Does The Little Mermaid Still Have Legs?

Debating kids' movies with Ross Douthat

Ross Douthat has a piece out with an exceptionally poorly-chosen headline (which I’m sure he did not write): “What ‘Tár’ Reveals About Wokeness in Hollywood.” The piece isn’t really about Tár except incidentally as an example of a movie for grownups that takes a grownup view of our cultural moment, inasmuch as it is (in part) about the cultural changes of wokeness and #MeToo without overtly pounding the table for one side or the other. But the real meat of Douthat’s argument is that what has changed more significantly in our era, as a consequences of those cultural changes, are movies for children, particularly movies made by the Disney Corporation.

Here’s the key section:

There’s diversification and multiculturalism, with the old European fairy tale narratives having their last hurrah in “Tangled” and “Frozen” and then giving way to the Polynesia of “Moana,” the Southeast Asia of “Raya and the Last Dragon” and the Colombia of “Encanto.” But beyond this there are also big thematic changes, which do seem connected to the new kind of progressivism.

For instance, romance is emphatically out; a kind of therapeutic management of family trauma and drama comes in. The antagonists cease to be personal villains and become increasingly structural or miasmic; conflict is borne out of misunderstanding or accident or environmental degradation instead of jealousy or the will to power. Or else the real bad guy is some authority figure who has misled everyone into unnecessary conflict: There’s an emphasis on deconstructing false histories and false family mythologies, or at least on waking up from the spell cast by prior generations’ narratives.

Older Disney movies, especially from the 1990s, often put a liberal-individualist gloss on traditional fairy tale structures, with plucky self-actualizing heroines finding adventure and their soul mates in the shadow of a bumbling or clueless or unsympathetic older generation. In this era’s movies, starting to some extent with “Frozen” and developing more fully thereafter, the older generation is still usually mistaken or unsympathetic, but the spirit of individualism is diminished. The goal is now cultivating allyship, embracing sibling relationships and friendships, rather than falling in love, with the magical adventure a kind of group therapy for the community, a source of reconciliation more than transformation.

And too much adventuring is somewhat frowned upon as well. As The Washington Post’s Sonny Bunch noted recently, 2022 brought two major kids’ releases, the Disney-Pixar production “Lightyear” and Disney’s “Strange World,” which were movies about explorers whose message was effectively anti-exploration, teaching their protagonists to stay home, embrace sustainability and be content with diminished expectations — almost as though their creators had read a bit too much Tema Okun and decided that the hero’s quest is just another facet of white supremacy culture.

I’m not going to defend Lightyear or Strange World, neither of which I have seen or wanted to see and which, Douthat acknowledges, were commercial and critical failures; they may be better examples of the decline of movies in general than exemplars of anything specific about kids’ films. And I’m not going to argue that nothing has changed as a consequence of the cultural ructions of the past several years. Moreover, it’s been a while since I had a parents’-eye view of the cinematic landscape, so I’m operating at a considerable disadvantage in any debate with Douthat from that perspective. Nonetheless, I think Douthat may have claimed too much in this case, when a narrower argument might have had more force.

Let’s deal with minor matters first. I’m glad Douthat doesn’t put too much stress on the multiculturalism question, because Disney has always sought a global audience as well as to bring the world to an American audience. In its earlier years, that meant primarily a European audience as well as an American one, but even as early as 1942 they were making films like Saludos Amigos. More to the point, though, Aladdin was from 1992; Pocahontas was from 1995; Mulan was from 1998; Lilo and Stitch was from 2002. How non-White cultures are depicted (and how films depicting them are cast) has changed a lot, but it’s been a small world for over sixty years at Disney, and the latest moves feel to me like a continuation of an ongoing process rather than any kind of radical break.

Douthat’s more significant argument is that the stories themselves have changed, being less about going on adventures and defeating villains and finding romance, and more about overcoming family trauma, achieving communal reconciliation and defeating systemic forces instead. Is Douthat correct about that?

I don’t think I’m going out on a limb to say that the two most important kids’ films of the 1990s were The Lion King and Toy Story, the former from Disney and the latter from Pixar, which is now part of Disney. The former is about overcoming trauma and guilt to become a leader who can restore a community and its ecological balance. The latter is a buddy comedy in which one buddy needs to learn to share and not always demand to be treated as uniquely special, while the other needs to learn that he is just a toy, not a hero, and that that’s ok, because toys have an important job to play. You can fit both of them into Douthat’s argument—there’s a romance in The Lion King (though it’s decidedly secondary), and both stories do have individual villains who need to be vanquished (though the important conflict in Toy Story is internal; Sid really isn’t nearly as structurally important as the villains of the sequels are). But I don’t think either is the the best poster-child for an argument about a fundamental shift in values away from individualism and adventure and toward community and reconciliation since the 1990s.

But why treat the 1990s as the reference point in the first place? What was the brilliant original animated Pinocchio about? As I recall, it was about a wooden boy who needs to learn to listen to his conscience so that he can become real. He has a bunch of adventures, and displays great courage and loyalty, ingenuity and determination in dealing with the various antagonists he faces, culminating with the ferocious whale, Monstro. But he only gets into those adventures because he doesn’t listen to his conscience. By the end he’s learned better, and part of becoming a real boy is that process of learning better. Attempts at a remake have not fared that well, and some of those failures might, in fact, be due to a values shift—but if so, it’s a much older shift.

I suspect the reason Douthat picked the 1990s has something to do with Douthat’s age. But another reason is that the 1990s was the era of the great Disney renaissance, powered specifically by the revival of the Disney princess. And that renaissance was really thanks to one movie above all: The Little Mermaid. And The Little Mermaid really does strike me as the kind of Disney film that it’s hard to imagine Disney making today. It has been a very long time since I saw that film, so I apologize if I am remembering it poorly, but in my recollection it was distinctive in not only assuming that marriage was the natural end-point of a princess-centered story, but in sending the princess on a quest for romance—and a quest for one particular guy. That’s not how Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs works, nor Sleeping Beauty nor Cinderella; the three classic Disney princesses all manifest a variety of virtues that ultimately attract their princely saviors, but they aren’t on a quest themselves. Ariel, though, is determined to be part of her prince’s world, and she’s prepared to risk everything—and give up everything—to get there, and get him.

That, I think, set the template for how romance played out in Disney’s during the 1990s renaissance, even though the other 1990s princesses frequently had other quests as well (often enough familial or communal), and it’s a template that has pretty much been abandoned. Douthat’s strongest argument for profound change is on this point. Not every Disney story in the 1990s had a romance, of course, and Pixar movies frequently didn’t. But Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Mulan all have romance as an important element, sometimes the central element, of their stories. And that’s simply not true anymore. The last Disney film that I remember having an important romance plot was the B-story in Frozen (which is wonderful), in which Anna learns the hard way that the guy she likes is a monster, while the guy she’s been disdaining is pretty ok. More commonly, contemporary animated films don’t have romance as an important plot thread at all. Marriage does play a part in Encanto (which I liked a whole lot), but that particular plot thread is about a daughter who wants to get out of a marriage that she doesn’t really want, and is only planning to go through with for the sake of the family. Meanwhile, sexual awakening is a crucial thematic element of Turning Red (which I liked less), but romance is not—desire is clearly being depicted as important, it’s not so obvious what it’s important for, because the important relationships are with friends and family.

Why have romance plots dropped out of this type of film? Perhaps it’s a reflection of the way romance has become less central to the narratives we tell ourselves about our lives; that depressing Pew poll about how parents think it is very important for their kids to have rewarding careers but not terribly important whether they marry and have kids has gotten a lot of play for a reason. It might also reflect the realities of what sex and romance look like now; I don’t think it’s an accident that Turning Red is set before the dawn of the social media age. But it might also just be driven by a desire to reframe those narratives in a way that is more, well, protective (which might be the better way to read that poll anyway). Frozen’s B-story romance plot is a story about choosing wisely; if it’s ultimately distrustful of the emotional impact of attraction, that’s in the service of something more likely to endure. Jiminy Cricket might even approve. Meanwhile, Turning Red’s brief for giving desire freer reign, but in a manner unconnected to future plans, can’t be divorced from the pre-teen age group that it’s depicting and aimed at. Would you really want a pre-teen story of sexual awakening with a plot arc like The Little Mermaid? Really?

A live-action remake of The Little Mermaid is scheduled for release in May, and I am very curious to see both how it does and how critics (and parents) like Douthat react to it. The advance controversy has all been about casting, but “is it ok to have a Black mermaid?” strikes me as an exceptionally stupid question. What will be interesting is not what cosmetic changes they make with the remake, but whether they keep the core story elements of the original. The original film is wildly out of sync with current trends in how romance is depicted (if it is depicted at all) in kids’ films; if they’ve preserved that quality in the remake, and the remake does well, I can’t imagine that it won’t have some impact on new projects.

I will freely confess to ambivalence about that prospect—and I wonder whether Douthat does as well. Is The Little Mermaid the era he wants to “RETVRN” to? If not, what is a romance plot that he would be happy for his daughters to get when they turn on Disney+? The difficulty in answering that question, more than some kind of ongoing cultural revolution, is, I suspect, why there really has been a shift on this score.

But if he does have an answer—a romance plot that sweeps you along with the power of falling in love, embeds that in a larger life narrative, and appealing both to today’s kids and their parents, something like Crazy Rich Asians but for kids—I suspect he could make a whole lot of money.