Disney casts 19 year-old Halle Bailey as Ariel in "Little Mermaid."

Wait, I appear to have misspelled "I don't care if it was ever specified"

 

Generica weeps.

 

I'm very excited about Halle Bailey being casted as Ariel. I knew about Grown-ish but never watched it, so I was not really aware of her before the announcement. However I've watched a little bit of her acting and a bunch of her singing and I'm impressed with both, so I feel Ariel is being portrayed by the perfect person.

I just read the Hans Christian Anderson book, never had before but it's literally only 58 pages and free. No where in the book is the Little Mermaids hair color mentioned, only her long flowing hair. Her eye color is only mentioned once and described as Dark Blue. Also her skin color is never mentioned, and the story isn't set in Skandinavia. In fact he describes Pale White Beaches and Coral.

 

People get upset about the casting of anyone to play anyone these days. Maybe we should stick to cartoons and get Cg voices. Cg people with cgvoices playing everyone. Am not sure when we reached peak crazy on it, turning what was once a solid reasonable thing to be righteously idignant about, into a tail chaser neverending twist, but for me it was when Zoe Saldana was declared the ‘wrong kind of black’ to play Nina Simone. I mean if I squinted a bit I could see the upset about all our UK actors getting the American jobs point...but....I didn’t even have to squint to see that one was crazy.

 

Fuckin' ditto!

 

I'm wondering about historical slavery.

If Eric is rich and white, maybe royalty, and Ariel is mistaken for a slavegirl, becuase of the colour of her skin, I'm just saying that it's nice that she maybe still has her mermaid super strength and she can effortlessly rip grown men in half.

Hey!?

What if Eric is Wakandan royalty?!

 

Backdoor introduction for the next Marvel hero confirmed.
Eric will change into a merman at the end, instead of Ariel leaving the water (much sequel friendlier, too).
He will rename himself Nemo and show up a couple hundred years later again as the crown prince of Atlantis and fight with the New Avengers.

 

I bet white red heads can get a cab in New York at night..
Never said they couldn't.. Just saying that red heads are bullied, and given hollywoods current streak of replaceing redheads with other genders or races, are being dis serviced.. thats all.

 

We stick Gary Oldman in all sorts of stuff to play Churchill. Saldana is a bankable star. I saw it as comparable basically.

Edit after a nap: It’s also crossed my mind that Chaplin is a wonderful film, about a poor working class English boy making good, Who is later persecuted forgot being American, stars an American, and that Ben Kingsley has all sorts of things written these days about his portrayal of Gandhi...despite being of ghujarati descent (like his dad was) but...do we think of these the same way?

 

Some people get upset at a remake of a movie getting upset, period, and for at least some movies that reaction would be widespread.

As for race or appearance, sure getting upset over fictional characters appearances can seem at best excessive but film is a visual medium, especially in an adaptation of another visual medium (like an earlier film or comics) a lot of fans of the original will care about the visuals including the character appearances.

 

Changes happen. That's why it's called an "adaptation" rather than a slavish recreation.

 

I've stayed quiet on this, but I do have 3 things to say.

(1) Flip the situation. If they recast a black character as white, you'd NEVER hear the end of it, and you know it. Hell, "woke Twitter" bitched and moaned over Naomi Scott being cast as Jasmine in the Aladdin movie because she wasn't ethnically Arabian. I even argued with "woke" idiots on Facebook that said Scott was disqualified for the role because she was half-white. So, given that, this is worse, being a complete race-flip....yet not a peep from the woke crowd? Of course not. They're all hypocrites.

There are plenty of characters Disney could've cast this young woman as. Or they could've created a new character specifically for her. That would've been amazing. So why Ariel?

(2) "But whitewashing was happening for years in Hollywood!" Right....whitewashing was a thing for decades. It was wrong, wasn't it? Yes. So why is the reverse somehow "right"? It's not. It's just as wrong.

(3) Especially since there's still tons of Little Mermaid merchandise out there showing classic Ariel, and now there's going to be more out there with this new black Ariel? C'mon Disney. Instead of pandering or creating a new character for this actress to make completely HER OWN, why didn't you just cast a up and coming ginger girl as Ariel? Why was that so hard?

 

The two most famous recent Churchill portrayals...Oldman, and Ian McNiece, só not remotelyhave the same features (different eye colours for a start) and it’s a ton of prosthetics on oldman in the film....the other famous Churchill portrayal recently was Timothy Spall, who I suppose is vaguely similar to McNeice as a ‘fat’ character actor, but is a different phenotype...I think Spall is blond, while McNeice has dark hair. Of course the only other famous Churchill that crosses my mind apart from the nodding dog was Simon Ward, and he’s not remotely similar to the other three, but he was playing young Churchill so didn’t need the belly, prosthetic or otherwise.
It’s basically like saying Morgan Freeman and Forrest Whitaker look alike. They don’t. Could they still conceivably be cast in the same role in different versions of the same story? Possibly. But they are very different kinds of actors.

The film being a flop is sort of irrelevant, the controversy helped kill it. Zoe Saldana is well known star, and had to put up with all this.

 

Given the number of shipwrecks around Erik's castle perhaps the crab came over by accident?

Or, for Disney crossover, Crush the turtle helped him.

 

It were a Viking crab. Norse runes carved into his shell as he grew his ginger beard!
It is as danish as bacon!

 

There's a major difference because in western society white is seen as the default, so we've had a majority of white characters since film was created and white actors were cast more than actors of different races. Because of this, we have a ton of white characters and very few minority characters even thought this doesn't really reflect the actual population. Like how nearly all the characters on Friends were white despite living in a diverse city like New York City.

So when roles are flipped from a minority to a white person, they're taking away a role from a group of people who don't get the same chances as white people. To make it simple, there's going to be countless movies about and starring white people and fewer about black people, even less about Asian people. All because white people are the default role.

Need a superhero? White guy, unless he lives in Africa and literally called Black Panther.
Need a romantic comedy couple? White people.
Need a horror movie hero? White woman.

That's been the way things were over a century and thankfully now things are changing because studios figured out that more diverse films lead to a more diverse audience and bigger box office returns.

So some white roles, which were only white because white people were the default, are now being recast as different races because it makes absolutely no difference. A mermaid is a fish, there isn't an actual society of them. Now certain roles probably wouldn't work, like Merida from Brave because her being Scottish is a major element of the story and Scottish people tended to be white until the last few centuries. So Ariel can be black because her being white isn't really part of the story, while Merida being Scottish is. This is because white people aren't really a group, just a collection of various groups (English, French, Scottish, Irish and so one) that all started calling themselves white largely due to racism and trying to be superior to other races using a lot of bullshit reasoning.

So that's why getting upset over Ariel being black is silly and getting upset over a character like Tiana from the Princess and the Frog becoming white is valid. You're trying to pretend that all things are equal and they aren't, not by any stretch of the imagination.

 

Don't you mean Namor?
And that mention of The Princess and The Frog made a random thought pop into my head, if/when they do a live action version, Dr. Facillier needs to be played by Idris Elba, and John Goodman has to come back as Big Daddy.

 

While I agree with the majority of this, it depends on *why* you believe certain things are wrong, and how far one rule for x and one rule for y is as you say valid. I would also wholeheartedly disagree with your idea behind ‘white’, or fairer to say, it’s such a simplistic explanation as to be dangerously wrong...while at the same time agreeing that the kind of people who are unpleasant do tend to be the ones who divide it all down so simple a line as ‘black’ and ‘‘white’ and then occasionally get into interesting levels of crazy as to what fits into each group despite amazing hair splitting.

Taking for example Bond....a ‘black’ bond is certainly workable now, whereas a true adaptation set in the sixties (or even as late as the seventies) wouldn’t work..because Bond is Swiss/Scots. I would say that based on my experience north of the border that a Chinese or Indian bond would work even better.
But that depends on how you regard the bond films.
A similar argument is there for a female bond versus a female bond like character. Historically, female action hero spy characters do well, it’s just a question of getting behind them as a franchise....if a Stella Rimington adaptation were to be done well, and people got behind it, congratulations, we have a female bond essentially.
If we cast the character of Bond and gender lip it, does it work? It certainly wouldn’t be good adaptation...too much of the character is bound up in certain aspects that wouldn’t work if a straight set in the past adaptation, and are seen as negatives even in the current male bond and have been stripped away. Male bond sleeping with someone for information is regarded in a very different way to female bond would be seen, especially as part of their job.
So how do we do it?