Faith Moore slams Disney’s 2023 Little Mermaid remake as a joyless, overcorrected "Wokerella" apology to feminists, stripping the 1989 original’s symbolic magic—like Ariel’s voice as identity—to avoid backlash, instead framing Eric as potentially under her siren spell. She mocks its dark, disjointed visuals (calling it "Lisa Frank meets dystopia"), Haley Bailey’s uneven acting, and absurdities like dry mermaids in the climax, while tying Disney’s shift to broader progressive over-editing that kills fun. Moore links the film to 2010s feminist critiques of princesses and Disney’s post-Walt "Dark Ages," arguing it proves leftist literalism drains meaning from stories—and life—itself. [Automatically generated summary]
So while we're talking about how bad culture has become, the new Disney remake of The Little Mermaid is out.
And I had to choose between going to see it or driving a screwdriver into my forehead repeatedly.
But luckily, I had access to the person who may be the greatest expert on Disney princesses in America, Faith Moore, who is the author of Saving Cinderella, What Feminists Get Wrong About Disney Princesses and How to Get It Right.
She is a freelance writer and editor.
She has a novel coming out with the Daily Wire this Christmas.
Apparently, the jacket looks great, by the way.
And she is also the stay-at-home mother of two of the most attractive and intelligent boys ever to existed, I think, in the multiverse, as far as it is.
Faith, it's good to see you.
I'm also your daughter.
Hi, Dan.
Oh, my goodness.
That's so exciting.
I'm so thrilled to hear that.
I know.
Well, you know, I was thinking back.
We saw this.
I guess the original Little Mermaid came out when you were maybe seven or eight.
And I remember.
I was six, 1989.
And I remember we went with a friend of yours, and I was sitting next to her father.
And during the big fight scene when Ursula became, the sea witch became a giant, I turned to him and said, whispered, this is actually pretty scary.
And he was pinned against his seat with his wide-eyed look of terror.
How did you experience the original one at six?
That's actually the only scene I remember from that.
I remember that I was six.
We went with my best friend.
It was raining.
I was wearing snowboard or rain boots and Ursula became giant and Eric stabbed her with the prow of a boat and her skeleton came in a flash of lightning and it was absolutely terrifying.
And that's all I remember.
But then of course, after that, I mean, that was the summer of playing mermaids.
I mean, you know, this is how you play mermaids.
You tie a sheet around yourself.
You ask your friend to tie the other side so you're completely immobilized.
You sit on the floor.
You wave your arms around like this.
And everybody played mermaids that summer.
I mean, that was.
So we'd never seen anything like that.
I mean, we had never seen anything like that.
I mean.
So this had a major powerful effect on you.
You wrote a piece, I should have mentioned before, but you wrote a piece in The American Spectator reviewing this.
And I'm going to read just the first paragraph.
The new live-action remake of The Little Mermaid is just the latest stop on Disney's apology tour.
We're sorry they're trying to tell us for all the horribly offensive things we said in your childhood.
Please pay us a boatload of money so we can show you how wrong we were.
What did they do wrong?
I mean, we love that movie, all of us.
What did they do wrong?
Right.
Well, in order to understand this, you have to kind of take a little tour through what has happened between 1989 and now.
So 1989 marks what is now called the Disney Renaissance.
You know, there was the golden age of Disney when actual Walt Disney was at the helm and they produced all kinds of amazing movies like Cinderella and Snow White and Pinocchio and all of those classics that we know and love.
And then for about 30 years, there was what we call the Disney Dark Ages.
They sort of started producing some dud.
They didn't have enough money.
They turned to other things like Disneyland was opening and they kind of stopped caring so much about their feature productions.
And then in 1989, The Little Mermaid comes out and the animation was amazing.
We'd never seen anything like that before.
It was the first movie to feature Howard Ashman and Alan Mencken, who were just coming off Little Shop of Horrors and they kind of reimagined what it meant to tell stories in feature-length cartoons for children.
And, you know, that marked the beginning of The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, all of these movies from my childhood that you remember taking me to, I'm sure.
Maybe it's all a blur at this point, but I remember.
And, you know, and critics loved these movies.
I mean, they came out, the Little Mermaid came out, and every, you know, it was universally loved, like Roger Ebert, the New York Times, you know, Daily News, everybody came out and said, this is an amazing movie.
And this is an amazing princess for a new era.
Here is finally a sort of more feminist princess.
Because even then, since Cinderella and Snow White, there had been sort of like, wait, but she, Snow White spends all her movie sleeping, and, you know, Cinderella is just needing to be rescued by a man.
And so now finally we have Ariel.
She's a feminist princess.
And on we go on to Belle, on to Jasmine, on to all of these people who we all loved.
Okay, seems fine.
Then the children that watched those movies grew up.
And while they were growing up, whatever wave of feminism was happening in the early, like, you know, in the 2010s or something, I've lost count of which wave we're on, but in the sort of 2010s, when people of my generation were suddenly grown up and becoming parents, they looked back at these movies because they wanted to show them to their children.
And they had gone through what one blogger calls a feminist click moment in which they suddenly realized these movies are actually horribly anti-feminist.
And, you know, they sleep through their movies, they get kissed without consent because they're sleeping.
They, you know, Ariel gives up her voice just to be with a man, blah, blah, blah.
And they start blogging.
They blog and they get articles published in popular mommy blogs and on things, places like Huffington Post and all of these things.
And this idea that these movies and these princesses that we loved are so horribly anti-woke seeps its way into the kind of general consciousness of American culture to the point where several years later, like around 2018 or so, now celebrities are kind of saying, coming out and saying, like, Kira Knightley, for example, says, you know, I've banned all Disney princesses from my house because Ariel gives up her voice for a man.
Or, you know, Kristen Bell, who actually herself played a Disney princess, says, you know, isn't it weird to her daughters?
Isn't it weird that the prince kisses Snow White without her permission?
Isn't that weird?
And suddenly now we all think, even those of us who loved the movies, everyone is like, oh, it's too bad that those movies that we really love are so anti-feminist.
Then Disney wants to make some money and they can't figure out why like Woke Arella Part 2 isn't making enough money.
And they're like, well, everybody loved these movies in the past, you know, the Little Mermaid and Aladdin and all of these movies.
Everybody loved them.
Let's remake them in live action.
That'll be great because all these moms and dads that love these movies, they're going to come with their children.
But this is the best part.
We get to correct our mistakes.
We're going to address every single little problem that people have come up with in the years between then and now.
And we're going to fix these problems in these movies.
There's only one problem.
Well, two.
They were never anti-feminist to begin with.
And the fixes that they put into these new movies actually make them 100% more anti-feminist.
Correcting Mistakes00:06:37
All right, give me an example.
Okay, so this movie, The Little Mermaid, one of the main criticisms of this movie is that she wants to become human just because she saw a guy on a boat five minutes ago.
And now her whole, she's going to change her entire species.
And to do it, she's going to give up her voice for a man.
She's going to give up her voice.
And isn't that so awful?
Okay, so in the new movie, um, she her voice is, well, let's back up.
This is not anti-feminist for this reason.
Her voice is a metaphor for very obviously in the original movie.
Her voice is a metaphor for her inner self, right?
Like, right, all fairy tales work by metaphors, right?
That's right.
So, a fairy tale is not ever meant to be taken literally, which is kind of the whole actually, this is kind of the whole problem, right?
Like that now, it's sort of like, yeah, but you know, she did this or said this.
It's like, right, there's also talking animals, witches, fairy godmothers, those things don't she's also a mermaid.
Yes, she's wait, those aren't real.
Sorry, I'm sorry, I should have told you before.
Yeah, yeah, thank you.
What is wrong?
Okay, all right, so she gives up her voice, which is herself, okay, which is her true self.
And we know this because even though the whole deal is she's got to get him to kiss her within three days, and otherwise, she's doomed forever.
Um, she actually doesn't, she fails.
And the reason that she fails is because she doesn't have her true self.
And the true self is the thing that the prince fell in love with to begin with.
He hears her voice and he falls in love with her.
And now she has no voice, and so he doesn't recognize her.
And it's only at the very last minute when she gets her voice back after the, you know, she's already succumbed to the curse, she gets her voice back.
And that's the moment when the prince says, Oh, it's you.
I knew, you know, I didn't know you without your voice, but now your voice is back.
It's, it's you.
So this actually was never a problem to begin with.
It's just that we don't, we didn't understand how to read fairy tales.
So that's amazing.
In other words, the evil witch takes her voice away from her because she knows that without herself, the guy is not going to actually fall in love with her.
She's just a body.
Right.
Well, think about it.
I mean, she could have taken her looks away.
If we want to make it literal, she could have taken her looks and made her ugly.
I mean, that would be the most literal thing to do.
And that would make sense, literally.
If what she has to do is win him with her body, she's going to take her looks.
So she can't.
But instead, she takes her voice because her voice is the thing that it's most difficult to win the guy without, because it really truly is.
So in the new version, right, they have to answer this.
So no, she gives up her voice for a man.
What does this mean?
So they make her voice literal.
They say, okay, well, it's because, you know, her voice is an actual siren song, you know, like the thing that lures sailors to their death when they're sailing through the ocean.
So she now her voice is a literal siren song.
And that is why, first of all, Eric fell in love with her.
That's why.
And so we have to take that away because otherwise he would just fall for her immediately.
Which begs the question, does he actually love her?
Or has she put him under some sort of horrible spell?
Yeah, which is more symbolic of sex, isn't it?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then at the end of both movies, the original and the new one, Ursula actually uses the voice to do this exact thing, to entrap Eric into marrying her to sort of get Ariel out of the picture.
Ursula sort of uses her voice to pretend to be somebody and uses it magically to sort of entrap him and bewitch him so that he forgets about Ariel.
So that's bad in the movie.
So if that's also what Ariel did to him, that's bad, I think.
So now it's like, well, this has solved the problem because it's not, you know, she's not giving up her voice.
She's giving up her voice.
I mean, you know, yeah.
You know, we're talking to Faith Moore, the author of Saving Cinderella, What Feminists Get Wrong About Disney Princesses and How to Set It Right.
The interesting thing to me is in the New York Times, there was an article about this saying the same thing.
This is an apology to work, except in favor of it, saying this is very important work that must be done.
But he complains that it reeks of obligation and noble intentions.
Joy, fun, mystery, risk, flavor, kink, they're all missing.
And so in other words, it's not enough.
It's never enough to make the, and by the way, Wokerella is hilarious.
They should actually make a movie, Wokerella.
I think that would be great.
Okay, have your people call my people.
Yeah.
But the thing is, you can never be Wokerella enough.
So they're not going to get anything out of it.
That's right.
I mean, they're also basically saying, like, so you, yes, thank you.
We needed all this correcting, but please correct.
But it didn't work because the movie, so the movie's bad, but please correct it some more.
Well, that's leftism in a nutshell, right?
It doesn't work, so do it some more.
Just keep doing it.
Just keep doing it.
Yes.
Also, I don't, maybe we probably shouldn't discuss on your show, like, what the kink would be.
Like, I don't, I don't believe.
I don't want to know what fish do when they're getting kinks.
I mean, is that what he's actually taught?
I don't, I don't know.
What about just as a movie?
How is the star, Haley Bailey?
Hallie Bailey is, she can sing, but she can't act.
I think the movie, I think if you've never ever seen or actually heard of the original movie and it happened to be playing under the rock where you live, then you might be so glad to receive some form of entertainment because you're living under a rock that you are fine with it.
You know, like it, it's okay.
Basically, all of the joy and the humor and the fun have been sucked out of it.
It's filmed in this kind of very dark, with this sort of very dark filter, except for these really weird moments that look like those kind of Lisa Frank folders that they used to have in the 80s, those big folders with like multicolored like dolphins and stuff on them and your trapper keeper or whatever.
And suddenly it'll be that and then back to like very dark, somber.
I mean, all of the kids in the audience were very bored.
Joy Sucked Out00:01:11
Were they?
Quite bored.
And then at the very end, there's a scene where all the mermaids come out of the water and everybody started laughing because they look wet.
So, you know, I think it's like fine.
It's not terrible.
There's nothing like, there's nothing like really, really objectionable unless you kind of do the deep dive that I'm doing here.
But why?
You know, it's no good.
And also, I mean, this thing about taking everything literally and humorlessly in a fairy tale is in itself so indicative of what the left does with all of human life.
You know, they take all the romance, all the glee, all the symbolism out of life.
And so they miss everything that life is about.
And so they do the same thing with a fairy tale.
It makes perfect sense.
Yeah, that's absolutely right.
And, you know, we can't tell stories if we can't figure this out.
All right, we got to stop there.
The author is Faith Moore.
I met her once before, but I can't remember where she's actually related to Spencer Clavin, although Spencer Claven, she's related to both me and Spencer Clavin, although Spencer Clavin and I are totally unrelated.
The book is Saving Cinderella, What Feminists Get Wrong About Disney Princesses and How to Set It Right.