TikTok was ablaze this month after Jenna Barbee, a teacher in Florida, posted a video about being investigated by the state’s department of education for showing last year’s Disney movie Strange World to her 10- and 11-year-old pupils. The animated film features a character who is gay, so potentially violating Florida’s controversial ban on teaching children about sexual orientation or gender identity.
It’s another unexpected twist in the House of Mouse’s chequered history with the LGBTQ community – and it comes just as the studio’s live-action version of The Little Mermaid, with the Grown-ish star Halle Bailey as Ariel and a scene-stealing Melissa McCarthy as Ursula, the sea witch who first befriends and then hoodwinks her, heads for cinemas.
The world of Disney princesses has traditionally been one of doe-eyed, ultra-feminised beauties – Cinderella, Snow White, Belle and Tiana – who whistle while they do the housework. But Ariel’s journey from aquatic royalty to boy-chasing landlubber, which Disney first told in its animated Little Mermaid, from 1989, has long been cherished as a queer allegory.
The origins of the fairy tale lie in the unrequited love of its author, Hans Christian Andersen, for Edvard Collin, a close friend who did not respond in kind when Andersen said in a letter to him, “I languish for you as for a pretty Calabrian wench ... My sentiments for you are those of a woman.”
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Disney’s animation eschewed the tragedy of Andersen’s vision – his lovelorn mermaid is turned to foam – in favour of a very straight happy-ever-after. But even this sanitised version retained its allegorical outline: constrained by the patriarchal norms embodied by her stern father, King Triton, Ariel yearns to find a world where she can be herself.
When I first watched the original I was convinced she was supposed to be Divine but it wasn’t public knowledge. I mean, the make-up, the look, the attitude – everything about her was obviously inspired by Divine. And now we know this to be true
— Melissa McCarthy on Ursula
“Ariel has an obvious passion for things that aren’t usually accepted by her kind,” as the YouTube critic and trans activist Jennifer Heaton puts it. “Like a closet trans woman stashing away their clothes and make-up, Ariel keeps her fascination with humans a secret from her judging family and only trusts her closest friends with her real feelings.”
With its Caribbean-accented lobster singing the virtues of underwater life to a calypso beat, Disney’s Little Mermaid is also camp, full of the artifice and exaggeration that are part of Susan Sontag’s definition of the form.
“I think we all saw camp in the original and we all loved it,” says McCarthy. “It was in the recipe of our script, and it was certainly there the first time we met and talked about it. I feel like Ursula is a constant lounge act. She’s reeling them in. She’s seducing, manipulating and holding court. Even when she moves she’s pouring herself like a cocktail in a glass. We kept calling her a great broad. That was how we talked about her. She was there for us to dig deeper. Such a juicy kind of character.”
The film’s early use of the song Part of Your World – which the Grammy-nominated Bailey belts out in the live-action version as if her life depends on it – is crucial to LGBTQ-friendly readings of the movie. John Musker and Ron Clements, who directed Disney’s animated original, originally envisaged Part of Your World as a drippy love ballad aimed at Prince Eric, the swashbuckling object of Ariel’s affection. But Howard Ashman, that film’s lyricist and producer, insisted that the song occupy the early spot afforded to Over the Rainbow in The Wizard of Oz, in order to put its longing at the heart of the story.
It was also Ashman, a gay man who was battling Aids throughout the film’s creation – and was a key architect of the 1990s Disney revival – who landed on the idea of a camp genie for Aladdin and an even camper villain for The Little Mermaid. And so a voluptuous sea witch emerged from the watery murk. Ursula is the real star of the tale. Sassy, witty, cunning and a dab hand at drawing up a legal contract, she’s Ariel’s only true female role model.
According to the scholar Laura Sells, Ursula’s song Poor Unfortunate Souls is essentially a drag show instructing the know-nothing mermaid in the art of seduction. “In Ursula’s drag scene,” she writes, “Ariel learns that gender is performance; Ursula doesn’t simply symbolise woman, she performs woman.”
The performative aspects of femininity almost certainly informed Ashman’s aesthetic choices. It was his rendition of Poor Unfortunate Souls that inspired the late Pat Carroll’s performance as Ursula in 1989. “He was brilliant,” she recalled for the 2020 documentary Howard. “I watched every body move of his. I watched everything: I watched his face, I watched his hands. I ate him up!”
It was also Ashman who happened upon an early design for Ursula inspired by Divine, the drag icon and sometime muse of the film director John Waters, as drawn by the animator Rob Minkoff. The creative team immediately pivoted towards her – and to the Dynasty-era Joan Collins – for further ideas. Carroll, for example, was “told to emulate the same low growls that Divine was known for”.
Melissa McCarthy remains glad of the prompt. “When I first watched the original I was convinced she was supposed to be Divine but it wasn’t public knowledge,” she says. “I mean, the make-up, the look, the attitude – everything about her was obviously inspired by Divine. And now we know this to be true.
“I’m a huge John Waters fan, a big Divine fan and a big drag-queen fan. I’ve loved drag since I was in my teens. It’s a fantastic art form. And I absolutely draughted off many drag queens that I know and I love. Because I think there’s confidence and bravado and something amazing about drag. You are paying homage to a certain type of woman, and at the same time you can kind of poke fun at them. It’s a very strange, wonderful balance. It’s self-deprecating and aggrandising.”
The new film also restores an idea from a late-1980s draft of the script to make Ursula the estranged and outcast sister of King Triton (who is played by Javier Bardem).
“It was quite a brilliant move to make King Triton and myself siblings,” says McCarthy. “Because, instead of standard good versus evil, it makes it much more personal and troubling to think that the people who are supposed to love you have cast you completely into isolation and solitude.
“That brought her into a modern world and made me think of her mental health. I think she’s funny and manipulative and, certainly, self-confident to an extreme, but at the same time I thought quite a bit about her damage and her insecurities. All the most interesting characters are a little bit of everything. I have a real soft spot for her.”
The Little Mermaid is in cinemas from Friday, May 26th
