Ursula

I know little girls love them, but sweet or “sassy,” Disney heroines bore me silly. Disney villainesses are another story. Those broads kick ass—none more so than evil, oozy Ursula in The Little Mermaid (1989). Making the sea witch an octopus instead of another merperson was inspired (and bringing in Pat Carroll to provide her voice was a masterstroke).

I can’t imagine the impression this cartoon makes on the young misses. It is dark, though light years less so than Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale. Nor is it as preachy, blessedly. In the original, the little mermaid wants a human—i.e., eternal—soul as much as she wants a human body to woo her human prince. The merfolk, she has learned, merely dissolve into foam when they die, and that’s that: oblivion. I have to say, Andersen, surely a closet sadist, throws some nasty stuff at his heroine. Yes, she gets the soul if not the man in the end, but it’s hard to feel happy for her, especially when we’re told further conditions apply. Dissolution never looked so good.

In the screenwriters’ hands, this metaphysical business is reimagined—and much diluted—as Ursula’s Garden of Poor Unfortunate Souls, which is where mermaid Ariel (voice of Jodi Benson) will be planted if she fails to win the undying love of Prince Eric (voice of Christopher Daniel Barnes) with her new, witch-given gams. [SPOILER ALERT] Ariel gets the prince. Her dysmorphophobia remains undiagnosed, however.

“If this weren’t a family picture, I’d cut out your tongue.”