Two Views of The Little Mermaid: Rankin/Bass Versus Disney

Although both the Rankin/Bass version of The Little Mermaid fairy tale found in Daydreamer (1966) and that of Disney both bifurcate nature, Disney's The Little Mermaid (1989) goes further. By  perpetuating powerful gender stereotypes that tie the feminine to nature, it exploits them both.

The Rankin/Bass version of the story is one segment of a made for television movie, The Daydreamer that highlights the trials shoemaker son Chris (Paul O’Keefe) must endure to see the Garden of Paradise. When Chris wakes up for his first trial, he is an animated (stop action) figure floating in a boat in an animated world. The river where he floats becomes wide and dangerous with tall waves that look like shining colored cellophane in a storm. When he falls out of the boat and into the sea, a little mermaid (Hayley Mills) saves him and takes him to her family’s castle under the ocean. Neptune (Burl Ives), her father, says the boy has drowned. He only has an immortal soul, so the little mermaid wants to help save his body. When she learns about the sea witch (Tallulah Bankhead) from her sisters, she visits her and agrees to live as an outcast if the boy does not love her after taking a potion that revives him.

With unselfish devotion, she sacrifices herself for Chris, but he reveals to her sisters that he is going to the Garden of Paradise and can’t stay. Instead of feeling any bitterness, the mermaid sacrifices herself again and shows him the way to Paradise. She hopes to go with him, but he says she will be in the way. She cries when he leaves, but Chris wakes up in his boat and selfishly continues his quest for knowledge, unwilling to share it with the little mermaid who must now live as an exile from her family. There is no happy ending in this Rankin/Bass version of the fairy tale, but nature and the feminine are both clearly superior to the selfish boy willing to exploit both.

While perpetuating anti-feminist gender roles, Disney’s The Little Mermaid (1989) bifurcates land from sea and humans from nature from its opening forward. The addition of Ursula, a sea witch, demonstrates the power of the supernatural over both settings, but nature is valorized over both human culture and the supernatural, in spite of Ariel’s and her father’s sacrifices, when natural attraction between Ariel and Prince Eric entices him to kiss Ariel and fight for her and her father’s souls.

Although David Whitley suggests that “The Little Mermaid could be read as playing out a longing for some form of resolution to the nature-culture divide,” we see that divide maintained and reversed, with nature providing the superior pole in the binary. Ariel loans Ursula her voice in exchange for legs, so she can woo the prince and earn his love and regain her voice. Ultimately Ariel fails because Ursula intervenes with her magic, but once Ariel’s sea friends free Ariel’s voice and break Ursula’s spell, the prince fights and kills Ursula and returns sea and land to their original dichotomy. Although the supernatural witch has been destroyed, it is nature—the natural affection Prince Eric feels for Ariel—that saves them all. Ariel does marry the prince, but the marriage is based on irrational wild nature instead of the logic of human culture. Nature and culture remain divided, this time with nature gaining an edge and stereotypical gender roles safely in place.