The "little mermaid" can be black, says Disney's Freeform after a surprise casting: NPR

When Disney announced that Halle Bailey, a teenage actress and half of the Chloe x Halle singing group, had landed the role of Ariel in the upcoming remake of The little Mermaid, some people on social media have become crazy.

But not on the fact that we are in 2019 and that the Danish fairy tale tells the story of a young creature who loves to sing and wear a seashell bikini top and enthusiastically abandons her voice in exchange for a romance with a nice kid. Nor are critics scandalized by the type of message the story conveys to young children.

Instead, some circles in the Internet fear that Disney's ingenue is black.

The complaints go in the direction of: "The actress should look like the real little mermaid!" They probably refer to the white-skinned, blue-eyed cartoon character of the hit movie of 1989. The hashtag #NotMyAriel quickly began to show a trend on Twitter and, since the announcement this week, many fans have committed to boycott the film.

For days, the company has remained silent about the controversy, but Freeform, a cable network owned by Disney and on which Bailey appears as a member of the cast. Grown-ish, posted a statement on Instagram stating that "Ariel … is a mermaid".

The company acknowledges that the author of the story, Hans Christian Andersen, is Danish, but added: "[Ariel] lives in an underwater kingdom in international waters and can legitimately swim where she wishes. "

"Ariel can go back to the surface at any time with his scuttle buddies and the Jamaican crab * ahem * Sebastian (sorry Flounder!) And keep that base in tight bronze."

"But for the sake of argumentation, suppose Ariel is also Danish, Danish sirens can be black, because Danes * can * be black," added Freeform.

"Spoiler alert", concluded Freeform, "the character of Ariel is a fiction".