That cry came from The New York Times’ review of the film. Critic Wesley Morris’ starts his review on a bizarre note, bemoaning the lack of “kink” in a family-friendly tale. He later dubs the film “timid and reactive,”

The colorization hasn’t led to a racialized, radicalized adventure. It’s not a Black adaptation, an interpretation that imbues white material with Black culture until it’s something completely new; it’s not “The Wiz.” It’s still a Disney movie, one whose heroine now, sigh, happens to be Black. …

HuffPo similarly snubs the movie for not doing enough to fight “systemic racism.”

“The Little Mermaid” goes out of its way, literally incorporating a whole new sequence, to show both Ariel and Eric experiencing and engaging with a Black humanity that is foreign to each of them, but stops short of actually dealing with that.

This is all easy to write off as expected Disney gloss, except that the studio made a huge diversity push around this movie, making it seem like it was going to deepen Ariel’s identity in a new way. Instead, Blackness and the diversity buzzwords the marketing machine peddled around for months are mere set pieces in a story that is still confined inside a fundamentally white gaze.

[This is more than the death of Disney. It’s the death of art to the Party Approved Narrative — eventually. Box Office Mojo reports that the film made $95.4 million over the weekend, not counting yesterday; CNN put the estimate at $117M, and $185M including international box office. That is almost exactly what their live-action ‘Aladdin’ made four years ago on the same weekend, though, and that’s not exactly known as a success. Its budget was a reported $200M, about what the original got in its first release, which means it needs to make around $500M at the box office to recoup the budget and costs for distribution and promotion. Reviews like these don’t help matters for Disney. — Ed]