by Pauline Kael
Hans Christian Andersen’s tear-stained The Little Mermaid is peerlessly mythic. It’s the closest thing women have to a feminine Faust story. The Little Mermaid gives up her lovely voice—her means of expression—in exchange for legs, so she’ll be able to walk on land and attract the man she loves. If she can win him in marriage, she will gain an immortal soul; if she can’t, she’ll be foam on the sea.
I didn’t expect the new Disney The Little Mermaid to be I Faust, but after reading the reviews (“everything an animated feature should be,’’ “reclaims the movie house as a dream palace,’’ and so on) I expected to see something more than a bland reworking of old Disney fairy tales, featuring a teen-age tootsie in a flirty seashell bra. This is a technologically sophisticated cartoon with just about all the simpering old Disney values in place. (The Faust theme acquires a wholesome family sub-theme.) The film does have a cheerful calypso number (“Under the Sea”), and the color is bright—at least, until the mermaid goes on land, when everything seems to dull out.
Are we trying to put kids into some sort of moral-aesthetic safe house? Parents seem desperate for harmless family entertainment. Probably they don’t mind this movie’s being vapid, because the whole family can share it, and no one is offended. We’re caught in a culture warp. Our children are flushed with pleasure when we read them Where the Wild Things Are or Roald Dahl’s sinister stories. Kids are ecstatic watching videos of The Secret of MIMH and The Dark Crystal. Yet here comes the press telling us that The Little Mermaid is “due for immortality.” People are made to feel that this stale pastry is what they should be taking their kids to, that it’s art for children. And when they see the movie they may believe it, because this Mermaid is just a slightly updated version of what their parents took them to. They’ve been imprinted with Disney-style kitsch.
The New Yorker, December 11, 1989
1 thought on “The Little Mermaid (1989) | Review by Pauline Kael”
I remember The Little Mermaid on VHS video cassette tape as a little 90’s kid when I was small and even in my school days when I used to board at every one of them and it first came out in 1991 by Walt Disney Home Video and then by Disney Videos in 1998 as a Digitally Remastered edition where it included the music video of Peter Andre’s Kiss the Girl with clips from the film itself and then showed the advert for The Little Mermaid Story Studio where children can point and click on undersea items and converse with Ariel, Sebastian, Scuttle or Flounder but try to beware of evil Ursula and Flotsam and Jetsam because they are bad and dangerous and could turn anyone into polyps if they fail to uphold their end of the bargain but at least Flotsam and Jetsam got killed off when Sebastian pinched Flotsam with one of his pincer claws and Flounder repeatedly slapped Jetsam with his tail fin sticking out of Flounder the little blue and yellow striped fish’s bottom behind him and they saved Eric making Ursula hit Flotsam and Jetsam with the trident instead and Ursula got impaled by a ship’s bowsprit that Eric steered into her killing her and saving Ariel while Sebastian defeated Chef Louis twice and managed to get away from the mad chef safe.