Following the racist backlash actor Halle Bailey received for her casting in the Disney film “The Little Mermaid,” parents are posting TikTok videos of their kids’ reactions to the trailer.
Millions of people have watched videos of children, particularly young Black girls, seeing Bailey as the title character for the first time and singing “Part of Your World.”
A father playing the trailer for his two Black daughters was seen in one of the videos posted by TikTok user @thedfwdad. One of the girls remarked after seeing Bailey, “Is she Black? Yay!” There were 1.3 million views of the video. The creator thanked Disney in the caption for helping his children “feel seen.”
When Bailey appeared on screen in another video posted by TikToker @preciousavery with the caption “When your favourite Disney princess looks like you,” her daughter immediately sat up. Emery said in the clip, “She looks brown to me! Ariel in brown is adorable.” There were 5.3 million views of the video.
Another popular video was uploaded by @jendayis682 on TikTok. the person filming the video responded, “In this ‘Little Mermaid,’ she will be,” in response to a young girl asking whether Ariel is “actually Black.”
“Say what you want and complain all you want I hear nothing over the joy and excitement that this little girl has over seeing a person that represents her,” the user wrote in the caption.
Since the trailer’s release on September 10, it has amassed over 13 million views on YouTube and more than 4.9 million views on TikTok under the hashtag #thelittlemermaidtrailer, with the majority of the reactions from both adults and kids.
In a Twitter thread with over 80,000 retweets and close to 500,000 likes, many of the TikTok videos were reposted.
In July 2019, Bailey was revealed as the star of the live-action adaptation of “The Little Mermaid,” much to the delight of fans who were eager to see a Black woman portray a beloved Disney heroine.
Ariel is shown as white with red hair in both the classic Hans Christian Andersen fable and the 1989 Disney animated adaptation, which drew criticism for casting Bailey as the role.
Following her selection, the hashtag #NotMyAriel became popular on Twitter, which prompted the film’s director to explain the choice in an interview with Variety.
The Disney-owned network Freeform, which produces “Grown-ish,” in which Bailey portrays Sky Foster, also openly backed Bailey.
After the video’s publication, the reaction picked up again online. According to Newsweek, the trailer had 1.5 million dislikes before the counter was turned off.
A now-suspended account’s widely-repeated tweet on September 12 purported to modify Bailey’s appearance in the teaser to a white mermaid.
The message said, “He changed The Little Mermaid and converted the woke actor into a ginger white female,” and “It’s over for wokecels,” as observed by Insider and afterwards reposted by other Twitter users.
“I want the young girl in me and the little girls just like me who are watching to realise that they’re important and that they should be a princess in every single aspect,” Bailey stated in response to the criticism in a recent interview with Variety.
She continued by saying that seeing Ariel as a person of colour when she was little would have had a huge effect.
After being chosen for a fictitious character, prejudice has been experienced by other Black actors besides Bailey. Moses Ingram and John Boyega have both encountered racism in the wake of their “Star Wars” roles, while 12-year-old Leah Jeffries has lately faced criticism in the wake of her casting as Annabeth in the forthcoming Disney+ series “Percy Jackson and the Olympians.”
Jonah Hauer-King, Melissa McCarthy, Javier Bardem, Awkwafina, and Daveed Diggs will join Bailey in “The Little Mermaid,” which will be released in May 2023.