Unfortunately, that’s faint praise.Ī lot of ink and pixels have testified to the value of Black children and their moms being able to see themselves in a Disney heroine, and that’s a powerfully admirable goal – as well as a long-overdue one, given the brand’s still overwhelmingly White majority of characters. But star Halle Bailey, in the role of Ariel, has nothing to apologize for: She’s the best thing about this movie. This feels lousy to say, because I was rooting for a huge success to follow the noxious backlash to the trailer last year: Some people apparently couldn’t handle the audacity of reinventing a cartoon character as a Black actress. This latest chapter in Disney’s never-ending quest to impose all of its hits on us again, in live-action format, is a profound miscalculation on almost every level, especially about how to revisit a beloved animated property that boasts some pretty problematic themes. More than one kid was wandering among the aisles by the time we passed the 90-minute mark of the 135-minute affair, which begs the question: Who, exactly, is this movie for? Why does it exist? I can report that the children in my small-town movie theater were checked-out at best. They’ve obscured the great Melissa McCarthy, playing Ursula, in a murk of bottom-of-the-ocean “natural light.” And they’ve retained the central plot, which confers happy-ending approval on a young woman making bodily-harming sacrifices in order to get the guy. They’ve jettisoned the fish song, “Les Poissons,” purportedly deeming it too cartoonish (what?) but given a dull musical number to Prince Eric (Jonah Hauer-King). Which makes the dour, overlong, dimly-lit and still pretty sexist product they’ve just released completely baffling.

But such tales are also social and cultural commentaries about what it means to be human: they encapsulate our beliefs and mores, express our weaknesses and strengths, and expose our deepest fears and desires.Disney’s had decades to think about how to update “The Little Mermaid” for new generations of viewers. The authors leave interpretation largely to the reader, but they do provide a compact overview of the genre, noting that mermaids “reflect our fascination with and fear of female bodies and of water and our dread of predators or poisonous creatures that live in or near water. Bacchilega and Brown’s volume brings together dozens of tales from a diverse array of cultures, including three that have never before appeared in English.

Reading all these kid-friendly mermaid books left this adult reader wishing for juicier fare - and I slaked my thirst with two recent nonfiction titles, Carolyn Turgeon’s 2018 book “The Mermaid Handbook: An Alluring Treasury of Literature, Lore, Art, Recipes, and Projects” and the 2019 folklore anthology, “The Penguin Book of Mermaids” (edited by Cristina Bacchilega and Marie Alohalani Brown).

Julian and the mermaid