In the original book, the titular mermaid had no soul and thus had to earn one in the afterlife. In the Disney adaptation, Ariel is a ginger.
Ursula's penultimate line "PITIFUL, INSIGNIFICANT FOOLS!" is nothing more than "POOR UNFORTUNATE SOULS", twisted to reflect Ursula's true colors on the matter.
Remember the polyps in Ursula's cave? How they grabbed onto Ariel? They were trying to SAVE HER.
Rewatch Bonus: listen to the polyps after Ariel breaks free from their grip. Amidst all the moaning, one manages to make a cry of "I failed!"
Why do Eric's boots come off in the ocean, and he's barefoot when Ariel brings him ashore, as boots cannot come off in the water that easily? Eric's bare feet being seen is meant to highlight something Eric, a human, has, but Ariel, a mermaid, does not have, which is obviously something (along with legs) she'd need if she wanted to be with him!
Which would explain why she spends so much time looking at her toes after she stops almost drowning.
Er, does that mean that Ariel pulled off Eric's boots herself so she could ogle his feet? No wonder they didn't show that part. If Eric hadn't woken up, the pants would probably have been next!
Kicking off your shoes if you fall into deep water is considered a survival tip; Eric's boots would have been the heaviest thing he could safely lose. Ariel removed his boots not only to admire his feet, but to help pull him to the surface; she's shown having difficulty carrying him.
When Eric was trying to escape the boat he got his foot stuck in a hole. It's possible he lost his boot when he tried to get free of the hole.
At first I thought so too, but if you look closely he still has his boots after that, so they had to have come off some other way. Honestly I'm curious as to why he wasn't wearing socks underneath them.
Maybe he was wearing socks, and they did slide off. Who knows?
Ursula the Sea Witch angrily refers to Ariel as "the little tramp" because she almost got Prince Eric to kiss her, even though she can't speak. Well, Charlie Chaplin, the brilliant silent movie star, was most famous for his "Little Tramp" character, who of course was never heard speaking.
Let's recap who knows about the human world besides Ariel. There is Scuttle, there's Sebastian, and there's Triton. Oh, and Ursula, too. And their knowledge is (therein lies the fridge part) connected to who they are. Scuttle is a creature of the surface, but flees any human, although he has seen some. He knows they aren't monsters, and he knows what they look like, but since he's never spoken to one, his understanding them is limited at best. Sebastian is a crab with capability to go on shore, so he knows quite a bit about humans, as demonstrated in Under the sea, and his small size allows him to spy on them. He knows about their way of life. On the contrary, he's too small-minded to understand them personally, so his opinion of them is likewise. Triton knows them the only way a fish can know them: from under the sea, as this things up there holding the hooks. Hence the "fisheaters" category.
In the beginning scenes of the movie, the sailors and Eric are commenting on the perfect sailing weather, and the sailors say that it must be because Triton is in a good mood, letting Eric know that Triton was, in legend, king of the sea. While they were either joking or being superstitious, Triton was in a good mood: he was about to watch his youngest daughter's musical debut. When she didn't show up and he found out that she went to the surface instead, he was furious at her and later got upset over how harshly he'd spoken to her. So maybe it is the sailors' superstition, but Triton happened to be in a bad mood when Eric and his men got caught up in the storm at night.
If you consider that scene and the concert to occur at the same time, it explains the sudden storm coming out of nowhere. Note Triton's red eyes as he realizes his daughter didn't show up, again.
Impossible. Before the storm scene, Triton and Sebastian were scolding Ariel for having missed the concert.
Regarding the storm, did all the other sailors survive the hurricane? We only see Eric, Grim and Max. What happened to the other sailors?
We see the sailors behind Grimsby on the lifeboat.
At the finale of the "Under the Sea" sequence, we see a number of fish pointing at the rock where Ariel is supposedly sitting. One of them is Mr. Limpet, as seen here (he's the one with glasses)◊. Now, why would a Warner Bros. character be in a Disney movie? Consider this: On May 4, 1987, Disney signed a theatrical distribution agreement with Warner Bros. International for the release of Disney and Touchstone films in overseas markets, with Disney retaining full control of all distribution and marketing decisions on their product. By inserting Mr. Limpet in this sequence, perhaps the animators at Disney were acknowledging that Warner Bros. was "part of their world" by making Mr. Limpet part of Ariel's world.
Ursula is supposed to be half-octopus, but she has six tentacles instead. That is, unless if you count her arms as limbs, which means that she actually indeed has eight limbs from the start.
Octopuses are one of those animals that mutate horribly easily - they've been found with less than eight, right up to dozens of tentacles.
During the chanting part of Ursula's song, one of the words she says in the song is laryngitis a.k.a. the disease that makes you lose your voice!
The line is "Larynxes, glossitis, ad max Laryngitis, la voce to me!" Larynx is the voice box, glossitis is an inflammation of the tongue, la voce is Italian for voice, etc.
During "Poor Unfortunate Souls", Ursula mentions one mermaid wanting to be thinner and the other one being in love with her, and Ursula is explicitly stated to have helped them. It might seem odd that she would pick those two out of her literally dozens (if not hundreds) of victims. But given that Ariel has fallen for Eric, and is in a similar impossible love situation, Ursula is intentionally bringing them up to make Ariel agree to her scheme. She immediately afterwards says that on a few occasions, her clients could not pay the price, when it becomes obvious she intentionally makes sure her victims fail. However, this is meant to give Ariel the belief that this only happened to a few people, and Urusla gives the impression the mer couple lived happily ever after.
Ursula's human alias is Vanessa. Vanessa is a genus of butterfly. Butterflies are well-known as the masters of metamorphosis and mimicry.
Adding to this, the main ingredient in the potion she uses to change herself is a butterfly.
While this version cut out much of the darker material in Hans Christian Andersen's story, it does include a sly reference to the tale's Bittersweet Ending. The film names the mermaid Ariel, which at first glance is simply a reference to the air-spirit of the same name in The Tempest. But at the end of Andersen's original story, the mermaid makes a Heroic Sacrifice to save the prince she loves and throws herself into the ocean to become sea foam; instead of ceasing to exist, she's rewarded for her goodness by becoming an air spirit. - TechnicolorPachyderm
At first the whole "three days to fall in love" concept sounds a bit trite, especially since it takes a lot more than three days to love someone truly. But then you remember that Ursula never wanted Ariel to fall in love. She probably knew true love would take more time to develop and made it three days to ensure Failure Is the Only Option!
Also note that Ursula still interferes and is determined not to let the two kiss even though she knows it probably won't work. She wants to deny Ariel even the slightest chance of success out of spite, and to be absolutely sure that nothing will stop her from ruling the seas.
Ursula's example in "Poor Unfortunate Souls" of the wimpy guy and fat girl, whom she makes buff and thin respectively: their story is "this one longing to be thinner, that one wants to get the girl". They didn't need her magic. He already wanted her just the way she was and she only wanted to be thin to be attractive! This nicely illustrates Ursula's tactic with Ariel. Ursula is the one who says the only way to win Eric's heart is for her to become human, and then immediately sets a deal in front of her to make it happen.
Various small moments in the film seem to show Eric ruling over a seafaring kingdom. If Ursula hadn't been destroyed, her power over the ocean would have caused devastation on land. Following that logic, in addition to protecting Ariel, Eric saved his entire kingdom by destroying Ursula.
Ariel was able to climb up the wedding barge (offscreen, but still) which only had a few skinny poles. Why? She's been climbing up all sorts things before (Eric's ship, the rock during the reprise, getting Eric's body on shore) and is used to improvising. Not to mention that was all done mostly with her arms, which were unchanged by Ursula.
She lives at the bottom of the sea, pretty much everything she does down there is done under a ridiculous amount of pressure from the weight of the water. She climbs all over the place as a human, but she also flawlessly controls a horse-drawn carriage. When they're running crazy, it's because she's letting them. On land, Ariel basically has super strength from the waist up.
Look at all the slapstick Sebastian has to go through after Ariel's transformation. Well who was it that snitched on her to Triton? Thus making him go mad, destroy her stuff and leave her easy prey for Ursula. Laser-Guided Karma.
Also a key point of Sebastian's Character Development is when he agrees to help Eric fall for Ariel. Up until that point, he had only worried about himself (i.e. how Ariel's behaviour would affect him) - and Triton destroying Ariel's stuff and sending her to Ursula had resulted from him worrying about his own skin. The point where he says "...and just be miserable forever" is him realising My God, What Have I Done? and admitting that Ariel is partially in this mess because of him. So he's doing his very best to make up for what he did, and ultimately coming to care for the girl after all.
There are seven seas; King Triton has seven daughters.
In the 2023 version, this is not a coincidence.
If Flounder and Sebastian hadn't been there when Ariel was turned human, Ariel almost certainly would have drowned. Ursula was planning to cheat Ariel by turning her into a human without sending her to the surface!
Ursula wanted to use Ariel as leverage against Triton, though, so she probably wouldn't have just let her drown for nothing. However, the other transformations we see in the series lack the uncomfortableaspects of Ariel's: Triton turned her into a human painlessly and wearing a dress conjured from nowhere, and in the sequel, Morgana transformed Melody quickly and painlessly and even gave her Magic Pants, even though she was using Ursula's magic. Triton made the process painless for his daughter, Morgana manipulated Melody by being nice to her, but Ursula just wanted to terrorize and demoralize Ariel as much as possible, and deliberately made the transformation as nightmarish as she could.
Ursula would have used Flotsam and Jetsam to drag her to the surface if Sebastian and Flounder were not there. If she wanted Ariel dead so pointlessly, she wouldn't have wasted a contract on her.
There's also a bit of Fridge Brilliance regarding Ursula's name and her Mama Bear tendencies; the name Ursula MEANS "she-bear."
Similarly, Ursula's craftiness and planning skills can easily be justified by the fact that she's an octopus—octopods are among the most intelligent of all non-primate animals.
Ariel declaring that she loves Eric sounds like your typical teenage blather because of course it does, she's only ever seen him the one time and they never even spoke, so it feels like Triton's anger is justified even if he overreacts about it... until you realize he has no reason to know that. He knows she goes to the surface all the time, there's no reason to think she's never really met the man she says she loves. He wrecks her grotto solely because he hates humans and she refuses to agree with him. He completely overlooks the legitimate problem with her behavior because what he cares about is establishing dominance: demanding that she sing his praises, uphold his grudges and buy into his prejudices, all while pretending it's about her safety so he can still claim the moral high ground. When he signs the contract to give himself up for her freedom, he's not giving her a get-out-of-bad-decisions-free card, he's making up for throwing her under the bus before by sincerely protecting her.
Of course Ariel can't just write Eric a note. Even if she's seen a human writing tool before, she wouldn't know what the hell it was because she would have learned it from Scuttle (and thus learned wrong), and she lives underwater, where using regular ink on paper is impossible. The only time she writes anything, it's with a magic laser fishbone quill that burns her name magically into a magical parchment. If she had a desk set in front of her, she still wouldn't have a clue what to actually do with it.
Alternatively, it's because she's a princess and her name is the only thing she knows how to write. Y'know, for signing contracts and stuff.
Or, and this doesn't seem to cross anyone's mind because we the audience know it is true, but from an outsider's point of view her explanation would sound utterly insane. Even if she knew how to write, how's she gonna actually explain 1) how she saved him, 2) why she can't speak and finally then try and convince him to kiss her after she just fed him that story. While he'd still take her in because he's a Nice Guy, Eric would be much less willing possibly court this potentially crazy girl. Ariel wins him over by her quirky nature, sure, but it's because he has no reason to consider that she's not potentially insane, just endearing. So her best bet really is to just not make herself seem completely insane and unappealing to him, which means she can't feed him any stories that might sound a little farfetched.
Thinking about "Les Poissons" again, it's very possible that Chef Louis isn't as crazy as he appears—the whole song is shown from Sebastian's point of view, so it's likely that Louis is just preparing a meal the way a normal person would (and singing to himself, which many people do when they're doing something they enjoy) and Sebastian (being one of the animals he would cook) perceives it as something more horrific. Even the terrifying lyrics could fit into this idea—Louis may be singing in French and Sebastian isn't able to understand it, so we're hearing his interpretation of said lyrics.
On the other hand, it could be a perfectly normal and easy-going song for the French. Ever looked up the English translation to "Alouette"? "Les Poissons" isn't really any more horrifying.
The Seashell Bra that the mermaids wear, beside preserving modesty, also serve another doylist purpose: the shells are rigid, so the animators didn't have to care about the underwater Jiggle Physics.
Except when absolutely necessary. Like Ursula.
This is probably the in-universe reason as well. This would probably get both annoying and uncomfortable fast.
A conversation of the creepy things Disney gets away with in kids movies brought me to the sudden realization that the Little Mermaid is, at heart, a watered down version of Faust. Both protaganists feel they've reached the heights of their current lives, both make a Deal with the Devil to pursue a life they believe will bring them more happiness, both fixate on a love interest which leads to them messing up royally, ruining the lives (permanently or temporarily) of a bunch of people, both end up being redeemed at the end. The original Hans Christian Andersen version of the Little Mermaid even more strongly parallels this, as much of the mermaid's motivation was to receive a soul, and at the end of the story she did, sort of. After suffering and dying, instead of just being dead, she is made into a spirit and given the chance of eventually earning soulhood and going to Heaven. In Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and subsequent adaptations, Faust's soul is eventually redeemed after he goes to great lengths to make up for the guilt of ruining Gretchen. In fact, Anderson could have drawn from elements of Faust, as he was well educated, and the legend of Faust predated him by at least 200 years.
Of course Eric became obsessed with Ariel's voice! She's a mermaid! Their voices are irresistible to the human ear! Good thing he spent some time with Ariel when she was mute, he had the chance to actually fall for her for real.
A nice distinction between the mermaid and siren myths; the song is used hypnotically by Ursula in the Vanessa disguise, since in some versions of the myths the sirens were just humanoid.
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When Triton is destroying the grotto, the lighting of the scene makes him appear similar to Satan: an evil-looking figure with "horns" (from his crown) and a "pitchfork" (the trident) almost completely shrouded in shadow in a red, hellish environment. This signifies that he's become a monster in Ariel's eyes.
A plot point for the Broadway musical, in which Triton and Ursula are siblings, is that their father left them two powerful gifts to wield upon his death; Triton his mighty trident, and Ursula her seashell. Triton banished her when she tried to use the shell's power to overthrow him, and while he could have use the trident's power to stop Ursula's schemes once and for all, he instead vowed to use his gift responsibly and to never abuse it for selfish ends, as as Ursula had done. Knowing this, this makes his immense guilt over destroying the grotto even worse. Not only did he do nigh-irreparable damage to his relationship with Ariel, but he also broke the promise he made to himself by spitefully decimating his daughter's collection, thinking it would end his problems and put her in her place. In short, he realized he'd become no better than his nemesis.
In "Poor Unfortunate Souls," during the line, "It's she who holds her tongue who gets her man," Ursula is seen tossing a human tongue into her cauldron. This could be a nod to the original fairytale, in which the sea witch took the mermaid's voice by cutting out her tongue.
This blog post points out that Ariel's first transformation represents a re-birth. Ariel briefly resembles a fetus in a womb, having to walk, and she is naked (except for her Seashell Bra).
The songs being implied to be diegetic actually makes some amount of sense when you think about it. Sailors are known for shanties, so it's not unlikely that they're singing a shanty that's well-known in-universe at the beginning of the movie. "Daughters of Triton" is an in-universe performance. "Part of Your World" is sung by Ariel, a trained singer. "Under the Sea" and "Kiss the Girl" are sung (or at least started) by Sebastian, the court composer. Finally, Ursula used to live at the court and the cook still does live at one, so they would have had some amount of exposure to music.
Why does Eric have a hard time guessing Ariel's name during "Kiss the Girl?" Because in the surface world, "Ariel" was originally a guy's name!
At first, it seems Triton summoned a rainbow out of no water when in actuality, it is a progression of light reflecting on water.
'Part of Your World' is sung three times in the movie. First; light flourishes in ripples underwater. The second; a wave crashes behind Ariel in overcast weather (meaning there's no light refracting). The only thing missing was a rainbow, which is provided at the finale.
While the basic plot of the movie follows Andersen's original story, Ariel has fundamentally different goals than the original little mermaid, and this is what makes the movie's Adaptational Alternate Ending work so well. Andersen's little mermaid is always focused on what will happen to her after death: her choice to become human is not only because she loves the prince, but because she wants an immortal soul like humans have, while merpeople are doomed to Cessation of Existence. So the story's Bittersweet Ending suits her. Though she loses both the prince and her life, she gains what she always wanted just as much, if not more: eternal life as a spirit. Disney's Ariel, on the other hand, wants to live as a human. This is her motive besides love for Eric: she wants to explore the human world, learn what human objects are for, walk, run, jump and dance, and live a free, independent life that she can't in the sea under her father's rule. For this reason, the original tale's Died Happily Ever After ending wouldn't have been bittersweet for her, but much too cruel. Human life is her greatest desire, not just the means to an end that it is for the original mermaid, so she can't possibly leave it behind in the end.
That's not even the worst that can be made of it. How many of those fish and crabs did Sebastian know on a personal level? I mean, when the fish head lands directly in front of him, for all we know, it was someone he considered a friend.
Chef Louis made everything worse. Sebastian had to watch him decapitate, debone, crush, skin, gut, and rub salt into the fish, while singing about how much he loves doing it and how delicious they'll be to devour. Then he says that the crabs are lucky they're dead, because otherwise they'd go into the boiling wateralive. Remember that Sebastian constantly heard Triton say how humans are evil, barbaric fisheaters all the time, and now he's stumbled into a torture cellar/cannibal dungeon crewed by his worst nightmare come to life!
Ursula's first appearance has her lamenting that she's "wasted away into nothing," and "practically starving." At first, you laugh at it, seeing how, er—big, she still is. But wait... if she genuinely believes she's wasted away and feels starved...how big was she beforehand??? Oh God, please don't tell me her One-Winged Angel form was her previous true form, oh God, please...
It could be taken metaphorically - when she lived in the palace she was wealthy and powerful and respected - probably the equivalent of the court magician - and now she's become a nobody.
Ariel signing that contract is effectively her signing away her soul. And without your soul you become a polyp. When I was young, I always figured that was what people look like without souls. When I heard about the sad ending of the original where the Little Mermaid dissolved into foam at the end because mermaids apparently don't have souls, it just made even more sense.
So Ursula is supposed to have an octopus' lower torso. But if you consider the fact that in real life, that's where the octopus' mouth is supposed to be, what is supposed to be the octopus' mouth in real life becomes Ursula's anus!
Maybe it's supposed to be a hint to the audience that, as a chronic liar seeking to destroy Ariel for her own pleasure and profit, she's talking out of her ass when she's making the deal?
The boring part is that it was hard to animate eight tentacles. That's why Morgana, animated eleven years later, got 8—they were able to handle it.
Considering real life female octopuses have their reproductive organs inside their heads, that would mean that Ursula is sterile. Unless she has twoholes beneath those tentacles...
Actually, this makes even more sense when you learn from the supplements that she may or may not have been in love with Ariel's father.
They may or may not be siblings, which is even more horrific. Nobody mentions it in the movie or sequel, Ursula isn't in Ariel's Beginning, and they are siblings on Broadway.
Her being a rather sadistic Depraved Bisexual seems a bit more likely; she clearly enjoys seducing Ariel into a Deal with the Devil, but she also makes clear from the start that it's really Triton she wants to see suffer the most, and Ariel is the means to that end. (Besides, if you put a male who's into other males into a female body, doesn't that kind of make him... straight again? Ursula seems like she'd be just as depraved if she were male.)
Ursula was modeled after, based on, and was supposed to be voiced by Glenn "Divine" Milstead, a drag queen synonymous with John Waters.
She also seems very into Eric, at least physically. She makes sure to get very intimately close with him in her Vanessa disguise, even rubbing her face against him at one point. While this is partly because she needs to keep Eric distracted from Ariel, she takes the closeness much further than she really needs to. She also called him "a catch" in a tone that suggested she desired him even before becoming Vanessa. Considering her heavily implied attraction to Ariel and Triton as well, she probably has an "anything goes" mindset.
So, the lesson here is that Ursula is a sadistic bisexual drag queen pedophile rapist with incestuous tendencies towards both her brother and niece? Who ever said that Disney films were sanitized?
Their mother's name is Athena. The goddess Athena had a problem with the god of the sea, Poseidon. The mother is never shown. Um, wait, what?
But the mother is shown in the prequel and I'm not sure what the Fridge Horror of that is anyway.
It is possible the original post refers to one of the many, many interpretations of Greek myth where Poseidon raped Athena and then stole the children from her that he fathered. It must be pointed out that Athena being present in tie-in films means nothing to the 75% of the fandom that denies their very existence - this Fridge Horror entry works especially well if you believe that there is only one film in which Ariel's mother is practically never mentioned.
Her father is Triton, who's the son of Poseidon and while Athena does hold grudges in the stories, she doesn't tend to punish Poseidon's children for it.
Except Athena and Poseidon were never married, Poseidon married a sea nymph Amphitrite. She (Amphitrite) is Trition's mother, and Ariel's grandmother. In fact, from what I've read, Triton is often portrayed as Athena's foster father.
What exactly do Merfolk eat? Because before anyone replies with the answer a diet of seaweed and other assorted underwater plants I will point to the fact that they very clearly have evolved meat tearing teeth; if they were designed to eat nothing but roughage their teeth would be large and flat just like every other herbivore. So... all those completely and absolutely sapient, laughing singing and dancing, brightly colored jolly fish would have at some point in recent history been a Mermaid's dinner. And they were probably begging for their life as they did it. This not only casts a whole new light on the Merfolk hatred for humans (a past they would rather forget perhaps?) it actually makes Ariel's relationship with Flounder seem rather creepy in retrospect.
Kelp. They eat kelp.
Perhaps krill. They're a good source of protein and too small to converse with on a one on one basis.
How about sharks? The one that attacked Ariel and Flounder certainly didn't seem all that sentient, and shark meat is somewhat popular at seafood restaurants. Assuming they are omnivorous, the mermen and mermaids might well enjoy turning the tables on a predator by eating him. In fact, under other circumstances, Triton might even have congratulated Ariel and Flounder for trapping such a massive shark; that's enough meat for a banquet!
Perhaps it's similar to The Lion King, where a deleted scene shows Mufasa talking to an antelope with the following exchange: "Catch you later!" "Not if I can help it!" Circle of life and all that...
Evolved? This is a setting with species-changing magic. The original merfolk may well have been created from humans by a reversed version of the spell cast on Ariel.
...Which would mean they eat fish.
The creepy part of the "Ariel wants to be One Of Those Fish Eaters" thing isn't just that Ariel wants to be human, but that the end of the story centers on her mentors going ahead and enabling her to do this, consequence free. Think about that for a minute. All the objections Triton raises about humans are still true when the movie ends, they still eat fish in a manner that, to the undersea community, is alarmingly like pedo-snatching (luring unsuspecting victims with a treat and then it's into the van— I mean, ship) and raiding (entire schools of fish being snapped up overnight by nets). It's the in-universe equivalent of the housewife-in-denial in police procedurals, only instead of everyone thinking she's a moron because her husband may treat her like a queen, he's still a serial killer no matter how hard he stands by her, they just shrug and say "Well, you can't stand in the way of true love!"
Surely no one's eating fish in Eric's kingdom once Ariel is Queen.
So, Ariel's got three days to charm True Love's Kiss out of Eric, right? But she doesn't really know the guy at all, he's just a pretty face that she's projected her love of the surface onto. What would have happened if he'd fallen in love and kissed her, but she had realized in that time that she wasn't truly in love with him?
Send Flounder or Sebastian to get her father and have him change her back. Sure, she'd still be mute and Eric would be heartbroken but that's just something she'd have to live with.
Actually Triton would not have been able to change Ariel back, or even get her voice back for that matter. Ursula's contract was "legal, binding and completely unbreakable", even for Triton. His magic couldn't work against it in the end, so there is nothing he could do that would have stopped the effects at the beginning. Ariel made the deal. She would have had to deal with it.
Her family and friends could do a "true love kiss on the forehead" a-la Once Upon a Time and Frozen. The Aesop would be that the ones who truly loved her and she loved back were the ones around her all the time.
Wouldn't work, Ursula clearly states that Eric is the one who has to kiss her and really mean it. She's not going to leave such an exploitable loophole for Ariel to abuse.
In Golden Films's 1992 Mockbuster film, Lena ultimately manages to get Prince Stefan to marry her, but doesn't seem to regain her voice, meaning she's a mute for the rest of her life. It is implied that if Ariel and Eric had gone through uninterrupted with True Love's Kiss while she was voiceless, she would have suffered the same fate.
Indeed, nothing in the contract mentioned Ariel getting her voice back if Eric did kiss her, which makes the line "She don't say a word/And she won't say a word/Until ya kiss the girl" rather suspicious...
The confrontation between Ariel and Triton when he discovers her grotto full of human treasures is unsettling enough at first. Then he pulls out his trident and starts blasting them all to pieces directly in front of her. With him in a rage and her desperately trying to stop him, and then trying to save her things from being destroyed - in all the chaos, it's not hard to imagine how easily she could have accidentally gotten in his line of fire...
Also in that scene, think about what Ariel has to hear before Triton blasts everything. Before she'd just felt that Triton not wanting her to go to the surface was just simple over-protectiveness. But in the course of this conversation she's told that she should have let an innocent boy drown purely because he was human. She discovers her father is that prejudiced, taking the Broken Pedestal to its extreme when he uses the trident.
Ursula removes the one thing that her victims would find most helpful to fulfill their contract to her. In Ariel's case it was her voice to make it ridiculously hard for Eric fall in love and impart that one true kiss. So what the hell did Ursula take away from that mermaid who just wanted to be thinner during "Poor Unfortunate Souls" in order for her to fail her contract? Because I have horrible images of the poor thing gorging herself to bursting point after Ursula stole her self-control.
The song makes it pretty clear that they were trapped because they couldn't pay Ursula, NOT because they failed the deal. Notice that Ariel's payment is her voice, which is not actually a part of her deal with Ursula. Her deal is getting legs for three days and having to kiss Eric within three days or be trapped by Ursula. The price for even making that deal in the first place is Ariel's voice. We do not know what price was asked from the fat mermaid and wimpy merman, but apparently they couldn't provide it.
Another horror: for the previous merfolk to be done in by not being able to pay then they must have signed the contract before Ursula was done explaining the deal, letting their excitement get the best of them. Once the contract was signed they were obligated to pay as long as Ursula fulfilled her part.
It's also made clear that Ariel is a special case: the payment comes first because it's the best way for Ursula to sabotage Ariel's attempt to fulfill the conditions of the spell she knows she's going to cast, but the service is the casting of the spell itself. For the other "poor, unfortunate souls", in fairy tales usually it's a matter of providing a service and then demanding the payment of something the customer was willing to part with when they didn't actually have it yet. It's easy to promise away your firstborn when you think you'll die alone anyway.
When Ursula dies, what happens to that gigantic body that sinks into the sea? Does it just rot away, or does she turn into lobster food, or what?
An awful lot of scavenging hagfish can't believe their luck, probably.
Free calamari, anyone?
This actually also happens with whale carcasses. They sink off to the bottom of the ocean, where they provide a banquet for sea life for YEARS.
When the camera is panning down to her lair before the polyps turn back into mermaids, you can see some bits of her body crumbling away as they sink.
In Ariel's Story Studio, she becomes a polyp.
Wouldn't Morgana's ice prison eventually melt?
Not if it's cold enough, and if she sunk all the way to the bottom of the sea, it might be. Alternately, it's magically made ice, so perhaps it doesn't melt like regular ice?
Let's just be glad Ariel wasn't wearing pants when her legs decided to turn into a tail again.
It probably would rip them in half, assuming it starts at the groin (like when she lost her tail). It would seal together starting at the top, and rip through the seams as it went to the toes/fins.
Consider the polyps in Ursula's garden for a moment. They went to her for help, and now are rooted in the ocean floor forever (at least, until Ursula's death), crying out and attempting to scare off more potential victims. How long have some of them been there? Do they continue to age in their reduced state? And imagine what their families and friends must have thought when they never returned...thank goodness they all were restored after Ursula's death.
There's evidence that Ursula turning into Vanessa is just an elaborate glamour, not a physical change. The mirror reveals her true form, which wouldn't be the case if she was totally physically transformed. (If it did, every mirror would show Ariel floating in the air with a tail, and in the sequel, Melody doesn't ever notice anything unusual about Ariel's reflection.) Max could also tell that Vanessa was bad news, probably because she still smelled like a gigantic, sopping wet octopode. If the wedding hadn't been interrupted, that would have left Eric alone with Ursula's real form, under mind control and therefore helpless, thinking he's making love to a beautiful woman while Ursula does unspeakable things to him. Ergh!
And just imagine if they had purple babies with tentacles.
Vanessa and Eric's wedding was set to take place on the evening of Ariel's third and final day; had the wedding commenced as planned, Ariel would have failed and become the latest of Ursula's polyps. Then remember that Ursula's ultimate goal was to get to Triton using Ariel. Once she had Ariel, it seems likely that Ursula would have just tossed Eric awaylike yesterday's diapers and continued with her plans.
Alternatively, she would have kept him around under her spell and ruled both land and sea.
Did anyone think to clue Ariel in on how mammalian sex works before her wedding night with Prince Eric? 'Cause that's got to be a helluva surprise if you're not expecting it.
Some answer this by having her be familiar with dolphins.
It is worth noting that Eric knows that Ariel is a mermaid by the end and thus neither would be surprised if such things came up in conversation. Plus, how do we know that the fangirl of all things human Ariel wouldn't already know how human sex works? Just because she mistook a fork for a comb does not mean that all of her information is incorrect.
Given that the movie appears to be set in the 1800s, it's likely that any human princess Eric may have married would have had about the same level of knowledge about sex. Which is to say, not much. This isn't to say that 'in the past everyone was prudish'; if they were in the 1700s or 1600s (or 1900s), it would have been a different story.
We don't ever see the full number of people Ursula transformed, but from the ones shown, it is a couple of dozen, in the smallest amount, but it is not exactly a stretch to say she transformed hundreds of people.
Ursula knows way too much about men and their "shallow" views of women to have just watched them through her Crystal Ball. If we take into account her shapeshifting skills, Eric may have not been the first man who fell under her spell.
Notice how Atlantica only has a small population of merpeople? It is heavily implied that all the merfolk Urusla turned into polyps were residents of Ariel's kingdom and Ursula wasn't just wanting Triton's crown for revenge. She also likely wanted to wipe out the population of Atlantica after being banished, as her way of saying if I can't live there, nobody can!
If this is true then it does lead to a second piece of Fridge Horror as to why has Triton not stopped this woman yet. Ursula as presented in the film does not have the same level of offensive power as Triton, her magic seems to revolve around subterfuge and trickery. But even if that isn't the case she definitely does not have numbers on her side. Seeing as she is slowly inflicting a fate worse than death upon the citizens of Atlantica and is presenting a very real and genuine threat to its survival, Triton would surely be able to raise an army if he doesn't already have one to go and arrest her. Either he can't fight, won't fight, or is completely oblivious to what is going on; all of which presenting us with a picture of a very weak and neglectful king who is blinded by his hatred of humans whilst ignoring the real threats right underneath his nose. He is at the end of the day just as much of an active threat to the future of his kingdom as Ursula is, especially as he epically fails the needs of the many outweighs the needs of the few test by handing her everything she needed to doom them all.
If Ursula hypnotized Eric using Ariel's voice, does that mean Ariel could do the same?
Maybe that's why he became so obsessed with her after hearing her voice for the first time?
Imagine a scenario in which Chef Louis successfully kills and cooks Sebastian. Ariel would be devastated to find him in her plate, or, in case she didn't look at other people's plates, suddenly notice him missing.
◊. Now, why would a Warner Bros. character be in a Disney movie? Consider this: On May 4, 1987, Disney signed a theatrical distribution agreement with Warner Bros. International for the release of Disney and Touchstone films in overseas markets, with Disney retaining full control of all distribution and marketing decisions on their product. By inserting Mr. Limpet in this sequence, perhaps the animators at Disney were acknowledging that Warner Bros. was "part of their world" by making Mr. Limpet part of Ariel's world.
