Why The Little Mermaid is bad news for cinema

It is disappointing to learn that, after critics and cynical audiences everywhere had sharpened their fish knives in the expectation of the new live-action Little Mermaid film being a catastrophic disaster, early reviews have suggested that it is… fine. It attracted a great deal of attention, and some criticism, for the casting of the black singer-actress Halle Bailey in the lead role of Ariel, on the grounds that sea-dwelling mermaids must, after all, be white-skinned redheads, as she was in the seminal 1989 animated film.