The original story has been the subject of multiple analyses by scholars such as Jacob Bøggild and Pernille Heegaard, as well as the folklorist Maria Tatar.

The Little Mermaid lives in a Utopian underwater kingdom with her widowed father, the Sea King, her paternal grandmother, and her five older sisters, each one of them born a year apart.

Lonely and feeling isolated from her family, she yearns to explore the world above, and constantly asks her grandmother to tell her stories of humans.

When the Little Mermaid's turn comes, she rises up to the surface, watches a birthday celebration being held on a ship in honor of a handsome prince, and falls in love with him from a safe distance.

The Little Mermaid, longing for the prince and an eternal soul, visits the Sea Witch who lives in a dangerous part of the ocean, surrounded by a forest of polyps, mud, and whirlpools.

Otherwise, at dawn on the first day after he marries someone else, the Little Mermaid will die with a broken heart and dissolve into sea foam upon the waves.

As she is mute, he confides in her his deepest thoughts and feelings—but he does not fall in love with her at all: he regards her more as a pet than a person, and has her sleep on the floor outside his bedroom door.

She despairs, thinking of the death that awaits her, but before dawn, her sisters rise out of the water and bring her a dagger that the Sea Witch has given them in exchange for their long, beautiful hair.

However, the Little Mermaid cannot bring herself to kill the sleeping prince lying with his new wife, and she throws the dagger and herself off the ship into the water just as dawn breaks.

Her body dissolves into foam, but instead of ceasing to exist, she feels the warm sun and discovers that she has turned into a luminous and ethereal earthbound spirit, a daughter of the air, and has regained the ability to speak.

On the fact that children are told that their good behavior will help the mermaid earn her soul more quickly, but their bad behavior will add days to her time of service, P. L. Travers, author of Mary Poppins and noted folklore commentator, wrote, "a year taken off when a child behaves; a tear shed and a day added whenever a child is naughty?

They point out that the events leading up to the mermaid's death should culminate in tragedy, but that the sudden twist allows the narrative to finish on a hopeful success.

Bøggild and Heegaard argue that this disjointed ending was not the result of Andersen's sentimentality and religious beliefs—to which have been attributed his choice to stray from the tragic path in the rest of the narrative.

[5] However, other critics including Søren Baggesen and James Massengale have argued that the ending is not tacked on, but is a natural part of the story's structure as a religious narrative.

[6] The working title of the story was "Daughters of the Air",[3] which are spirits who, as Andersen conceived them, can earn souls by doing three hundred years' worth of good deeds.

In 1837, shortly after completing his manuscript, Andersen wrote to a friend, "I have not, like de la Motte Fouqué in Undine, allowed the mermaid's acquiring of an immortal soul to depend upon an alien creature, upon the love of a human being.

Tatar's interpretation of the tale is one that presents a rare heroine with an investigative curiosity which is shown through the mermaid's fascination with the unknown, the forbidden, and her intent on broadening her horizons from the start.

[14][better source needed][15] Some readers may consider the story to be a cautionary tale, suggesting that people should love what they already have, lest they lose it forever.

The Little Mermaid's endeavours to earn an immortal soul through the love of a prince are fraught with suffering from the beginning: she is constantly racked with horrific pain from losing her tail; the prince regards her as a plaything rather than a love interest; and on the evening of his wedding before the sun rises, the Little Mermaid laments the home and family she has left behind.

[17] The artist Pen Dalton has made use of Laura Mulvey's interpretation of fetishism in art to link The Little Mermaid to the wearing of fetishistic clothes, and obsessive cosmetic surgery with masculine fears of loss.

The series features adaptations of fairy tales like Mother Goose and other family-oriented stories performed by well-known actors.

The first season of sixteen black-and-white and colored episodes aired on NBC between 12 January 1958, and 21 December 1958, as Shirley Temple's Storybook.

[24] The second season of twenty-five color episodes aired on NBC as The Shirley Temple Show between 18 September 1960, and 16 July 1961 in much the same format that it had under its original title.

Unlike the original story, the mermaid does not give up her voice to become human, but she still fails to win the prince's heart when he falls in love with the princess who found him.

The prince transfers his feelings of love for Pearl onto her, believing she is his rescuer, and they begin a courtship that they find each of their fathers had hoped would happen so they could conjoin their kingdoms.

After The Prince weds Amelia, Pearl's sisters come to the surface and announce they've traded their hair to the sea witch in exchange for a dagger.

Written, produced, and directed by Ron Clements and John Musker, with music by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman (who also served as a co-producer), the film features the voices of Jodi Benson, Christopher Daniel Barnes, and Pat Carroll among others.

While in production in the 1980s, the staff by chance found the original story and visual development work done by Kay Nielsen for Disney's proposed 1930s Andersen feature.

Ellen Price, the ballerina who danced the Little Mermaid in the 1909 Royal Danish Ballet production, was the model for the head and face.

She was created in 2000 by Kristian Dahlgard, with several layers of metal, in homage to the Danes who live in Monaco and for the late Prince Rainier III to mark the 50th year of his reign.