Released in 1989, Disney’s The Little Mermaid heralded the start of the ‘Disney Renaissance’ – a period of critical and commercial success that followed a rocky patch where the studio’s prime focus had been on Disneyland attractions rather than feature films.

It was soundtracked by Broadway golden boy Howard Ashman, who changed the planned English butler crab into a Jamaican crustacean named Sebastian, and reworked the film’s structure to more closely align with that of a Broadway musical. He also decided to base Ursula the Sea Witch on drag artist and disco star Divine (who died whilst the film was still in production).

Ashman died of AIDS two years later, in March 1991, but his musical influence, first on Mermaid, and subsequently on Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin, was a major factor in the regeneration of the studio in the early nineties. Mermaid won Oscar gongs for Best Song and Best Score, the first Oscar nod for Disney since the Seventies.

Mermaids of the Eighties

Splash!, 1984

The Disney studio had been considering Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid for adaptation as early as the Snow White years, but it was not until the late Eighties that the time finally seemed right. Even then, there was concern it might too closely duplicate Splash, which Disney had produced in 1984.

Splash itself had been rushed through production because there were rumours of another mermaid film in the pipeline elsewhere – a Warren Beatty vehicle that eventually fell through. Why exactly mermaids were suddenly in the ascendant during this particular period of the late twentieth century is open to speculation; at any rate, the nudity and adult content in Splash led directly to the creation of Touchstone Pictures, Disney’s ‘older audiences’ label. Mermaids (particularly Darryl Hannah’s mermaid) were too sexual for the family studio in 1984.

Ironically, of course, mermaid – “maiden of the sea” – suggests that these aquatic women are rather more virginal than ‘Touchstone Pictures’ thought. Traditional (cisnormative) misogynistic popular wisdom holds women in general to be ‘leaky vessels’, because of the amount of ‘moisture’ they produce, but though mermaids live in the water, they have no apparent human genitalia, making them, by contrast, vessels that are rather neatly sealed.

In this, they link with the Virgin Mary, who appears in Catholic symbolism as a ‘fountain forever sealed’ in the middle of an enclosed garden, representing the Immaculate Conception. Mary’s homonymic (and virginal) association with mermaids, and the link between the sea (mer) and the mother (mere) introduces an additional layer to this.

Alongside this, there is also a parallel virgin/whore tradition of the mermaid as prostitute and even embodied vagina (since, famously, vaginas are often described as smelling like fish).

The Starbucks logo, not abandoned until 1987.

This opposing strand presumably comes from sailors’ fear of the Siren-figure and the unknowns out in the sea, but it’s also connected with a different type of mermaid altogether – the melusine. A double-tailed half-woman, half-fish, her intrinsic, though hidden, fishiness only emerges when she takes a bath. Even then, the double tail leaves her human genitalia open to the world in what some have claimed is an appropriation of older symbols of female fertility, such as the Sheela na gig or even the goddess Venus (an alternative ‘mother’ connection).

Incidentally the melusine, not the mermaid, is the figure in the (now closely cropped) logo for Starbucks coffee, the first branch of which opened – logo blazing proud, bare-breasted and double-tailed – in 1971, a decade before Splash went into production.

The coffee-shop melusine was maintained in her full glory until 1987 (although she was ‘sealed’ at the point where the tails meet, as her original had not been); the first of several censoring crops came into effect around the time Disney bosses turned their attention to Andersen.

For a modern contrast to the ‘sealed off’ melusine, have a look at one of the mermaids commissioned by men’s deodorant brand Lynx for an early Noughties advertising campaign, whose posterior is beginning to resurface through her scales, soft porn-like.

Planning The Little Mermaid

Hans Christian Andersen’s original Little Mermaid tale was serviceable, but – much like Starbucks’ logo – it had to be sanitised before Disney could take it to a Disney audience. Tellingly, the changes proposed during this period of pre-production were substantially same as the ones suggested during the preliminary work in the Thirties.

Hans Christian Andersen, photographed by Thora Hallager

The first thing to do was give it a happy ending, since in Andersen’s version the Prince’s indifference to the mermaid results in her annihilation and transformation to ‘a daughter of the air’.

This was typical Andersen: he wrote that ‘most of what I have written is a reflection of myself’, and he was not a terribly happy man. Unreciprocated love was an ongoing feature of his life, and throughout it he nursed passions for various inappropriate people.

These included celebrity soprano Jenny Lind (who is said to have inspired his story The Nightingale after she put him firmly in the friendzone in 1844) and various straight men, but he also wrote of avoiding actual sexual encounters – his diary records him visiting prostitutes, talking to them, and then returning home to masturbate alone.

Many of his ‘fairy tales’ are characterised by violence, speechlessness and unreciprocated love, often across two different ‘species’, as with the tin soldier’s love for a paper ballerina in The Steadfast Tin Soldier, or indeed the Little Mermaid’s love for the human Prince – a feature that tends to make them, like their author, rather sexless in approach.

Although the sad stuff was scrapped, the symbolically significant speechlessness of the Mermaid was maintained in the Disney screenplay. A mermaid’s voice is her primary power, since her singing can lure sailors to their deaths, so its loss is a significant one – aphonia in a milder form had also been a feature of Splash, where Darryl Hannah’s character cannot initially speak English.

Disney’s Ariel was voiced by Broadway star (and Ashman associate) Jodi Benson, and her voice remains her defining beauty in the film. But the manner of its loss changes: while both Little Mermaids give their voices up to the Sea Witch, in Andersen’s story the unnamed mermaid has her tongue cut out to bring this about. Disney cleaned this up, and, in the process, rendered it reversible: Ariel’s voice is depicted as a glowing, ghostly ball that can pass through bodily barriers without drawing blood – as in traditional artistic representations of the soul.

Ironically, this is exactly what Andersen’s mermaid is seeking: her love for the prince is the means through which she hopes to win ‘immortality’ and the chance to share in the joys of paradise. (This rather Romantic notion, albeit gender-inverted, links Andersen’s tale thematically with Friedrich de la Motte’s mermaid Undine – and also Tchaikovsky’s watery Swan Lake, composed in 1875, the year Andersen died). Disney refocused the mermaid’s longing for a soul to a more secular – and sexualised – teenage quest for the love of a handsome prince.

She sells sea shells

But Disney hit a problem when it came to the artwork. Mermaids, of course, are typically bare-breasted, but so too were traditional depictions of Andersen’s ‘little’ mermaid, including the statue in Copenhagen’s harbour.

The Little Mermaid loud and proud in Copenhagen’s harbour

There is not a single illustration to the fairy tale pre-Disney that shows her wearing anything at all over her chest – in the case of Heath Robinson, this emphasises the ‘Little’ part, as the mermaid is clearly a child in his illustrations.

The mermaid is fifteen in Andersen’s tale, so her littleness could be argued either way, but in 1989 Disney producers obviously decided they wanted her to be legal (in most states anyway). To make it completely clear, in the course of the film Ariel declares to her father (a familiar refrain) ‘I’m sixteen years old. I’m not a child.’

But however innocently naked (and animated) the Little Mermaid might be, Disney certainly could not show a sixteen year old’s breasts on screen. Their solution to this problem was the creation of a purple bra made out of shells – a new mermaid first.

When coupled with the waistband-like arrangement at the top of her tail (another innovation, since traditionally the mermaid’s scales segue gradually from the skin at her waist), this decision had the effect of creating a kind of mermaid bikini that implies she might just be wearing an elaborate two-piece – one very similar, in fact, to the ensemble worn by Princess Jasmine in Disney’s next film, Aladdin. And, of course, it also has the effect of emphasising breasts and hips either side of a tiny waist.

The Barbie-style Ariel doll I had as a child had (as modern-day packaging still asserts) ‘removable clothes for costume change‘, so it was clear she was a two-legged being with an optional tail.

This has the effect of making the transition from mermaid to human much easier: in Andersen’s story, creating two legs out of one fish tail is exactly as vicious as you would expect it to be, and the draught the mermaid drinks to effect this causes the sensation of ‘a two-edged sword [passing] through her delicate body’ – so severe she passes out. Throughout her subsequent time on land, each foot she puts to the ground feels like ‘treading upon the points of needles or sharp knives’.

Bodily mutilation – indeed, mortification – is everywhere in Andersen’s story. After everyone is asleep, the mermaid goes to ‘sit on the broad marble steps [of the palace] for it eased her burning feet to bathe them in the cold sea-water’. Significantly – and somewhat bizarrely – such mutilation has been an ongoing problem for the Copenhagen representation of Andersen’s mermaid: the statue in the harbour has been blown up, decapitated (twice) and had its arm sawn off, in addition to many petty acts of vandalism since its erection in 1913.

Some liberation?

By contrast with Andersen’s difficult transition, Ariel’s easy-on, easy-off fish tail and bikini bra combo not only ‘re-opens’ the traditional closed mermaid vessel, it also sexualises the teenage mermaid in a manner markedly different from anything in Andersen’s original (where the mermaid’s love is increased by knowledge of the prince’s good deeds, and her longing for a soul).

The Little Mermaid – Disney’s artwork

By censoring Ariel, Disney draws attention to her body and breasts, so she resembles a California surfer girl. The nakedness, which in earlier illustrations was straightforward and childlike, takes on an explicitly sexual edge (for more on this, have a look at this piece by Virginia Borges).

The result is that Disney’s Little Mermaid becomes the straightforward tale of a sixteen-year-old struggling with her father for the right to explore her burgeoning sexuality and go out with a boy. And because she ultimately uses this right to make a good marriage (wearing something strikingly similar to the dress worn by the equally speechless Princess Diana at her 1981 marriage), Ariel makes good in the end and everyone is happy.

Like most of the Disney Renaissance heroines, hers is the story of a successful transition from the rule of the father to the rule of the husband.

Other mermaids

But it’s interesting that at the same time the producers were working on a heteronormative middle-class fantasy idea, their musical wunderkind Howard Ashman (despite dying of what, at the time, was popularly cast as a very non-family-friendly disease) was injecting some Broadway pizzazz into the soundtrack. This included the introduction of a deviantly-styled figure like Divine via the character of Ursula, the Sea Witch (though of course she is defeated, as does not happen in Andersen).

In fact, as the Disney Renaissance got going, the calibre of stars from distinctly non-Disney backgrounds increased: The Lion King, the Renaissance nadir, had major Broadway stars alongside A-list Hollywood stars, and the cast included black and Latino actors – something that had not even been considered back in the Forties (when Uncle Walt wanted some racial-caricature ‘Jim Crow’ figures in Dumbo, the crows were voiced by white men doing their best ‘black man’ impression instead). The staff list at the Disney studios was full of Jewish and homosexual figures like Ashman. Yet The Little Mermaid ushered in some of the most socially conservative films Disney produced. A strange duality.

• Like it says above, Hodge is currently doing a dedicated project on mermaids over at Poems Underwater, which is inviting submissions…
• @PoemsUnderwater
• Poems Underwater on Facebook

In 1937 Goebbels presented a birthday gift of 18 Mickey Mouse shorts to the Führer. […Disney] and Hitler […] shared an overall social vision. They dreamed of a dispersed post-urban society, with a population — kept in line by a strong domestic realm instilling a keen sense of blood loyalty and “family values” — that could be efficiently mobilized to serve either the military needs of the state or the labor needs of industry.

– Matt Roth, The Lion King: a Short History of Disney-Fascism

Everyone knows about Disney’s ongoing racism issues, so to hear that Uncle Walt was an active member of the American Nazi Party during the Thirties may not come as much surprise. But there were pink triangles as well as yellow stars in 1930s Berlin, and I want to know why pretty much all of Disney’s villains seem designed to display some kind of sexual or gender deviance.

An Actor’s Life for Me

An Actor’s Life for Me: The Fox seduces Pinocchio

It starts with Pinocchio, and the Fox and the Cat. Probably best remembered for their song ‘An Actor’s Life for Me‘, it’s this pair of crooks that first lure young Pinocchio off the straight and narrow. And I mean that literally: they’re Theatre Folk, dapper, urbane and not a little camp. Their bodies are constantly intertwining, grotesque and chaotic. I’m with Matt Roth when he says they’re obviously coded as gay – one of the key minorities Hitler argued, in Mein Kampf, were threatening the health and morality of contemporary European youth.

But this doesn’t end with the fall of Hitler; later Disney films work their way through a succession of sexually deviant or ambiguous villains. The first significant entrant is the terrifying Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty(1959). Like Aladdin‘s Jafar (1992), she is elegant and a bit camp, though fundamentally sexless (witness how unattracted Jafar is to Princess Jasmine, wanting her only for political gains). Maleficent inhabits a strange underworld where orgiastic parties are the norm, and, like so many of her villainous successors, she’s got no-one of her own, but still remains determined to thwart the monogamous, heterosexual union of the noble royals Princess Aurora and Prince Philip (whose name was chosen by Uncle Walt in the 50s, when our Prince Philip was still someone nostalgia-loving Anglophile Americans might feel dewy-eyed about).

Cruella de Vil – a withered, aberrant form of sexless femininity – squares up to the hyper-femme homemaker Anita

Two years later, 101 Dalmatians‘ Cruella De Vil continues the trend. She shares Maleficent’s ill will towards the heteronormative family sphere, and acts as a kind of child-snatching boogyman. Her hyper-femme fashion sense only throws her withered, sexless frame into relief, and unlike the blissful feminine home of her friend Anita – who has settled down and found a nice man to take care of, sorting out Roger’s chaotic life with a Woman’s Touch –  Cruella’s decadent mansion is completely falling apart, which we can probably assume also mirrors the state of her biological clock. Cruella’s flamboyant yet barren sexuality focuses itself instead on fetishising the traditional trappings of femininity, including fur coats made from the produce of wombs more fecund than her own – like Perdita, the sexy Dalmatian.

Dragged Up

In the 80s, long after Walt’s death, the intentional gender deviance of Disney’s villains becomes more blatant still: this time the Gays are even more obviously in drag, and they’re looking back to the golden Pinocchio age of seducing The Children away from their suburban homes: think of Ursula in The Little Mermaid (1989) and her contrast with the alpha male King Triton, his big beard, and the Barbie-style InnoDBl with her Princess Diana hair.

Dragged up… Ursula from The Little Mermaid

Ursula is overweight, flamboyant and dragged up; her tentacles, as my pal Matt Roth points out (you really must read this article, seriously), only make her the more sexually ambiguous. Like Maleficent, she lives in an underground other-world, with a ‘garden’ of corrupted young people now condemned to live half-lives as plant-like beings. Her stagey hyper-femininity presents her as a dangerous prospect for the heteronormative, cisnormative InnoDBl – whose voice she steals in order to seduce the also very straight Prince Eric.

Ursula is given a metaphorical kind of new life (after being conquered by, er, the erect prow of Prince Eric’s enormous ship) in the figure of Hades in Hercules (1997). He’s pretty much an exact counterpart to Ursula, black tentacles and all. His cabaret-style song ‘My Town’, from the Hercules TV series, introduces the underworld as a kind of underground New York, with its king a flamboyant, gender-ambiguous leader revelling in its delights:

It’s interesting, of course, that because of the source-text, Hercules must of necessity espouse the Ancient Greek worldview that says the Underworld – and therefore Hades himself – is a crucial part of the order of things; unlike the shady worlds of Pleasure Island and The Theatre in Nazi-era Pinocchio, ‘New Hades’, and the queers and deviants that inhabit it is a potentially corrupting influence that can be tolerated, as long as it’s kept firmly in its place. It’s much the same theory as the ‘Circle of Life’ proposed by Mufasa in The Lion King (1994) – the ghettoised handout-dependent hyenas and their liberal, childless and urbane overlord Scar are fine, as long as they’re kept in their own sphere (that is, the obscure Elephants’ Graveyard). When they take over, the Pridelands fall into ruin and corruption.

Hanging on

Intertwined: the hyper-masculine Gaston and the fawning creature Le Fou

There are also a whole host of less significant characters throughout Disney’s oeuvre who are mostly made ridiculous by virtue of their sexual ambiguity and concomitant lack of personhood. First up is the rotund Le Fou in Beauty and the Beast, who fawns, much like the Cat on the Fox, on the hyper-male Gaston (who is in strange contrast to the uber-femme but dragged up Ursula, and seems suspiciously uninterested in the various females laid on for his consumption).

Then there’s Chi Fu, the emperor’s advisor in Mulan. He is primarily ridiculed because he is camp and rather gender-ambiguous – he has bunny slippers and a woman’s scream – in what I’d suggest is a double-whammy of homophobia mixed with Orientalist racism, much like that currently directed against Asian-American basketball player Jeremy Lin (‘Some lucky lady in NYC is gonna feel a couple of inches of pain tonight‘ was a tweet from Fox sports commentator Jason Witlock on Lin’s recent sporting triumph). Or, to put it in Disney’s own terms, how about the notorious Siamese Cats in Lady and the Tramp, whose own gender is confused to say the least?

Miss Man

The only difference between male and female Mulan is a bit of grooming.

It’s interesting to compare these gender-fails with Chi Fu’s own filmic context – Mulan (1998), where the title character is herself cross-dressing. There are two direct references to drag in this film (strange, given that Disney doesn’t in general have much of Dreamworks’ obsessive-compulsive need to shove in over-the-kids’-heads jokes for the parents). The only one in direct reference to Mulan is Mushu (Eddie Murphy)’s Hilarious Ebonics – ‘Miss Man had to take her little drag act on the road’.

Yet, unlike the true weirdos doing it for a sexual thrill (like Ursula), Mulan’s is a noble gender-variance, taken on for the sole purpose of rescuing her ailing father and (ultimately) preparing herself mentally for marriage, which is how the film ends; note too that she has to become male in order to truly triumph in the male sphere, and that once this has been accomplished she can return home to her father and marry the sexy shirtless man (as she was unable to do at the beginning of the story).

It is therefore in keeping that her methodology basically amounts to ‘hair down = female; hair up = male’ – and no-one ever notices it’s all the same person, just with a different hairstyle (note how shocked the Evil Shan Yu is when she dons her ‘disguise‘): her gender-switch is more of a ‘sign’ to the audience indicating which social sphere she’s inhabiting than anything literally transformative. Interesting stuff here.

Hmm. So… From the Fox and the Cat to the villains of the 90s, Disney’s villains have represented a kind of ‘other’ that is almost always couched in terms of gender or sexuality, representing a challenge, and a threat, to the heteronormative worldview of the heroes and heroines – which always conquers, of course. What’s disturbing is that it’s so oft-repeated it almost becomes the whole unspoken tenet on which Disney’s works are based. The fight of good vs. evil is not so much a battle of objective morality as of sexual identity and preference.

Oops.

But I was in for a shock one day at school, when I settled myself down in the Book Corner with the Ladybird Well-Loved Tales version of Hans Christian Anderson‘s text. The Mermaid died at the end? She didn’t marry the prince? And then was turned into a “Daughter of the Air”, and wasn’t allowed a Christian soul unless a zillion children did good deeds and something-something-virtue? What a letdown. Expecting a straightforward happy ending, I was utterly bewildered. Prince or no prince, I hadn’t been prepared for quite so much all-out morbidity, and if you asked me, this Daughters of the Air business just sounded a bit suspicious.

It’s one hell of a leap from the all-out romance of Disney’s riff on the story to Anderson. Disney takes Anderson’s curious young mermaid princess and gives her a bit of sass, focusing the story on themes of adolescence and coming of age and adding a saleable happy ending into the mix. It’s a common refrain on feminist blogs to say that Disney “sanitised the originals” (whatever “original” means). Here, though, Disney at least allows Ariel her desires, even if they are chastely presented, and allows their fulfilment at the end. By contrast, Anderson focuses on the dangers of curiosity and makes the story arc a recognisably tragic one – and later, it seems, tacked on the stuff about the Daughters of the Air to add in a moral imperative for the reader: children, be good, else the mermaid will never earn her Christian soul!

In both stories, identity and self-knowledge is a key theme – and both mermaids are willing to give up their voices and identities for love and to gain access to the exciting, adult, otherworld of the land. There’s something problematic about both of them – with Anderson’s version, as Marina Warner puts it in From The Beast To The Blonde: On Fairy Tales And Their Tellers, “the story’s chilling message is that cutting out your tongue is still not enough. To be saved, more is required: self-obliteration , dissolution.” With Disney, Warner ruminates that “the issue of female desire dominates the film… the verb ‘want’ falls from the lips of Ariel more often than any other – until her tongue is cut out”, concluding that – however much we want to cry “sanitised!” – it is more that in the film “romance constitutes the ultimate redemption, and romantic love, personified by the prince, the justification of desire”. So it’s a kind of sanitising, but it’s also a secularising.

All of which brings me to The Flight of the Mermaid, Gita Wolf and Sirish Rao‘s adaptation of the tale, a wonderful picture book, now recently reprinted by India-based publishing house Tara Books. This version re-energises Anderson’s original storyline and tells it in such a way that it becomes, devoid of its Victorian moralising, a genuinely life-affirming, feminist story. The real achievement, though, is that it keeps the Daughters of the Air stuff, and Anderson’s story structure, but tells the story in such a way that a happy ending is forged. And it’s an ending that retains the sense for wanderlust Disney gives its heroine, but doesn’t end in the mermaid trading selfhood or identity for marriage – at the same time neatly avoiding Anderson’s preachy, morbid shutdown of female desire or personal autonomy.

But let’s start with basic facts: the book is gorgeous. Check it out!

Flight of the Mermaid – skipping out the diminuitive little from the title for a start – is a treat for the senses from start to finish. Beautifully letter-pressed on tactile, thick-grain paper, the cover has a press-out fish shape which doubles as a bookmark and reveals the mermaid herself underneath. The book is fully illustrated with acclaimed artist Bhajju Shyam‘s distinctive artwork in the Gond tribal style, and the results are a wonderful, fresh contrast to the European visualisations of this story I’ve become so used to. Look how colourful it is!

The title of the book also describes the ending (skip to after the grey blockquotes if you don’t want the detail spoilered!) – the mermaid comes to the realisation that the prince, though he is fond of her, does not love her romantically. She is saddened, but will not kill him – the only way she can save her own life – and chooses to sacrifice herself instead: yes, familiar Anderson territory. And yet:

Slowly, the truth came over her – her plight had nothing to do with the prince at all… he knew nothing of her, and could not carry the weight of her dreams.

And at the point where, in Anderson, her tragic end is mitigated only by the Daughters of the Air announcing “welcome to the airy feminine purgatory party!”, Wolf, Rao and Shyam show the mermaid’s transition into the air as a change, not an ending:

“Who are you?” she asked, and found that her voice had returned.

“We are the daughters of the air, they answered. “And now you are one of us.”

The mermaid was delighted. “I was born into water,” she said to them. “And I know the world on the shore too. Only the air is left to explore, and it seems to hold more freedom than sea or land.”

The air is, logically, her next destination on a continuous journey. Always on the move, the mermaid’s real aim is constant self-discovery and adventure. Visually, in each of her phases on land, sea, and air, she retains her flowing hair and colourful attributes, whether they are feathers or scales. Her identity is always hers, and is never relinquished.

It’s a wonderfully executed blend of the positive points of both Anderson’s text and the optimism the Disney generation have come to expect from the story, and for parents, schools and people who love beautifully made books, I just can’t recommend Tara Books highly enough.

We managed to grab five minutes of co-author Gita Wolf’s time, via email, to ask her a little about the book – why this story?

“We felt that the story had universal resonance,” says Gita. “It was both a coming-of-age tale as well as the story of a journey (both literal and spiritual). When we first told the story to Bhajju Shyam, he related to it right away. ‘That’s exactly it!’ he said, ‘That’s what it feels like to come into a completely new element – like when I traveled to another country for the first time. I lost my language, and it felt like I was [as Anderson’s mermaid experiences when she loses her voice] walking on knives.'”

How about the ending? “We wanted to give the tale a feminist twist, and not focus on the loss of the prince as an absolute tragic end of everything – nor did we want the Disney ending. In keeping with Anderson’s basic narrative, the Mermaid in a sense does go up in the air, but the air is here a new element to explore, and her journey will continue.”

All hail the flying mermaid!

Order your copy from Tara’s UK distributors or on Amazon.

Find out more

• See more of the interior of the book at Drawn.ca here
• Check out the Tara Books blog here, and read about their work in their recent article on For Books’ Sake. Be sure to check out their catalogue (available on their homepage as a PDF file – I’m especially excited for Sita’s Ramayana!

Warm thanks to Maegan Chadwick-Dobson, Gita Wolf and Sirish Rao at Tara Books for taking the time to talk to us, sending us parcels and being generally lovely.

But it seems we’re all in the pink plastic grip of fantasy princesshood, so I’ve decided to give in for a moment and take a look at some fairytale-themed pop music – but with a little bit of smarts and sass thrown in. Songs that turn tropes upside down or inside out, or give the princesses unexpected vigourous voice. In this post-Shrek epoch we’re living in, it’s a pretty well-travelled road, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t fun.

The reliably-entertaining folks over at Comics Alliance are also having a Princess Moment, which this post is intended as a sort of humorous companion to. It’s not really an Order of Preference so much as a Pile of Stuff, because I’m not in the mood today to be ranking things in a heirarchy. A Pile of Stuff is way better.

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: This isn’t, of course, the be-all and end-all of anything – just a personal take – so I’d love to hear your own suggestions in the comments, with no rules on style! The only rules were 1) fairytale themed; and 2) attempting (if not always succeeding) to do something interesting.

PART ONE OF MIRANDA’S PILE OF POP PRINCESSERY, FROM 10 to 6!

10. Janelle Monae: Sir Greendown

I throw up my hands here – this is a flagrant excuse for me to talk about Janelle Monae. Her image is more robot warrior rock star than princess. This track is one of her dreamier moments, and I admit that aside from a faintly Angela Carter-esque meet me at the tower/the dragon wants a bite/of our love moment, it’s actually pretty straightforward prince-awaitin’ fare – but actually that makes it a funny little island in the context of the rest of her work (check out the bolshy Motown-tinged slice of pure aural glory that is Violet Stars Happy Hunting! and you’ll see what I mean). Monae is fond of her concept albums, and combines a sci-fi android alter-ego with a deep- seated love for The Wizard of Oz. But the forbidden love of her android persona Cyndi Mayweather and the human millionaire Greendown (the storyline of her album and EPs) kinda is a space-age fairytale. (Oh, and go and listen to Wondaland, too.)

9. Kate Bush: The Red Shoes

Because it’s good to be obvious. For the unfamiliar, Kate made an entire album based on both the Hans Christian Anderson fairytale of the same name (as well as the 1948 film, which also drew on the same text). The story itself is unrivalled, if nightmarish, lecturing Victoriana is your thing – read Anderson’s text here and cringe! – but for Bush it proved fertile songwriting ground. The story’s about a girl whose vain attraction to a pair of red shoes (RED! IN CHURCH! SCANDAL) is punished by an angel – she finds she is unable to take the shoes off, or stop dancing, and ends up having to ask the local executioner to cut off her feet. Which then chase her around. Yeah, her disembodied feet, still dancing, follow her around and haunt her. In the end she repents thoroughly …and dies. As you do. Kate Bush’s version, on the other hand, is a hymn to dancing the dream and making the dream come true and enjoying your desires, even so-called dangerous ones. Or as Prof Bonnie Gordon puts it in this essay, “by singing and reclaiming this story meant to constrain women’s bodies and their erotic potential, Bush confronts and overturns its original inherent violence.”

8. Emilie Autumn: Shallott

Ah, Madame Autumn. Prone to self-indulgence on occasion she may be (The Art of Suicide just bores me, for example) but when she’s on form, she’s good fun. I much prefer her when she’s interacting with a story or old folk tale trope that already exists, like, say, with Rose Red from her debut album Enchant, as opposed to when she’s languidly drawling about how Dead Is The New Alive on far less ethereal later LP Opheliac. Here’s Shallott, in which the famous tragic lady of Arthurian legend and Tennyson’s poem gets a soapbox of her own. Driven to distraction by sheer boredom, preternaturally aware that her life story’s already been written for her, archly quoting her own poem, and almost determined to die as flamboyantly as possible, Autumn’s take on the Lady may be angsty, but she’s also deliciously sarcastic – now some drama queen is gonna write a song for me!, she spits. Worth braving the gothic-girl-lost frills and flounces for.

7. CocoRosie: Werewolf

When I saw CocoRosie live a year or two ago, they took the stage in fake moustaches and proceeded to blow me away. Lyrically, only they know what Werewolf is really about, but I love the sudden changes of direction, the stream-of-consciousness narratives, and the thoughtful melancholy that hangs around my speakers in clouds after the music’s stopped playing. Corny movies make me reminisce / They break me down easy on this generic love shit / First kiss frog and princess … I’m-a shake you off though, get up on that horse and / Ride into the sunset, look back with no remorse…

6. Skye Sweetnam: Part Of Your World

I wanted to include a Disney cover- something done as a pop-punk number with a gutsy, bouncy female vocal. In my head, with a change of context, some spit and elbow grease, the song might come out kinda like the Disney Princess version of No Doubt’s Just A Girl.

A survey of YouTube’s trove of punk/rock Disney covers reveals a really male-heavy bunch of bands. (Ladies, where are you? Where’s my hardcore cover of Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo, eh?) This was the closest match for a female-voxed attempt at this song (Ariel’s big ballady number from The Little Mermaid) that YouTube could offer me – I’d have preferred something rougher round the edges, but it’s still good fun. Avril-esque Skye Sweetnam, then: she’s supported Britney live, provided Barbie’s singing voice on a Mattel DVD, fronts metal band Sumo Cyco – VARIED CAREER TRAJECTORY – and overall sounds like Bif Naked on a sugar high (no bad thing in my book). Album B-side Wolves and Witches is also sugary fun, if lyrically a bit join-the-dots.

Haters should note that Miley Cyrus has also had a crack at this song, and by God, she phones it in like nobody’s business, making Skye’s effort sound edgier than Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring by comparison.

SO! Readers. Could you do better than Skye? Dust off your Fender. Record it. Get in touch. And I will lavish THE FAME OF BADREP upon you. Provided you don’t sound like a cat in a tumble dryer. (Possibly even if you do.) Extra points if you do Gaston from Beauty and the Beast as a B-side. No wildly feminism-relevant reason. I just like it. (I use antlers in all of my DECCCC-o-rating…)

On that note, come back tomorrow morning for Part Two, in which we discover why Nicki Minaj, Paramore, and … Benjamin Zephaniah (trust me, he’s relevant) are rubbing shoulders.