"Where Do the Mermaids Stand?" - Voice and Body in The Little Mermaid movie By Laura Sells

Introduction

The film the little The Little Mermaid (1989) has a special place in Disney's history since it is the first successful animated movie to be released since Walt Disney's death in 1966. The story in the movie is based on a teenage mermaid by the name Ariel. Ariel desires more things but the most important of them all is to be a human being. At the start, her only desire is to be free and independent of her. Later on, Ariel main incentive shifts and she falls in love with a human prince by the name of Eric. To catch her eyes on Eric, Ariel trades her voice to the evil sea witch by the name of Ursula for a pair of legs. The movie ends that at the end Ariel and Eric both live happily and the sea evil which Ursula is killed. The next paragraph is the critical review aspect of this movie and how it relates to the modern world.

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A number of feminists and other people who champion for women rights have criticized the Little Mermaids character Ariel on a number of reasons. The main one is that she seems to have little ambitions which are beyond just getting her Prince Eric. The message in the film is more liberatory and somehow insidious. From one perspective, with the customary tall tale trappings of discovering genuine regal love, the Disney interpretation can be viewed as more guileful on the grounds that it purifies the expenses of women's' entrance to the "male circle" by attacking ladies' quality and by deleting the torment that so regularly goes by "going." On the other, I see The Little Mermaid as additionally more liberatory in light of the fact that it contains the methods for its own particular fixing in the camp character of Ursula the Sea Witch, and in Disney's obligatory upbeat ending, which gives the mermaid both the access and voice. Precisely, both Bush's and Disney's variants of the mermaid can be perused as preservationist pictures. However the two variants of the mermaid scrutinize the tight scope of choices that compel women's' lives, and both accentuate issues of decision and agency.

Conclusion

This essay places The Little Mermaid inside the setting of contemporary American women's liberation and the battle over the social meanings of a "woman". By perusing against the background of Bush's discourse, and the media's portrayal of the Wellesley students, I find that The Little Mermaid mirrors a portion of the strains in American woman's rights between reformist demands for access, which set up the settled and integral meanings of male and female gender personalities, and radical refiguring of the gender of the individual that state emblematic change as starter to social change. In this specific circumstance, at that point, the mermaid figure ends up both a symbol of common feminisms that is experienced in the American society and the positioning of the women as only speaking subjects.

References

Sells, L. (1995). Where do the mermaids stand? Voice and body in The Little Mermaid. From mouse to mermaid: The politics of film, gender, and culture.