But let's face it, Disney's not in the business of expanding minds and shifting paradigms, they're in the business of manufacturing happy endings. And I'd say it's turning out ok for them.
Recently, I was cleaning my bathroom and clanged my metal trashcan against the toilet. It sounded like a steel drum, so, naturally, the song Under the Sea from the Little Mermaid popped into my head. I thought, oh, I love that movie! It's so cute with all the singing and bubbles! Unfortunately for me, as is usually the case, more cleaning led to in-depth, Adderal-level, uninterrupted thinking. My bathroom was magnificently clean, but The Little Mermaid, for me, was forever tainted.
Since that fateful bathroom day, it has occurred to me that Disney movies are like Mexican 7 layer bean dip: the deeper you dig, the more likely you are to end up with just a chipful of refried beans. (The rules of Mexican dip are simple and finite: all the good stuff slides off the top if you get greedy, get your chip in, take a quick scoop and get out.) As I continued to mentally delve into TLM, I became increasingly discontented, then borderline apoplectic, and ended somewhere around being completely okay with overfishing.
And here's why.
Ariel, the protagonist, is super tired of being a fish. Basically, her dad's overbearing and she has to deal with a retarded seagull and a (for some reason Jamaican) crustacean bossing her around. Call me old-fashioned, but I don't think I can really accept those as adequate criteria for lobbying for a species change. We all have problems, you entitled aquatic adolescent.
The worst part is that she's heralded as some sort of a bridger of gaps between fish and man; a celebrator and embracer of ecological differences. That would all be great except that her only narrow motivation is her hormone-induced hysteria brought on by her run in with Prince Eric. She's not a pioneer for peace/love/understanding between fish and fowl, she's just trying to get it on with the guy with the best man bangs. For shame, Flipper!
The ends will not, as it turns out, justify the means for Ariel. Consider the facts: he's handsome, wears tight pants with high boots, loves his dog, and definitely has a "manservant". Perhaps the most damning evidence, the coup de grace on his thinly-veiled attempts at heterosexual perpetrations, is that Prince Eric has just one criteria for his wife-to-be (spoiler alert... it's not her searing wit): he simply and elegantly wants a wife who can sing.
Sealing his fate as a homo-for-lifer, all Eric has to do to help Ariel undo her deal with the devil (the very fabulous half-octopus, half-drag queen Ursula) is to kiss Ariel. That's it. So while the audience painstakingly watches her throw herself at him for three days, Eric's busy catching up on episodes of Queer as Folk and dreaming about the next time he'll be alone on a ship with a bunch of shirtless sailors.
Disney may have been able to slide that flaming little subplot by me in the 90's, but not now.
I'd love to see the look on Ariel's face when Eric, with the support of his personal trainer Raul, tells her he's leaving her to pursue a career in professional figure skating. You can almost see the realization come over her face when suddenly all of the times he asked to borrow her purple conch shell bikini make perfect sense.
The only character in the movie with some hutzpah is Ursula. Amply bosomed and tentacles a-swirling, she is the ultimate villain. As a kid watching the movie, I'd cower against the couch cushions while siding sympathetically with everyone she tormented and think, what is this inky bitch's problem?
But upon further review, she's a pure and simple anarchist. Her minions Flotsam and Jestam are agents of chaos. Her motivation might be deeper and darker than the Mariana Trench, and her revolutionary tactics geared towards overthrowing and then consolidating power to herself and taking over the ocean, but at least she's interesting. And sometimes it's a good thing to throw the establishment on its head.
In the end, Ariel and Eric sail off into the sunset all fireworky and smiles. The pure saccharine enjoyment of that moment is forever lost for me knowing that Ursula's dead, Eric's queening-out, and Ariel is as annoying as ever after authoring the New York Times best-seller, Why He Didn't Want Me. King Triton will be involved in a sex scandal, Flounder will get lost in the maelstrom that is meth addiction, and Ariel's once endearing seagull pal will, after being cast in Finding Nemo, move to Hollywood and become a Scientologist.
Is nothing sacred anymore? I'd like to believe that some things, animated or otherwise, will under any circumstances maintain some degree of virtue and purity. But I suppose in my case, it's either deal with their potential downfall or never clean my bathroom again.
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