> Disney movies are there to teach little moral lessons and tell a good story, which is not always bad. And besides, when making kid movies, like "The Little Mermaid", you can't leave in all the gory details. I haven't read the original story of the mermaid for a while, but I believe she has to kill the Prince in the end, and so she stabs him at the end. In some versions, she opts to kill herself instead of the prince. either way, it's gory and unpleasant.

I don't object to stories with little moral lessons. However, I do feel that modern moral tales largely restrict themselves to the simplistic PC moral that "if you're a nice person you'll live happily ever after". Yes, fine, very nice, but I think I can see a flaw in that argument, which is called "reality". Children aren't stupid. Escapism is great too, but it doesn't always need to be sanitised into feelgood mush just so people won't be exposed to Unpleasantness.

In Anderson's version of "The Little Mermaid", the heroine dies. The moral, if there is one, is not "be good and you'll get what you want", but "be good and you might or might not get what you want, because that's the way the world is, but spiritually you'll be better off for having been good." The mermaid would die on the night her prince married someone else, unless she killed him. She loved him too much to do it, and so she died. The addendum was that instead of dissolving into foam, which is apparently the normal fate of mermaids, she became some sort of air sprite instead, and had the opportunity to gain an immortal soul after many more hundreds of years.

This sort of moral is a *lot* more complex than the type favoured today. But I thought it was a preferable moral when I was ten, and I still think so now. Before everybody goes off with the impression that I despise Disney movies in general and The Little Mermaid in particular, let me say this is not the case. I just want to put this discussion in context with what I think about moral stories.

Brunnen-"my opinions always sound like "everything's gone way downhill since the good ol' days in the late 1800s", I know, I know"G