Ariel's most defining feature is her long, flowing, thick, bright red hair. From the waist down, she has a green horizontal fish-like tail with sea-green scales and sea-foam green fins and a matching V-shaped waist-line resembling fish-lips that reveals her midriff and her belly button.

Ariel's story really begins in Ancient Greece. According to lore, she is a nereid, one of the dozens of daughters of the sea-god Triton. This isn't the first time that the internet has been set alight over the suggestion that famous figures of antiquity could be anything but white.

During film production in the late 1980s, animators used actress Alyssa Milano as the main inspiration for Ariel's look.

Disney's Ariel is not the same as Anderson's little mermaid. The movie is loosely based on the fairy tale, so Disney has the freedom to give Ariel any skin color they want. In the 1989 movie, Ariel was born in the fictional underwater kingdom of Atlantica, which technically makes her Atlantican, not Danish.

Ariel is of Hebrew origin and means "lion of God." It is comprised of the Hebrew elements of 'ari, meaning "lion" and 'el, meaning "God."

Ariel wasn't known as Ariel in the original fairy tale. She was simply referred to as the “little mermaid.” Aside from Disney's Ariel, the character has gone by other names as well. For instance, in the Japanese animated series Adventure of the Little Mermaid , she is known as Marina. 6.

It was inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's famous fairytale about a mermaid who gives up everything to be united with a young, handsome prince on land.

Although Disney opted to make it a love story, this very much not the plot of the original story as written by Hans Christian Andersen. In fact, in 1837, the author of the Danish tale published Den Lille Havfrue (The Little Mermaid), a story that is very different from the one retold by the animation studio.

The story of Ariel is not tied up in her ethnicity or race, but there are stories where it is. In those cases, we want the stories to be told with actors who have an authentic connection to that character in some way.

the Red Sea Ariel (Halle Bailey) Does anyone need any explanation for Ariel representing the Red Sea? Like Arista/Karina, the fan theory for Ariel has been associated with her hair for decades. The Little Mermaid premieres in theatres on May 26th!

Ariel doesn't believe that a human life is less than a mermaid's life, unlike her father, the King of the Sea. She doesn't see any reason to disapprove of humanity despite their differences. This, if you ask us, is a much better reason for rescuing Prince Eric.

white skin In Anderson's telling and the original Disney film, the mermaid possessed white skin. In Disney's upcoming live action version of the story, Ariel will be portrayed by black actress and singer Halle Bailey.