A few things in advance of this auspicious weekend.

I obviously haven't seen the new film yet, but I'm assuming that it sticks close enough to the original Disney version that I am effectively commenting on both.

This is not a story about a girl giving up her voice in order to get a boyfriend.

Shoehorning that narrative criticism requires ignoring and distorting an enormous amount of the story as it is actually told.

Ariel is not primarily driven or motivated by her crush. We know exactly what drives her, what her underlying motivations for all her her behavior are. She sings about them. She wants to explore, she wants to learn, she wants to see and understand and experience, she is motivated by curiosity and wonder and knowledge.

She wants to break the bounds and escape the patriarchal order defined by her father's control (including her father's disapproval of her longing for knowledge of a larger world). The crush comes up as a thing that Ursula can weaponize against Ariel in order to use her as a pawn in her own war against Triton's patriarchy.

Even when she is forced to give up her voice and try to quickly seduce Eric (and Ursula explicitly frames it to her as seduction) in order to get what she wants, she still behaves in a manner that is entirely consonant with her character. Even when she's on the clock, even when time is running out, even when her entire fate rests on her ability to successfully seduce this wholesome, if boring, prince, hers is still the behavior of someone driven by inquisitiveness, wonder, and a thirst for knowledge and experience. She is not trying to seduce anyone, and he is not looking to be seduced.

What makes Ursula so evil is that she is willing to weaponize the worst and most abusive and most stifling aspects of patriarchy in order to fight patriarchy, and she doesn't care if she throws women and girls under the bus in the process. Ariel doesn't concede to our embrace the oppressive silencing of patriarchy in order to win her man. She is manipulated into silencing herself by somebody taking gross advantage of her, and her underlying motivation is still clearly escaping patriarchy and being a part of that other, better world.

Still, I'm pretty confident that if you talk to the girls and women you know who love this film about what it was like watching when they were very young, they will confirm that even though Ursula plays the narrative function of the villain, Triton was the actually terrifying figure.

The reason that the original Little mermaid and Moana are the two best non Pixar Disney films is that they are telling the same core story. And the two best Disney songs, "Part of Your World" and "How Far I'll Go", are essentially the same song. In the best possible way.

No art is impervious to criticism. And yes, there are still sociopolitical subtexts to some of the plot points in this film that have not aged well and are not unproblematic. But cheap, one dimensional criticisms will always be just that. And I absolutely consider the original Disney film a genuine cinematic masterpiece.

Finally, while critics do seem to be ambivalent about at least some aspects of the new film (and considering what it's measuring itself against, that is not entirely unsurprising), the consensus certainly seems to be that BY FAR the best thing about the new film is Halle's performance.

I am incredibly excited to see this.