Contradicting Popular Opinion: Little Mermaid

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“I know that the human being and fish can co-exist peacefully.”

Contradicting Popular Opinion:

A.K.A.

An Enquiry Concerning Why Your Favorite Movie Sucks: Little Mermaid Edition

Listen, I’m not one of those guys that is unjustly critical of Disney movies. Disney may be an “evil empire” but they have put out a lot of good products.

Everything put out by Disney/Pixar has been good. Everything.

Lilo and Stitch has a greater emotional range than most dramas. The old 101 Dalmations is this Homeric epic of love and loyalty. Beauty and the Beast is one of the great musicals. Aladdin is this wonderful adventure story about freedom, identity and power.

And then there is The Little Mermaid. I hate The Little Mermaid. I can’t be in the same room as this movie.

First off, the animation is crap. The animators hadn’t yet achieved the crispness nor the smoothness of the later Disney films. The animation of The Litle Mermaid doesn’t seem to have the dedication and craftsmanship of the earlier Disney films. It feels like an awkward transition between eras.

Actually it feels like one of those cheap DIC cartoons like “Liberty Kids” or “Archie’s Weird Mysteries.” But the animation is slightly better than “Clutch Cargo.”

The character design just seems bland. That is as nicely as I can put it.

The music is decent, I guess.

The film doesn’t really have a terribly positive view of women. The female leads are a ridiculously naive, virginal fish, and a terribly malevolent, big tittied octopus.

Maybe she isn’t a fish; I don’t really get the whole mermaid thing. Well, I know that the myth allegedly came from drunken horny sailors ogling lactating manatees. In the context of the myth though, how does it work? Do they shoot out eggs to reproduce? Do they breastfeed their young like mammals? The mermaids certainly seem to possess mammalian attributes (read as: tig ole bitties). Their tails move in a mammalian way, instead of side to side like a fish. Are they breathing water? Do they have gills? Can they live in freshwater? Too many questions…

I reckon my big problem with The Little Mermaid is this: it is f*cking creepy. It is a creepy ass movie. Fish are creepy. This film is ostensibly a children’s movie, but it is about Faustian deals, Rastafarian crabs, large chested octopuses, people being turned into kelp, and some weird form of fish bestiality.

And it is bestiality. There is something a little depraved about carnal infatuation with a fish, sentient though she may be. At some point The Little Mermaid just turns into Dagon right? (Granted Dagon ups the ante by making the human/octopus coupling incestuous as well.)

I know, I praised Beauty and the Beast earlier, and that can be taken as “furry” pornography, but at least in that instance the subject was a cursed human. And he still breathed air and walked on two legs and all that business. Beauty didn’t fall in love with the footstool or the Jerry Orbach candle stick.

In Beauty, love allows the beast to unlock his true physical form.

But Mermaid just paints the females as deceivers. They deny their true form to snag a husband. Then they reveal their horrible octopus tentacles.

Maybe that is a more accurate depiction of marriage…. wait… My wife reads this column. This is not an accurate perspective of female mating goals.

If we take this as an allegory for inter-racial couples, it doesn’t really send the best message. How would it translate? The white girl puts on blackface when visiting her prospective lover’s family?

Or maybe it would be like a guy pretending to have a prosthetic leg to date a cripple.

No it just doesn’t work.

Neither does the movie.

In conclusion, bad animation, big tittied octopus, women are not man-traps, and blackface is bad.

Pretending to have a fake leg, though? Comedy gold!

Pimping is pretty easy, but not at all necessary

Robtrain lovingly goes over the story of the reprehensible Oscar winner, Braveheart, failing to see the connection between that film’s Gibson and the religious zealot of today. Mel was always the creepy sort of Catholic. The film, like Mr. Gibson, is homophobic, misogynistic and has an unhealthy martyr fixation. It’s also pretty bad history. And the battle scenes are rubbish. Bad chaotic editing. For an example of good chaotic editing, watch The Wild Bunch or the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

But hey, that’s just my opinion.

This week’s Nyogtha is good reading, even though it makes a slight towards The Serpent and the Rainbow.

Mondo Culto does what I’ve been doing for months now: talk about Cronenberg. Brad doesn’t show as much love as me. He also doesn’t quite get the overall continuity of Cronenberg’s career, but so it goes.

Apparently an associate of mine is some sort of semi-celebrity. Visit Seven Spoon For a level of hipness I can never achieve.

I also seem to be writing an advice column for moodspins. Did any of you know about this thing? Huh…