The Little Mermaid

Guess who's back. That's right, I'm reporting back after watching The Little Mermaid (1989). I really enjoyed watching this movie, Ursula got what she deserved. Anyway, there's a lot of different messages that can be taken out of this movie. I'm not entirely sure whether or not the kids watching this movie will recognize any of these messages, but these are just what I saw.

I should start off on a positive note. The first message that I took from the movie is to follow your dreams and not let obstacles stand in your way. I feel like this is the most obvious of all of the presented messages. Ariel is a mermaid who falls in love with Eric, a prince of the kingdom on the land who she saves from drowning in a shipwreck. Triton, Ariel's father, forbids the mermaids from having any sort of contact with the people of the land. In fact, Triton got upset with Ariel for saving Eric from drowning. Of course in this situation, Ariel made a risky and poor decision (hindsight 20/20) to make a deal with Ursula where she gave Ariel her voice and has three days to make Eric fall in love with her. She didn't succeed, but of course in Disney movies the protagonist always finds a happy ending so they defeated Ursula and Ariel and Eric got married.

Now for the more indirect messages. If you think about it, Ariel is teaching people not to be comfortable in their own skin. Ariel is not content being a mermaid, her dream is to be able to live on the land and explore all of the crazy things that she could not even imagine from the depth of the ocean. In a way, it is chasing her dream, but her dream is to be someone other than herself. The children that are watching this do not have a witch to make a deal with or an all powerful father that can transform them into who they want them to be, nor should they want to be changed to begin with. If Ariel is willing to risk her soul to have a chance to be a human, so it is as if she wants to be a human or wants to die. As I said before, I highly doubt that the children watching this movie are absorbing this message; however, in the off-chance that they are, this is not the message that we would want to send to our youth.

Finally, we have a message that is present in a majority of Disney movies. Disney once again showing love at first sight, based purely on appearance. I have to give Disney some type of credit and admit that this movie is based in a past time period where people did get married based on appearance and a husband and wife would not know each other very well. However, in modern times, I believe it is imperative that children are not grown up being taught to chase after the most attractive person they find, regardless of personality. Once again, children might be too young to understand what true love is and they might not understand that you should not fall in love with a person immediately upon sight.

This movie is message laden, as all Disney movies are. Are the children actually understanding the messages from the movie? It may be impossible to tell...