The Little Mermaid And The Seamaid

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

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