Who is Ariel?
Ariel is the mermaid heroine of Disney's animated film The Little Mermaid. She is curious about the human world and collects things she finds under the sea. Her story links an undersea kingdom with life on land.
How old is Ariel? Ariel is 16, and the film says so.
Every object Ariel finds raises questions about how people live. That's a ready-made plot for a game at home: show an ordinary object to a heroine who has never seen one and work out how she discovers what it's for. Disney's film is different from Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale, including the ending. If you read the book and watch the film, compare those specific versions.
About the story: Disney Princess: Ariel.
Build Ariel's underwater museum
Our own activity ideas inspired by the story — for drawing, toys and telling stories aloud.
- Set a few everyday objects on the table. Imagine the mermaid is seeing them for the first time. What funny but kind explanation can you invent for a spoon, a hairbrush or a clothespin?
- Draw an underwater museum with three display cases. Label the treasures or tell about them out loud. Then figure out how the museum's owner will learn what they're really for.
Talk about it together: How will the mermaid figure out what a hairbrush is for? Who could she ask?
Let’s play!
Picking a coloring app after The Little Mermaid
For a child who likes choosing colors and decorating characters, our catalog includes Disney Coloring World. Before you install it, check that the current set has the characters your child wants; store availability also varies by country. You can draw your own underwater museum on paper, too. On paper, there's no limit on which treasures and sea creatures go in.
We picked these apps for the activity. We haven't confirmed that this heroine appears in them.
Questions about the heroine
Is Disney's Ariel the same as Andersen's Little Mermaid?
No. Disney made its own film based on Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale. The book and the film differ in their details and in the ending.
How old is Ariel?
Ariel is 16, and the film says so. In The Little Mermaid (1989), she tells her father, King Triton, that she is sixteen and not a child anymore. She and Aurora, also 16, are the youngest official Disney Princesses whose age is given in their own film; Rapunzel, at 18, is the only other one.