Like Most Disney Stories, ‘The Little Mermaid’ Is Based on a Much More Tragic Fairytale
The live-action remake of Disney’s The Little Mermaid is finally hitting theaters in May. We haven’t seen many clips from the movie so far, but what we have seen—teasers of the underwater CGI work, a few short seconds of star Halle Bailey singing a couple of iconic lines from “Part of Your World,” and the briefest of flashes of Melissa McCarthy’s Ursula—is more than enough evidence that the studio is once again trying to get us in our nostalgic feelings.
Disney’s animated The Little Mermaid movie came out in 1989 and pretty much single-handedly saved the company. The film kickstarted the era known as the Disney Renaissance and won two Academy Awards for its music, both for Best Original Score and Best Original Song.
The image of The Little Mermaid‘s protagonist, Ariel, with her iconic red hair that defies the laws of physics and her passion for human gadgets and thingamabobs, has been cemented into everyone’s collective imagination—so much so that it might be hard to remember that the original little mermaid is vastly different from her Disney counterpart.
Like many Disney classics, The Little Mermaid was inspired by a popular fairy tale that was adapted to fit the studio’s trademark themes and styles, shaving off any of the crude or gory details that are usually very popular in fairy tales and folk stories. The original version of The Little Mermaid is no exception.
The original The Little Mermaid is a literary fairy tale written by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen around the middle of the 19th century. In the years since its publication, the story has become one of Andersen’s most well-known works—so much so that a statue dedicated to the Little Mermaid famously stands at Langelinie Pier in Copenhagen, the capital city of Denmark.
While some of the major story beats are the same—a mermaid falls in love with a human prince, saves him from drowning, and then trades her voice to a sea witch for a pair of human legs so she can be with her beloved—there are several details that Disney adjusted or chose to outright omit.
The process of becoming human is much more painful in the original story than in the Disney version. Andersen’s story describes how each step the Little Mermaid takes on her human legs feels as if she’s walking on sharp knives. The stakes of her bargain with the sea witch are also higher since she has to marry the prince or else die the morning after he exchanges vows with someone else, dissolving into seafoam. And then there’s the issue of the eternal soul, something the Little Mermaid learns that humans have and mermaids don’t, and that she longs to obtain along with the prince’s love.