Anyone who has sung along to Disney’s The Little Mermaid as a child or parent will be familiar with the idea that “baby it’s better/down where it’s wetter” – but ‘The Litter Mermaid’ turns that jaunty rhyming couplet on its head.
The film by not-for-profit collective Melon Comedy takes all of three minutes to demonstrate the severity of plastic pollution, what we need to do about it, and make us laugh. It shows a mermaid complaining to the human resources department that the job is not what she expected, while picking a plastic fork out of her long wavy hair. King Neptune waits on the beach, kicking his way through what must be several hundred final straws.
The Litter Mermaid was shot at St. Kilda Beach, Melbourne, and features exclusive footage of polluted waters in Indonesia shot by Richard Horner. As Lorelei, King Neptune and the Mermaids explain: “It’s sort of an open letter to the human race – a message in a plastic bottle if you will, from the disgruntled ‘maids of the sea’, now that there is now an island of plastic the size of France out there. Cutting down on straws isn’t going to cut it. We need to encourage real change.”
The Litter Mermaid
The Litter Mermaid
The Litter Mermaid
The Litter Mermaid
The Litter Mermaid