Although Walt Disney had considered animating a version of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid as early as the 1930s, the venture capsized. Fifty years later, the premise remained a risky vessel. “It was controversial,” director John Musker attests. “Can you really do that? Can you have the star of your movie actually lose their voice?” (Duca, 2014, para. 6). Since its 1989 release, The Little Mermaid has remained drenched in such critical “controversy.” Decrying the loss of the mermaid’s voice as a full-throated panegyric to patriarchy, for example, Trites (1991) adjudges Disney’s adaptation “more sexist than” its source, an “annoying reworking” that “rob[s] women of integrity” (p. 145). However, as The Walt Disney Company commemorates its centenary with a live-action return to Mermaid’s seas, the tide has come for a deeper dive beneath the surface—and surface-level critiques—of the originary animation. In Disney’s reimagining of Andersen’s Kunstmärchen, the mermaid evinces none of the passivity of her Victorian forbear. If Ariel evokes atavistic fantasies of the self-abnegating Victorian angel, it is but to subvert them with another Victorian archetype that Auerbach (1982) describes as “slither[ing] with … the mermaid” who “submerge[s]” herself—her voice, her agency, her autonomy—“not to negate [her] power, but to conceal it” (p. 7). Far from bespeaking resigned authority, Ariel’s re-signed silence interrupts the tired tunes of patriarchal and ableist ideologies with radical re-articulations of voice and ironised re-citations of hegemonic gender codes. This mermaid’s muteness proves mutinous.