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Ariel the Little Mermaid is part of your … historically inaccurate … world.
“The Little Mermaid” is being criticized by a prominent diversity advocate for its erasure of slavery in the Caribbean.
Marcus Ryder, an influential British campaigner and chair of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, applauded the casting of Halle Bailey as Ariel — but took issue with how the movie showcased racial harmony.
“A world in which the very idea of race for the main characters seems to be subverted, consciously ignored and at the same time Black beauty is celebrated, needs to be applauded,” Ryder wrote in a blog post.
He continued, “While the importance of casting the Little Mermaid as a Black woman has been commented on in numerous articles the casting of the other roles is also worth a mention … At the same time the Little Mermaid’s father is White while her Mermaid sisters are of various different races and ethnicities. Race as a social construct, as we know it, clearly does not exist underwater.”
However, in the blog, titled “Disney’s the Little Mermaid, Caribbean Slavery, and Telling the Truth to Children,” Ryder points out that the movie appears to take place in the Caribbean in the 18th century during a time of African chattel slavery — yet the islanders depicted in the film seem to live in a world free of this inhumanity.
“In this setting, I do not think we do our children any favors by pretending that slavery didn’t exist,” he wrote. “For me Disney’s preference to try and wish the inconvenient truth away says more about the adult creatives than it does about children’s ability to work through it.”
Though he acknowledged that the movie is a fantasy and doesn’t necessarily need to be historically accurate, he said that Disney shouldn’t be “encouraging historical amnesia.”
“But the total erasure and rewriting of one of the most painful and important parts of African diasporic history, is borderline dangerous, especially when it is consumed unquestioningly by children,” he added.
Ryder proposed that Disney could have instead set the live-action film in Haiti after slavery was overthrown, with Ariel meeting Prince Eric in the wake of real racial harmony and not sacrificing historical accuracy.
“We owe it to our children to give them the most amazing fantastical stories possible to help their imaginations grow,” Ryder said. “We do not do this by ‘whitewashing’ out the difficult parts of our history. We do it by embracing our rich history and empowering them with the truth.”
After the blog went viral, Ryder took to Twitter to clarify his comments to readers.
“The sad reality is this great film left me concerned that Disney did not take seriously this very sensitive time and place which due to the atrocities that happened there should be treated very carefully – especially for impressionable children,” he wrote in the Twitter thread.
He added, “For the record I liked the film. There are a lot of positive elements – one of them being the casting and normalizing of Black beauty – but that does not mean I don’t think there aren’t flaws that could have been addressed better.”
This comes shortly after the news that IMDb changed its rating system for the newly released film amid “unusual voting activity.”
“Our rating mechanism has detected unusual voting activity on this title. To preserve the reliability of our rating system, an alternate weighting calculation has been applied,” a note on the US, Canadian, UK, Brazilian and Mexican “Little Mermaid” pages reads — after some “review bombers” gave the movie negative scores for no good reason.
Regardless, “The Little Mermaid” is top at the box office, grossing over $217 million worldwide since opening last Friday, according to IMDB’s Box Office Mojo.
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