TheRedChamber
Apprentice
- Joined
- Mar 21, 2014
- Posts
- 2,078
The thing I had a problem with about the story is that at the end of the movie, you realize the story never really about Ariel, but her father. He's the one who learns the lesson around the perils of stripping your daughter of her autonomy to suit your own interest in her life. Any of his daughters could've been substituted for Ariel with their own desires and dreams and it would've played out just the same way, ultimately with Triton learning the lesson and changing at the end of film to "allow" his daughter to make her own choices, for better or worse.
And again, her giving up her voice was, in my opinion, symbolic of ridding herself of the one thing her father appeared to value in her (her singing being similar to her dead mother's, which is a whole other level of twisted.) It's only after he exchanges his soul for Ariel's at Ursula's that he expresses any consideration for her as a whole being to her. Before that it was only ever about her performing for him.
Yes, that's certainly a better reading of it than I'd come up with. That said, it still feels a bit thin, as I'd expect both of them to have learned some kind of lesson by the end. The autonomy part is interesting because she always seems to do whatever she wants anyway and as she nearly gets eaten by a shart in the first five minutes and then trades her soul to the most obviously cartoonishly evil woman ever, as a father I'm kind of on his side! Still, this is the sort of thing that makes characters come alive.