still has problems to face. She makes it to land and learns that the prince is in love with another, whom he believes saved him from drowning, unaware that it is the mermaid before him. In the end, he ends up marrying said woman instead of the mermaid. Leaving the mermaid requires no interference from the witch, as it does in the film, making this prince much less of a prize than Disney's Eric.

With the prince married, the mermaid is set to die, as was her deal with the witch. But her sisters, who had discovered where she went, make their own deal with the sea witch to bail her out. If she kills the prince on his wedding night, the mermaid will live, his blood returning her to her original form. But the mermaid cannot do it. She accepts her death rather than hurting the prince, dissolving into sea foam and losing her chance at an immortal soul. However, Andersen's tale offers a taste of hope. After 300 years of serving as a daughter of the wind, the mermaid can get a soul of her own, making a slightly less bleak ending. Disney rewrites this to allow Ariel and Eric to marry and live a happy life together, making it into a love story and providing a much more satisfying and child-appropriate ending than the tragedy of the fairytale.

Disney's Changes Made 'The Little Mermaid' Better

Despite the considerable changes they made, Disney improved on the original version. Adding magic through characters like Sebastian and Flounder, rewriting the goal to be more easily accessible, and making the story appropriate for all ages created the film everyone knows today. Disney took what was a tragic, bloody story, and made it into a fantastical musical experience, proving that sometimes, diverging from the source material is for the better.

Disney's The Little Mermaid is available to stream on Disney+.