I should add that I've never seen The Little Mermaid, and neither (as far as I know) has Nia, but having read the original story to her from an old book of fairy tales a while back I can confirm that it's a phenomenally grim and joyless tale with some suspicious undertones of puberty, menstruation and general horror of female sexuality (and all the other stuff being a punishment for expressing it). None of which are things that'd play well with the target audience for Disney animated films, so they took the liberty of removing most of that stuff and giving the film a happy ending. Incidentally the manservant's name, as far as I can tell, is Grimsby, perhaps an ironic nod to the grim undercurrents that got sanitised out of the final glossy feel-good product. Or perhaps not, and that's just his name. Sometimes a manservant is just a manservant, as Freud definitely didn't say (the jury's still out on the cigar thing).
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