Time and again throughout The Little Mermaid, Carroll and Ursula both seem to savor the richness of their dialogue. I’m not sure that I’d go so far as to say that it’s camp, but there is something knowing about the voice acting here that suggests as much. After all, it’s “Poor Unfortunate Souls” that has become one of the film’s most enduringly popular songs, far more so than even the other great hits “Under the Sea,” “Part of Your World,” and “Kiss the Girl.” There’s something infectiously arch about the entire song, the way that Ursula–and perhaps, given her comments about Ashman, Carroll herself–was in on the joke. And, no offense to Jodi Benson, but her performance can’t hold a candle to Carroll’s. There’s a certain irony to this, given that the entire film is premised on the idea of a young woman trading away her voice to gain the love of a prince (in fact, she goes on to spend half the movie not saying anything at all). Yet less attention has been paid to the particularities of Carroll’s vocal performance. She made being bad look good (blue eyeshadow, gelled hair, and all). And it is also true that, thanks to Carroll’s performance, viewers of all ages were led to love this villainous character. Unsurprisingly, much has been written about the queerness of Ursula as a character, from the way that she was clearly modeled on the famous drag queen Divine to the way that “Poor Unfortunate Souls” is essentially a drag performance that highlights the constructedness of gender. … I got more about that character from Howard singing that song than from anything else.” … His shoulders would twitch in a certain way, and his eyes would go a certain way. As she herself noted : “I got the whole attitude from him. Given that Ashman was a gay man, it seems safe to say that Carroll must have known, on some level at least, just queer her performance was and how easily it could be appropriated by legions queer audiences. Rarely have we seen a voice actor give as much to her role as Pat Carroll did to Ursula.Ĭarroll has made clear in interviews that she drew a lot of her performance from seeing a recording of Howard Ashman. There’s no question that a major reason that Ursula is such a dynamic villain is because the woman who voiced her had such a queer timbre (the same was also true of Aladdin’s Jafar, voiced by Jonathan Freeman and The Lion King’s Scar, voiced by Jeremy Irons, to say nothing of Pocahontas’ Governor Ratcliffe, voiced by David Ogden Stiers). The reason for this failure on my part stems from Carrol herself, particularly her voice. Try as I might, however, I couldn’t capture Ursula’s essence and, to be honest, I still can’t, despite years of practice. And, like many another queer boy of that day and age, I spent many hours pretending to be Ursula (I always insisted on being her when my friends and I would re-enact The Little Mermaid ). Even as a child, I knew there was something about this voluptuous villainess that called to me, though it would take me many more years to realize just what it was that made her so appealing (hint: it’s her queerness). Like many other elder millennials, my clearest memory of Pat Carroll–who died July 31, at the age of 95–was as Ursula, the villainous sea witch in Disney’s 1989 film The Little Mermaid.
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