The mermaid in the illustration was lithe, mysterious, sylphlike. She perched on a rock, inscrutable. For years, I’d been bombarded with the images, books, merchandise, and endless one-offs of Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Disney’s Ariel was redheaded, cheerful, an open book—voluptuous in that squeaky-clean cartoon way. She was certainly not the mermaid Hans Christian Andersen envisioned when he wrote his tragic tale. But here was a sad water sprite who was the perfect embodiment of the ambiguous virtues of folklore. I’d stumbled across her online, in a series of concept drawings for Disney’s The Little Mermaid. They had been drawn in the fifties and shelved for thirty years.
Who was this illustrator, Kay Nielsen? What happened to his version of the mermaid?
I grew up during a losing streak for Disney. They were putting out live-action films, and while their classic fairy tales were still beloved, they were scarce. As a child, I was more familiar with the source material: I had devoured the Grimms, the Andersens, the Perraults with gusto. I have noticed that younger generations tend to be shocked to learn the original plot of Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” (spoiler: she kills herself), hence the scores of articles revealing the real stories behind Disney fairy tales. Disney made his versions cannon; the originals were reduced to curiosities.
Perrault and the Grimm brothers collected the folk stories peasant women had told their daughters since prehistory. They repackaged them for the landed (and literate) gentry. Dark tales told as warnings gained some lightness and lost a bit of savagery in these retellings. But they still retained the elements that Bruno Bettelheim approved of when he wrote his classic, The Uses of Enchantment, where he posited that children resolve their fears by imagining themselves up against fairy-tale monsters. When Hans Christian Andersen, George MacDonald, and other writers set to work in the mid-nineteenth century, they braided their modern, national stories with the wild strands still at work within fairy tales. There were plenty of writers who used fairy tales to preach moral values. But there were others, such as Andersen and the Grimms, who saw themselves as recorders rather than interpreters. Andersen had spent his childhood tagging along with his grandmother as she tended gardens at the town insane asylum, listening to the surreal tales the women there spun.