- Starring
- Mykal-Michelle Harris, Gracen Newton, Elizabeth Phoenix Caro
- Creator
- Lynne Southerland
- Rating
- TV-Y
- Genre
- Action, Adventure, Family, Fantasy
- Release date
- June 27, 2024
- Where to watch
- Disney+
Disney Jr.’s Ariel is an animated preschool series that follows the early adventures of Ariel, an 8-year-old mermaid princess in the underwater kingdom of Atlantica. As she explores her Caribbean-inspired surroundings, Ariel goes on adventures with her friends, discovering treasures and learning lessons about the world around her.
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James Carrick
James Carrick is a passionate film enthusiast with a degree in theater and philosophy. James approaches dramatic criticism from a philosophic foundation grounded in aesthetics and ethics, offering insight and analysis that reveals layers of cinematic narrative with a touch of irreverence and a dash of snark.
One comment
Sweet Deals
March 17, 2025 at 7:28 pm
Disney Junior’s Ariel has only eight half-hour episodes. I lost my patience with it while watching the intro theme. But I forced myself through it by setting the episodes to play at hyper-speed.
Although Disney Junior’s Ariel is ostensibly a “new” show, I can’t help but feel like I’ve seen it all before. The computer-generated visual style is bright, colorful, sparkly, and all together too busy, with too many things going on in the backgrounds. It looks less like a beautiful world under the sea and more like a homogeneously generic world built entirely out of plastic toys. The sea is now magical for no reason, and Ariel’s tail lights up when she gets excited for no reason, because being an ordinary mermaid isn’t cool enough anymore. The music is generic synthetic pop music that you’ll forget about immediately after hearing it. The performances are loud, excitable and a little too happy, with very little emotional range because apparently preschoolers can’t handle any emotion more intense than mild disappointment and anxiety over not being able to get exactly what you want right away. The plots are dull and simplistic: a grown-up tells the young merkids exactly what needs to be done, but the merkids don’t listen and do the wrong thing anyway, even though they should know better. Then, when things predictably go wrong, the grown-up gently sits the merkid down, explains that they have learned a lesson that should have been evident from the beginning, and everything gets fixed. The victories are boring because there is very little sense of urgency or peril, the conflicts aren’t really conflicts, and making mistakes doesn’t really cost anything. It’s ironic how a show that’s been so heavily sanitized to avoid pain can be so painful for me to watch.
Regarding obligatory intersectionality, every mermaid in Disney Junior’s Ariel is either black or Hispanic. The very first episode of the show is about celebrating “diversity” in an annoying yet harmless way. Ariel is black, like her live-action counterpart. Her father King Triton is also black, and so are Ariel’s two sisters. King Triton is also now happy and gentle and never gets angry at Ariel or anyone else because he’s been preschool-sanitized. Ursula is now a kind, sassy and helpful magician and is King Triton’s sister; Ariel calls her “tauntie” (The French word for aunt is “Tante”, and the e is silent). She and her pet eels Ebb and Flow have also been preschool-sanitized. Also, while Ariel and her friends are rather clueless about the function of “land treasures”, they also play the very land-based sport of cricket complete with bats, wickets and helmets.
I didn’t see much else, but that’s because I got so bored that I wasn’t paying close attention. If I were a toddler, maybe I’d be happily distracted by the all pretty colors and sounds, or I’d get bored watching it and leave to make up my own adventures using my own mermaid dolls. I think my imagination is a lot more interesting than the sparkly plastic junk that Disney has created.