But maybe the actress is really good?
At the very least she can sing. That’s better than Hermione as Belle, for starters.
Yes, that is exactly my point.
Sauron, you first post in the thread discussed Disney changing Ariel’s race. Not her skin color, but her race. Well, the reason I find that crazy is we don’t know what Ariel’s race is other than mermaid. You are assuming her race is white. But there are pale skinned, blue eyed people who are categorized as black. So who is to say this is a “race change”?
If Vanessa Williams were thirty years younger and she had been cast to play Ariel, would you find it objectionable? After all, VW is a black woman. We’d have the same presumed racial swap we have now, correct? Or would you feel like VW is close enough skin tone-wise to the cartoon that it’s no big deal what her race is?
To think about this further, if Disney were to do a live action version of the Proud Family and they cast a dark-skinned girl to play the light-skinned Penny, would this register to you as a big change? Or would you feel like nailing the skin tone is low priority to whether the actress can act like Penny and look enough like her through clothing and hairstyle? What if the dark skinned actress killed it in the audition? Should the casting director go with the subpar light-skinned actress just because her skin tone lines up with cartoon Penny’s better? How would that make good business sense?
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Genies are blue (apparently). That’s an intrinsic part of genies, I suppose.
Mermaids aren’t white. They’re mermaids. Being white isn’t an intrinsic part of mermaids – having a fish tail for legs is.
Psst, that’s a little racist. You’re supposed to say Chilean Sea Bass-American now.
But to claim that merely casting a live actress who happens to have somewhat darker skin tone than the cartoon character (we don’t know yet how Disney will present the actress’s hair and eye colors) is “changing an icon” is intrinsically approaching the subject “from a racial standpoint”.
Halle Bailey actually does look quite a bit like cartoon Ariel, insofar as an actual human woman can look like a combination of an animated character and a fish. The fact that you think her relatively minor difference in skin tone qualifies as “changing” the character of Ariel in a way that makes her no longer recognizable as Disney’s “established” “icon” reflects America’s cultural obsession with racial classification more than any objective alteration in the look of the character.
<nitpick>Disney Genies are color-coded by alignment. Jafar becomes a red genie after his requisite idiotball wish</nitpick>
Which raises the question, what is the relationship between Genies and lightsabers?
Follow-up: If the live-action version had changed the shade of Ariel’s red hair from, say, cartoon Ariel scarlet to some human redhead shade, that would be an objectively bigger visual shift than changing Ariel’s peachy-beige skin to Halle Bailey’s peachy-bronze. But subjectively, nobody would even register it as a significant change.
It really is all about our ingrained notions of racial categories being fundamentally, hugely important differences between people. But mermaids (as far as we know) don’t have racial categories. They just have skin. And scales.
Thats really the end of the argument. They arn’t even fucking human.
If I were casting the movie, I would have went with Sadie Stanley (if she could sing.) Not only does she have the right look, but she has already starred in one Disney animated-to-live adaptation. (Not a very good one, but still…)
I googled her. Not a natural redhead- Her actual hair is brown.
I think the main challenge anytime you make a live action version of an animated film or comic book is having the character be grounded in reality, still recognizable as the 2-D character and doesn’t look like someone in cosplay or a weird creepy CGI. To your point, people only “care” about her shade of skin color because or all the racial and political connotations humans ascribe to skin color. There is really no reason Ariel’s skin being several shades darker should matter any more than her hair being a more realistic “red” color than in the cartoon.
Exactly. Which is why her father King Triton will be played by this actor.
I shouldn’t have said “race” in my first post; I was focused on what others were saying, and followed that narrative. My fault.
Again, the issue for me is changing the look of an iconic (for 30 years, anyway) Disney character. I would be making the same point if the live-action version was going to change Ariel’s fish tail / scales from pale green to pink or purple, or changing her hair from red to yellow.
I’m approaching this from a character / brand perspective, not racial. Disney has spent millions upon millions of dollars for three decades promoting the Ariel character / brand based on a rigidly defined set of physical characteristics. Changing those characteristics now for no good reason (or at least no reason of which I’m aware) seems counterproductive to me.
Suppose the reason is “Halle Bailey is an enormously talented performer and blew the competition out of the water in her audition”. Would that be a “good reason”, in your opinion?
No, for two reasons:
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I don’t believe Halle Bailey is so far beyond every other possible actress who could play this role that her casting is a no-brainer. If she is, then the vast majority of the production cost should be her salary, because otherwise the movie couldn’t get made.
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Regardless of who plays the role, the character of Ariel shouldn’t be affected. If I got the role – a 53-year-old-man who can’t sing – I would expect massive CGI to be employed (along with Oscar-worthy voiceover work) to make me look and sound like Ariel as she’s been depicted for 30 years.
Okay. Some of us think things like singing and acting ability are far more important to such a role than skin color. Apparently, you feel differently.
Why is the visual appearance of Ariel so important? And which of these features do you expect them to maintain in a live-action remake?
-Perfectly flawless skin
-Eyes the size of lemur eyes
-Two solid bars of pure white to replace human teeth
-Hair the color of ripe tomatoes
-A waist about twice as wide as her biceps
-Skin the color of white peach flesh
If you’re fine casting an actress with skin blemishes, whose eyes are not readjusted in CGI to become inhumanly large, who has teeth, who doesn’t dye her hair a profoundly unnatural color, and who has the kind of waist achievable without severe body modification, but you DRAW THE LINE AT SKIN COLOR SIR, that’s a little odd, don’tcha think?
Nice.
As I’ve said repeatedly, I’m not discussing skin color per se. I’m discussing the characterization of Ariel as she’s been portrayed for 30 years.
Would you be offended if Disney employs CGI to make Halle Bailey look like the accepted version of Ariel? They made Will Smith blue to be the Genie in Aladdin, and he’s a far more established star than Halle Bailey.
I have no issue with Halle Bailey as an actress. I’m sure she’s fantastic at her craft.
Edited to add:
I give up. Many of you seem determined to put your own spin on what I’m saying, despite my repeated attempts to explain. Either I’m failing to make my point in an understandable manner, or there’s a willful misinterpretation of my posts. Either way, further discussion seems pointless.
I don’t really care about these choices by Disney – I’m trying to highlight how cultural and societal emphasis on the importance of race and skin color is unnecessary and even harmful, and we should deliberately and purposefully be trying to fight against it.
But they changed the characteristics of Belle in Beauty and the Beast, too. Cartoon Belle has a pronounced widow’s peak and very abundant dark brown hair in a topknot, Emma Watson Belle doesn’t. Cartoon Belle has much pinker skin and curvier eyebrows than Emma Watson Belle. Cartoon Belle wears long yellow gloves and other accessories with her iconic ball gown, Emma Watson Belle doesn’t.
Objectively, this is as much of a visual change as making Ariel’s skin a few shades darker. The reason you think that the live-action casting “changed the look” of Ariel so much more than Belle is, again, all about race, even if you don’t intend it that way. You are just culturally conditioned, as we all are in American culture, to think that people in different racial categories “look different” in a much more fundamental way than people in the same racial category, even if the objective visual differences between them are smaller.