Ursula (Disney)

"Triton's daughter will be mine, and then I'll make him writhe. I'll see him wriggle like a '''worm on a hook!"

- Ursula

Ursula is the main antagonist of the Little Mermaid franchise. Ursula delights in making deals with "poor unfortunate souls", giving them their hearts desire if they succeed but also secretly sabotaging their efforts to do so. She is voiced by Pat Carroll in all of her appearances. Over the years, Ursula has become one of the most popular, and iconic of all the Disney villains and is one of the franchise's official members.Her appearance is of a plump light lavender-skinned, white-haired female human and from the waist down has black octopus-like tentacles. The character has been compared to Madame Medusa from the 1977 film The Rescuers, in terms of style, dramatics and choice of minions.

'Hans Christian Andersens' Fairytale'
Ursula the Sea Witch was originally from the classic Danish Fairytale titled 'The Little Mermaid' written in 1837 by children's story teller Hans Christian Andersen. The Witch in this story is a nameless character and is only called by the title of her position as the "Sea Witch".

The Original Story... The namless character only known as 'Little Mermaid' or 'Princess Mermaid', dwells in a beautiful underwater Kingdom with her widowed Father the Sea King or Mer-King, her Dowager Empress Grandmother, and her five pretty sisters.

Her five sisters are each born one year apart. The Mermaids favorite pastime is to listen to they're Grandmother's tales about the upper world when they are not attending they're sea Gardens by the palace. When a Mermaid turns fifteen, she is permitted to swim to the surface to watch the wonderful world above, and when the sisters become old enough, each of them visits the upper world every year. As each of them returns, the Little Mermaid listens longingly to their various descriptions of the surface and of human beings. The Little Mermaid is described as being the most beautiful yet reserved one out of all her older sisters. And when her fifteenth Birthday finally arrives she is adorned with a wreath of white lillies decorated with pearls and twelve oyster clams attached to her fin. The Mermiad rises up to the surface, sees a ship aglow with a handsome Prince on deck. She falls in love with him from a distance and watches the human party celebrate the young lads birthday as fireworks are shot into the air, the Mermaid believes the stars are falling from the sky. Suddenly, a great storm of thunder amd lightning hits, and the Little Mermaid saves the unconscious Prince from nearly drowning like everyone else on board. She delivers him while still unconscious safely to the shore near a religious temple that sits on a rocky cliff above the shore. Here she waits until a young girl from the nearby temple who is accompanied by ladies in waiting, all find him. The Prince believes it is the temple girl who has rescued him and never meets nor sees the Little Mermaid, his true savor who was scared away and flead back into the ocean before being seen.

The Sea Witch...

A long time goes by, and the sad and suffering Mermaid cannot forget her Prince. She cannot stand it any longer and slips away into the night, sneaking off from her family during a royal ball, as the pinning over her Prince has become too painful. She dangerously journeys to the Sea Witch's layer to ask for the Sea Witch's help. (In the original story the Witch is referred to also as "The Sea Sorceress".)

"And then the Little Mermaid went out from her garden, and took the road to the foaming whirlpools, behind which the Sea Sorceress lived. She had never been that way before: neither flowers nor grass grew there; nothing but bare, gray, sandy ground stretched out to the whirlpool, where the water, like foaming mill-wheels, whirled round everything that it seized, and cast it into the fathomless deep. Through the midst of these crushing whirlpools the little mermaid was obliged to pass, to reach the dominions of the sea witch; and also for a long distance the only road lay right across a quantity of warm, bubbling mire, called by the witch her turfmoor. Beyond this stood her house, in the centre of a strange forest, in which all the trees and flowers were polypi, half animals and half plants; they looked like serpents with a hundred heads growing out of the ground. The branches were long slimy arms, with fingers like flexible worms, moving limb after limb from the root to the top. All that could be reached in the sea they seized upon, and held fast, so that it never escaped from their clutches. The Little Mermaid was so alarmed at what she saw, that she stood still, and her heart beat with fear, and she was very nearly turning back; but she thought of the prince, and the immortal soul..." -Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid.

Hans' Sea Witch is not necessarily evil, being not the antagonist nor Villain. She is a recluse living in an abandoned part of the Ocean where all of the most terrifying sea monsters and other strange creatures of the abyss dwell.



"There sat the sea witch, allowing a toad to eat from her mouth, just as people sometimes feed a canary with a piece of sugar. She called the ugly water-snakes her little chickens, and allowed them to crawl all over her bosom." -Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid. The Witch's character is placed in the middle of the plot to assist the protagonist Mermaid and help her dream of being human to win the love of a handsome human Prince she rescued and explians the price to be paid to be apart of the upper world.

"I know what you want,” said the sea witch; “it is very stupid of you, but you shall have your way, and it will bring you to sorrow, my pretty princess. You want to get rid of your fish’s tail, and to have two supports instead of it, like human beings on earth, so that the young prince may fall in love with you, and that you may have an immortal soul.” And then the witch laughed so loud and disgustingly, that the toad and the snakes fell to the ground, and lay there wriggling about. “You are but just in time,” said the witch; “for after sunrise to-morrow I should not be able to help you till the end of another year" -Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid.

To Witch even warns the Mermaid about the deadly price to be paid and the result of what will happen if the Prince does not fall in love with the Mermaid back. Thus, even telling her of her stupidity. The Witch's deal to take the Mermaids voice is much more gruesome and darker than the Disney film...

"But if you take away my voice,” said the Little Mermaid, “what is left for me?” "Your beautiful form, your graceful walk, and your expressive eyes; surely with these you can enchain a man’s heart. Well, have you lost your courage? Put out your little tongue that I may cut it off as my payment; then you shall have the powerful draught.” “It shall be,” said the Little Mermaid." -Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid.

The price is to cut off the Little Mermaids tongue to mute her, in exchange for a magic postion she must drink which will painfully split her tale into two and shrink into a pair of beautiful legs. Thus, allowing the Mermaid a chance at attaining a mortal soul by marrying the Prince and sharing his soul as one, which one day will allow the Mermaid to have a place in heaven with him. It is said that Mermaids are to live for three hundred years in the depths of the sea, but do not have souls and when they die they dissolve and become a part of the ocean. After death sea folk turn to seafoam and just simply no longer exist, not even in an afterlife.

The Original Ending...

The Little Mermaid drinks the potion the Witch gave her and she passes out and lays unconscious. When she awakens it is daylight and the Prince finds her laying on the white marble steps of his Palace. The Prince is mesmerised by her beauty and grace even though she is mute. Most of all he likes to see her dance, and she dances for him despite her suffering excruciating pain. When the prince's father orders his son to marry the neighboring king's daughter, the prince tells the Little Mermaid he will not because he does not love the Princess. He goes on to say he can only love the young woman from the temple, who he believes rescued him. It turns out that the Princess is the temple girl, who had been sent to the temple to be educated before being able to wed. The prince loves her, and the wedding is announced immediately.

The Prince and Princess marry, and then a lavish celebration is held on a royal ship. But the Little Mermaid's heart is broken. She thinks of all that she has given up and of all the pain she has suffered. She despairs, thinking of the death that awaits her. Right before dawn, her older sisters arise from the waves, they're hair, no longer dancing in the wind. They all come bringing her a dagger and explain to they're little sister that the Sea Witch has given them this as a token in exchange for their long beautiful flowing hair.

"We have given our hair to the witch,” said they, “to obtain help for you, that you may not die to-night. She has given us a knife: here it is, see it is very sharp. Before the sun rises you must plunge it into the heart of the prince; when the warm blood falls upon your feet they will grow together again, and form into a fish’s tail, and you will be once more a mermaid, and return to us to live out your three hundred years before you die and change into the salt sea foam. Haste, then; he or you must die before sunrise. Our old grandmother moans so for you, that her white hair is falling off from sorrow, as ours fell under the witch’s scissors. Kill the prince and come back; hasten: do you not see the first red streaks in the sky? In a few minutes the sun will rise, and you must die.” And then they sighed deeply and mournfully, and sank down beneath the waves." -Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid.

If the Little Mermaid slays the prince and stabs his heart with the knife and lets his blood drip on her feet, she will become a Mermaid again, all her suffering will end, and she will live out her full life of three hundred years with her family as a Mermaid.

However, despite her fear of death, the Little Mermaid cannot bring herself to kill the sleeping prince lying with his new bride, and she throws the dagger and then herself into the sea as dawn breaks and basically commits Suicides. Her body slowly dissolves into foam, but instead of ceasing to exist, she feels the bright rays of the sun; she has turned into a spirit, a child of the air. The other children tell her she has become like them, an invisible and ethereal form because she strove with all her heart to obtain an immortal soul. She will earn her own soul one day by doing good deeds for three hundred years and she will eventually rise up into the kingdom of God and earn a place in Heaven.

"After three hundred years, thus shall we float into the kingdom of heaven,” said she. “And we may even get there sooner,” whispered one of her companions. “Unseen we can enter the houses of men, where there are children, and for every day on which we find a good child, who is the joy of his parents and deserves their love, our time of probation is shortened. The child does not know, when we fly through the room, that we smile with joy at his good conduct, for we can count one year less of our three hundred years. But when we see a naughty or a wicked child, we shed tears of sorrow, and for every tear a day is added to our time of trial!" Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid.

The End

The Little Mermaid (1989)
Through circumstances unknown, Ursula once lived in the palace within Atlanta with Triton and his family, but was banished, again due to circumstances unknown (though it was presumably because of her liberal use of black magic). She made her home in the belly of a dead leviathan, and used her dark powers to "grant wishes" to merfolk. If they succeed, they get their hearts desire. If they fail, she adds them to "her garden", which is a collection of pitiful looking sea creatures who are anchored to the floor. Via her song "Poor Unfortunate Souls", she offers Ariel the chance to be human for three days. If she can get the prince to give her "the kiss of true love" the condition would be permanent, but if not, she would be Ursula's property. Ariel accepts, and Ursula, true to her word, turns her human right then and there, at the cost of her beautiful singing voice.

Later in the movie, Ariel is "too close" to accomplishing her goal, so Ursula decides to "take matters into her own tentacles". Using her powers, she disguises herself as a beautiful dark-haired woman named Vanessa, and uses her magic to put Prince Eric in a trance, forcing him to marry her. Ariel and her friends crash the wedding, and though they stop it and release Ariel's voice, Ariel is too late. Ursula reverts back to her natural form and kidnaps the mermaid. Her father King Triton, warned earlier by Ariel's friend Sebastian, tries to stop Ursula, but Ursula hides behind the contract, demonstrating that it is "legal", "binding", and completely unbreakable, even for [Triton]". The heartbroken king agrees to take his daughter's place, and Ursula finally accomplishes her goal of being the unquestioned ruler of the seas. She grows into a giant monster and traps Ariel in the bottom of a whirlpool she made. Ursula attempts to murder Princess Ariel and just as she's about to at last electrocute her to death, she is impaled on the bow of a sunken ship piloted by Eric, which causes her to explode. All the people she kept under her spell, including the king, were released from Ursula's spell for good.

She was voiced by Patt Carrol and was originally voiced by Jennifer Saunders.

The Little Mermaid 2: Return to the Sea (2000)
Ursula's sister, Morgana (also voiced by Pat Carroll) is the primary antagonist of the movie. In it, it is revealed that Ursula was far more powerful than her sister, and the family favorite. Morgana has been trying to come out of Ursula's shadow her entire life. When Morgana surreptitiously obtains the trident, she cries to the skies that she is now the favored daughter. However, Ariel's daughter Melody steals the trident back and tosses it to her grandfather, Triton, who promptly turns her into ice. As she sinks to the bottom of the ocean, a picture of Ursula (at which Morgana regularly threw darts) sinks down with her.

The TV Series
Ursula appears in the TV series based on the movie as well. She appears in four episodes as the primary antagonist ("Against the Tide", "Tail of Two Crabs", "Heroes" and "Ariel's Treasures"), still opposed to Ariel and her allies.

The Little Mermaid (Broadway musical)
In the musical, Ursula remains largely the same. Her evil nature is still present, she is still a cruel sadist who delights in the suffering of her clients, and she is a very powerful witch. However, there are some key differences as well, the largest being that she is now thin and attractive. She is also Triton's sister, making her Ariel's aunt (an unused plotline for the movie). Her conch is no longer a necklace, but is rather kept on a stand. She still gives Ariel her human legs, still tries to sabotage her, and still seduces Eric to try and ruin her chances. However, the Vanessa subplot was removed, and instead of crashing the wedding, Ariel defeats Ursula in a singing contest. She obtains Triton's trident and conquers the ocean, but is destroyed when Ariel smashes her conch shell, the source of her power.

In the stage show, she was originally portrayed by veteran Broadway actress Sheri Renee Scott.

Kingdom Hearts series
Ursula watches Sora defeat the Guard Armor in Traverse Town from her post in Hollow Bastion. She suggests that Maleficent should turn him into a Heartless, and it'll "settle things quick enough". After the defeat of the Opposite Armor, the Hellfire Club is beginning to dwindle. Ursula is still her ally, and appears alongside Oogie Boogie and Jafar, reminding Maleficent of the Princesses of Heart.

She returns to her homeworld of Atlantica where she uses Ariel and Sora to find the world's keyhole and steal Sora's Keyblade, as well as the trident. Once she obtains it, she battles the heroes in her cave, and when she is defeated there, she grows giant like in the movie. However, she is defeated again, and destroyed for good.

As in the movies and the TV series, she is voiced by Pat Carroll.

Ursula appears again in Kingdom Hearts II, revived by unknown means. Her role in the game is largely similar to her role in the movie, however, due to the fact that Atlantica is a musical based world in Kingdom Hearts II, she is defeated during the song Ursula's Revenge. Like in the movie, she grows into a giant and attacks Ariel and Eric. Sora knocks the trident out of her hands only for Eric to throw it right through her, killing her.

Reflections of Ursula
Although Vanessa herself doesn't appear in the short story Disney's The Little Mermaid: Reflection of Ursula, she is subtly referenced with Ursula's disguise of Arsulu, a blond mermaid with a red tail and magenta shells which she adopted to infiltrate Atlantica. Just like Vanessa, mirror reflections reveal "Arsulu's" true identity as Ursula, which Ariel later exploited.

Reception
As the first major villain of the "Disney Renaissance", Ursula made a considerable impact. An official poll of the top 30 villains in Disney history put her at #5, and the Nostalgia Critic ranked her #6. Ursula was likely the inspiration for Gnorga from A Troll in Central Park.

Trivia

 * The name of Ursula's human disguise, "Vanessa", is derived from the Latin word "Vanitas", meaning "Vanity", "Worthlessness", "Emptiness" and "Nothingness".
 * In an original draft for The Little Mermaid, Vanessa's role in the plot was quite different than in the final version. Originally, Eric proposed to Vanessa willingly after he discovered that she had the voice he was looking for, although he later had second thoughts at the actual wedding, when Vanessa intimidated him into saying "I do". Also, Vanessa was originally supposed to wear a scarf in order to ensure that her identity as Ursula was safe (as it hid her nautilus) when meeting people up close (such as Ariel).
 * She is one of many villains who is an all-encompassing force.
 * The attack on her was actually much different in the original version, as Scuttle and the various aquatic fauna did not start attacking her and the ship until just before the priest could pronounce them Husband and Wife. While fighting off the animals, Vanessa also nearly hinted that she wasn't who she claimed she was so she faked fear at a suspicious Eric. Scuttle, in this version, also decided to exploit the fact that Vanessa's true form can be revealed from her reflection by airlifting the mirror from the bridesroom over to her and positioning it near her, but she caught on and destroyed it before he could get into position. However, her reflection was already exposed from water seeping onto the deck from the animals, thus giving away who she really was to Eric. Perhaps the biggest difference is that Vanessa still kept Ariel's voice, though for some reason, she was unable to use it anymore.
 * At one point while Vanessa was being harassed by Scuttle, she yells angrily "Oh why you little!" and strangles Scuttle in a very similar manner to Homer and Bart in The Simpsons. (Coincidentally, both The Little Mermaid and the first Simpsons full length episode were released in 1989.)
 * Her name is never revealed in the film before the wedding, often in storybooks she is known as The Maiden.
 * Vanessa is one of four characters to possess violet eyes, the other three being Aurora, Megara and Doctor Facilier. On a related note, Vanessa was also the first villain to possess purple eyes, eventually being succeeded by Facilier.
 * In the official comic adaptation, Vanessa was shown multiple times singing in Ariel's voice without the necklace hanging around her neck, implying that so long as the necklace is safe, she will be able to speak with Ariel's voice.
 * Ursula is the first major Disney villain to have his/her own song. While the villain songs before her were either sung by the henchman (The Siamese Cat Song, The World's Greatest Criminal Mind and The Elegant Captain Hook), The "funny/incompetent" villains (The Magnificent Marvelous Mad Madam Mim, Hi Diddle Dee Dee, Who's Been Painting My Roses Red and Trust in Me), or the heroes who were against the villains (Cruella De Vil and The Phony King of England), while the "serious/non-comedic" villains (The Evil Queen, The Coachman, Chernabog, Lady Tremaine, Maleficent, Shere Khan, Madame Medusa, The Horned King, Bill Sykes, Etc.) never sang at all.