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The Little Mermaid And The Seamaid

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Gender in communication studies indicate that social institutions can shape several individuals’s personality and perspectives. Social institutions can help these individuals determine what’s correct and incorrect or enforce specific norms, especially in early childhood development. Academic facilities and restrooms are examples of social institutions. However, the media is known to be ranked the highest in the list of social institutions, specifically the television industry. The television industries has been producing infamous animation for numerous decades, thus allowing them to obtain extremely high levels of income. Would such a production that’s booming with business have some type of sovereignty on their audiences? Indeed, because cartoons …show more content…

Disney also owns a history of controversies with their “magical” ideologies in films. In a study conducted by Chyng Feng Sun and Erica Scharrer, college students were asked to create a critique and analysis of Disney’s film, The Little Mermaid and Hans Christian Andersen’s The Seamaid. Obviously the students were highly entertained with the colorful images and the sing alongs in Disney’s version of the story, but they’ve made crucial statements. “I know they had to have changed the story because of the portrayal of Ariel and other women and how they have stereotyped Disney thin, more developed bodies than a girl of that age” (p. 50), states a student in Sun and Scharrer’s article. Then after reading The Seamaid, another student claims, “I realized how much the Disney version influenced me . . . while I was reading the little sea maid, I was picturing Ariel, from the Disney story. I was actually quite disappointed to see such an old-fashioned frumpy-looking girl in the pictures. Isn’t that terrible? I was conditioned to expect the long-haired, doe-eyed, big-breasted girl from Disney, not a “normal” looking mermaid/girl!” (p.50), indicated in Sun and Scharrer’s research. Andersen’s The Seamaid lies in the same genre as the Grimm Brothers’ tales, meaning that the story consists of darkness, sloppiness and of course no happy ending. Disney wanted to create a family-friendly movie, resulting in producers beautifying the entire story. Which consists of portraying all the women in The Little Mermaid as having a primary body image of skinny figures, wearing revealing clothing and being

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Importance of Princess Figures Isabelle Gill published an article title, “Representation of Disney Princesses in Media.” The main idea in this text it that there is a bias representation of women in many forms in the media. The article refers to how in movies and media women are shown as beautiful and how domesticated they are. This limits women to only being valued for their physical appearance and the contributions they make in the home.

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Throughout the entirety of literature, mermaids are depicted to be extremely beautiful, living the perfect life, and finding their other half in the form of a prince. Timothy Schaffert may be widely recognized for doing the exact opposite in “Mermaid in the Tree”. In Schaffert’s “Mermaid in the Tree”, the author portrays the mermaid’s life as a pitiful one, filled with heart break and deceit. Timothy Schaffert brings this to light through a character named Axel. Axel is recognized as an evil character due to his greediness and his detrimental behavior towards others, especially the Mermaid.

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However, the later Disney films have gradually attempted to break away from this stereotype resulting in stronger female characters like Ariel, Mulan, and Elsa among others. Keeping this transition in mind, this paper uses semiotic analysis of four popular Disney films, namely, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), The Little Mermaid (1989) and Mulan (1998) to depict the influence of societies ' changing perceptions of women on the portrayal of Disney princesses. These films taking into account the earliest film and certain popular characters that have represented a shift from being the coy damsel in distress to a woman who plays an active role in determining her own destiny. The portrayal of the Disney princess has changed in accordance with the development of women in society over time (1937 to 2013) from demure and traditional to

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Provided that, this film caters to the ideal western image of beauty. Ariel along with her sisters are presented having very slim hourglass figures. These characters conform to the ideologies of beauty also by having doe-eyes, a button nose, big smiles, symmetrical faces and luscious long, voluminous hair. All essential features that can be described as “beautiful” by society’s gender norms. Ariel’s sisters are also portrayed in the beginning of the film as high maintenance gals, since they are applying makeup to always look appealing.

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The characters in The Little Mermaid are stragetically designed in a way that conveniently adheres to stereotypical ideas of how males and females should behave, value, and appear according to their gender roles in a patriarchal society that demeans women. In order to do this, the main male characters, including King Triton and Prince Eric, must depict hypermasculinity to dramatically contrast from the creation of their fragile and inferior female counterparts. This is to also exhibit the men’s hypothetical ownership over these women, and using their displayed incompetence as justification of their assumed possession of Ariel. Ariel, the central female character, is depicted as beautiful, because she meets stereotypical standards of beauty

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In this article, Andersen’s story of the mermaid wishing to be loved by a human prince is one of the few classic made-up fairy tale. It’s one of the greatest Disney musical version to the young readers. An artist duo Metaphrog serves a great example in recreating the little mermaid though the young readers that’s only familiar with their vision that can be shocking by the end, which is true to the original story. The author keeps both rhythm of Andersen’s writing as well as the unhappiness that he loved so much, but none of the character in the story smiles and their brows are crumple by the worry

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