This may come as a surprise to some of you, and some of you may not be surprised at all, but Ursula is no sea witch. She is a queen. No, I am not talking about her drag queen origin story, but I am talking about her self-loving female empowerment. Before Queen Ursula, our villains were all beautiful, and thin. Or if they weren’t thin and beautiful, they were self-loathing and jealous of the protagonist for whom their evil eye twitched.
But not Queen Ursula. No. She was a woman…..er, anthropomorphic woman to be reckoned with! And that is what makes her my favorite, life changing villain.
I may not be the first person to express this kind of devotion and gratitude to Queen Ursula. Considering that her overall design is deeply imbedded in the drag queen scene, it’s no surprise to find that several people have already constructed their ode’s to her. One such ode takes on the spoken word form (proceed with caution: Use of profanity in the video):
Needless to say when I first saw this spoken word piece, I got chills. Not only do I commend Melissa May for calling out Disney in their faulty attempt to “improve” Queen Ursula by constricting her to today’s social standards of thin, but for pointing out everything I hadn’t realized up until that point. Ursula owned her body, and she relished in showing it off. But more importantly she didn’t give a flippy floppy what anyone thought of her much less what they thought of her physique. In a day and age where we are shoveled misinformation about proper fitness and body image, Ursula is first and foremost comfortable with herself which is a lot more than what I can say for those in the unfortunate cycle of fad diets and over-exercise*.
Though Queen Ursula doesn’t have a lot of screen time in the film, she makes the most of it with a killer song, and a killer death. Not to mention a killer plan.
While most evil plans fail due to an oversight, small technicality, or sheer stupidity, Ursula’s plan only fails because she got too drunk with power and Eric turned out to be a better seaman then anticipated for a prince, resulting in one heck of an ending.
*Note: I realize that Queen Ursula is no model of physical perfect health. However, what Queen Ursula excels at here is perfect self confidence.
