Disney's new live-action version of The Little Mermaid has yet to be officially released, but one critic who received an early screening of the film recently speculated that it had a sting aimed at Princess Kate Middleton.
According to him, Ariel sacrificed her voice to get legs and rise to the surface to reunite with Prince Eric. "She can't speak, and he's trying to guess her name." His first guess is Diana, the second is Katherine, but after Ariel grimaces at the name, the prince declares, "Okay, definitely not Katherine."
From "The Little Mermaid",
According to the same visitor, Diana and Catherine are, of course, the names of the late Princess Diana and Princess Kate Middleton (and future Queen of Great Britain), whose full name is Catherine. The fact that Ariel reacts with disgust at the name is proof of a deliberate sting in Kate Middleton's direction. "It would be naïve and disingenuous for Disney to claim that the choice of names in this case was accidental," he said in an interview with the New York Post Page Six gossip site.
It was also claimed that the fact that Ariel's character in the film this time is dark-skinned and the fact that Prince Eric is white is not coincidental and is of course related to Kate's brothers-in-law, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, with whom she and her husband Prince and future British King William have been in almost complete disconnect in recent years.
In Markle and Harry's much-talked-about 2021 interview with Oprah Winfrey, Markle revealed that she watched the film while she and Harry were still living in the UK after their wedding and empathized with Ariel's character when she said at the time: "I said to myself, 'God forbid.' She falls in love with the prince and loses her voice because of it."
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