So we know the story. Ariel makes a deal with Ursula the sea witch: she gets legs, and if she can get Prince Eric to fall in love and kiss her in three days, she can stay on land, but if she doesn’t, she becomes another poor, unfortunate soul. But Ursula didn’t say anything about her getting her voice back. Presumably she’d have been mute for life, right?
But in the song “Kiss the Girl,” Sebastian says, “She don’t say a word and she won’t say a word until you kiss the girl,” implying that once she gets him to fall in love, she’ll be able to speak again.
So would she have gotten it back if the plan had worked?
I would assume not. First, it wasn’t a condition of the spell that Ariel had to win Eric’s love without speaking. She gave Ursula her voice as payment for casting the spell. It wouldn’t be good business for Ursula if Ariel not only got what she wanted out of the deal but also got a refund on her original payment.
Second, we know that Ursula wasn’t generous or even fair in her dealings with “poor unfortunate souls”. It seems unlikely that Ariel was ever going to get more out of their bargain than what was explicitly promised to her. Even if Ursula had implied that Ariel would regain her voice then I wouldn’t trust her to actually come through on that unless it was part of their magically binding contract.
Sebastian was probably engaging in a bit of poetic license with his song, although I suppose it’s also possible he was confused. He was being restrained by Flotsam and Jetsam while Ursula was explaining the terms of their deal, so he may not have caught it all.
And no her voice was given in payment for the spell. The kiss would have made the change permanent.
Of course in true Disney fashion all of the darker parts of the original fairy tale have been removed, including the original ending, so who really knows.
Disney’s depiction of the Sea Witch is actually much darker than Andersen’s. In his story she’s not really a villain at all. At worst she’s a magic user who drives a hard bargain, but there’s no indication that she’s using the Little Mermaid as a pawn in some greater scheme. She keeps up her end of the deal and doesn’t try to interfere with the Little Mermaid’s blossoming relationship with the prince. The “other woman” he ditches the Little Mermaid for is likewise innocent of wrongdoing.
As for the ending, what people tend to remember about Andersen’s ending is that the Little Mermaid dies, but he wasn’t content to leave it at that himself. He chose to tack on what is perhaps the worst, most condescending, and preachiest “happy” ending ever. The Little Mermaid becomes a good spirit who will eventually get to heaven, but whenever children are naughty it makes the [del]Baby Jesus[/del] Little Mermaid cry and forces her to spend more time in this limbo state. But when children are good, it helps her get to heaven faster!
There’s certainly room to criticize Disney’s fairy tale adaptations, but even at their treacliest I don’t think the folks at Disney have ever come up with anything that bad.
And even gives her a way out (her sisters sell their hair to the sea witch in exchange for a dagger, which the mermaid can use to cut the prince’s throat and live). I used to hate the Disney version. Still prefer the Andersen, but I appreciate both works for different reasons.
As a character I prefer Ursula to Andersen’s Sea Witch just because she’s more entertaining, but I do think having her show up to cast a mind-control spell on the prince is kind of cheap plot twist. Having the prince actually be attracted to someone else (whether an innocent princess or Ursula in disguise) is IMHO more interesting, even if he winds up with the Little Mermaid in the end – as he surely would in any Disney version of the story.
Oh, I meant to link to this earlier, but for anyone who didn’t see it there was a pretty funny Little Mermaid sketch on SNL a few months back, with Anna Kendrick as Ariel: http://vimeo.com/91380243
TVTropes also weighed in, debating both sides. Quite an issue!
Lamia, yes, I agree it’s far more devastating if the prince really falls for someone else. The mind control makes it, for lack of a better word, less personal.
Weirdly, I always thought it was more of an all-or-nothing bet, like if Ariel gets the Prince, she gets the whole package back. I know this isn’t based on anything specific in the text, other than perhaps the one lyric in the song. I suppose it always seems to me like Ariel stands to lose everything - her voice, the prince, and her soul - so the opposite should be the win. That’s based on her voice being her stake, although Ursula seems to suggest the voice is the vig. (I have no idea why I’ve taken this gambling metaphor so far.)
I’ve also wondered if Ursula’s motivation is purely to be sadistic and torment Ariel, adding her to the collection of souls, or if she anticipated an endgame where she has King Triton in a bad bargaining position to get his trident, and thus control of the sea. (I’ve read somewhere that in the original Disney script, Ursula is King Triton’s sister, so at some point when the story was being developed, there was more of a personal vendetta against Triton.)
Better go back and re-watch it, delphica. It’s pretty clear that Ursula’s playing the long game, even before Flotsam and Jetsam first bring Ariel in for a consult.
I think it was to use Ariel to get to Triton the whole time. Early on when she’s watching Ariel she says, “Flotsam! Jetsam! I want you to keep an extra close watch on this pretty little daughter of his. She may be the key to Triton’s undoing…” So I think she knew the whole time that this was her way to power.
I’m pretty sure she was out to get Triton from the beginning. Had Ariel been a mer-commoner Ursula presumably would have been willing to sell her a spell at her usual “reasonable” rate, but she had her eye on Ariel from early on and knew she’d be a powerful bargaining chip in a confrontation with Triton.
I was thinking earlier about why Ursula wanted Ariel’s voice in the first place. In the Andersen story, where the witch isn’t villainous, it seems like a pretty straightforward deal where the Little Mermaid gives up something of great value to her in exchange for a powerful spell – losing one physical ability to gain another. But since Ursula is a villain it seems like there may be more to her scheme than that. Maybe she just plans to sell Ariel’s voice to some other mermaid who wants to be a singer, but she does store the voice in her own necklace and we see that she is willing to use it when she goes after Prince Eric. It occurred to me that she might have been planning all along to use Ariel’s voice to trick Triton, either by luring him into a trap (“Help Daddy, I’ve been captured by humans!”) or by disguising herself as Ariel to take her place at court.
Oh, I pulled up “Poor Unfortunate Souls” on YouTube to see how much of the contract is shown. But all you can see is “I hereby grant unto Ursula, the witch of the sea, one voice, in exchange for”, followed by a quick scroll down past what looks like a lot of fine print, and then “for all eternity.” Turns out there’s actually a screencap on TVTropes too, illustrating the Magically-Binding Contract article, and the middle part that can’t be clearly seen in the video is just a bunch of “lorem ipsum” style filler. So the exact terms of the contract remain a mystery, but I continue to think it highly unlikely that anything in the fine print is there to benefit Ariel.
OK, now let’s debate what would have happened had Aladdin used his last wish on a selfish desire instead of freeing Genie and instead given the lamp to Sultan or Jasmine to have them spend their last wish on freeing him? Would it would have worked out?
What bugged me about this movie is that Ursula offers to Triton to turn Ariel back into a mermaid from the piece of seaweed, as long as Triton takes her place as a piece of seaweed AND turns over his trident to her, a trident that will grant Ursula godlike powers.
:dubious:Now remember Triton has many other daughters, and he is essentially handing a nuke over to her.
And what does Ursula do not a few seconds after getting the trident? Try to murder Ariel!, and undoubtedly she would go on to ravage and murder many humans and mermaids including Triton’s other daughters.
It would be like a absolute maniac who you know will kill as many people as possible, including the child of yours they are holding hostage and all your other children, holds one of your children hostage if only you turn over a nuke. And you know the second they have it they will use it.
Hmm, hard to say. While it would technically be possible for the next Master of the Lamp to free Genie, there are a lot of ways that plan could go wrong. Going from the fairy tale, if Aladdin kept the lamp then his wife would wind up falling for the “new lamps for old” scheme and trading it to an evil sorcerer.
Going just from the movie, the Sultan is well-meaning but a little too gullible to be trusted with a powerful magical object. It’s easy to imagine him handing the lamp off to a persuasive but evil Jafar type who’d convinced him that he really needed to make two wishes but would totally free Genie with the third one. Jasmine is sharper, but she’s also young, sheltered, and idealistic. She might decide on her own or be persuaded by either an honest do-gooder or a convincing con artist that it’s for the greater good that the lamp get passed around a few more times so more wishes could be made. And once that gets going, everyone has good reason to claim they’d free Genie but instead pass the responsibility off to someone else.
That’s all assuming the lamp can be given as a gift. I don’t believe the movie ever spells out any rules for becoming Master of the Lamp aside from just having it in one’s possession, but IIRC we only know of it changing hands through theft or trickery. Perhaps there’s some sort of Elder Wand style limitation on who can control the lamp. That’s pure speculation, but either way the lamp would be a tempting target for any thief who even suspected its value. The longer Aladdin & Co. hung onto it the more likely it would be that someone else would manage to steal it before Genie could be freed.
