Everyone needs to calm down about The Little Mermaid

‘I do not think we do our children any favours by pretending that slavery didn’t exist,’ wrote Royal Academy of Dramatic Art chair Marcus Ryder, in a blog about the newly remade Disney adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale The Little Mermaid. ‘Setting the fantastical story in this time and place is literally the equivalent of setting a love story between Jew and Gentile in 1940 Germany and ignoring the Jewish holocaust,’ he wrote.’ Not to be outdone, the singer Paloma Faith wrote on Instagram after she’d been to watch the remake that, ‘As a mother of girls, I don’t want my kids to think it’s OK to give up your entire voice and your powers to love a man’. She went on to say that this isn’t what we should be teaching the next generation of women, referring to the fact that in the film, Ariel traded in her mermaid tail for a pair of legs in order to marry her prince and sail off into the sunset.