"Don't Underestimate The Importance of Body Language"

Y'all know how I feel about Target.

So when my husband asked me if I wanted to get out of the house for a bit and take our daughter on a Target run with my mom while he watched the newborn, I jumped at the chance. (And I don't care how #basicwhitegirl it makes me if I love walking around Target with my Starbucks macchiato. Or #suburbanmom. Or both.)

And I'll admit that one of the reasons I love going to Target -- and there are many -- is that there is always so. much. Disney. stuff. Disney is a marketing genius, and this extends to their ability to merchandize everything and anything.

In our house, we're a sucker for Disney Legos -- if only because Legos are my husband's Kryptonite. Combine them with Disney? There's no hope for us.

So as we're walking down the toy aisles, I noticed this set, "Ariel and the Magic Spell":

Nothing special -- I was actually more interested in the Moana sets on the shelf below -- but it struck me that this was kind of a "dark" scene for Disney to make a Lego set out of. (Aside from the fact that it's the scene with one of the greatest Disney songs, ever.) It would be having a Snow White set with the old crone and the apple or a Sleeping Beauty set with Maleficent and the spinning wheel. 

And then I took a closer look at Ursula:

I'm not one to judge but...if Ursula weren't an animated cartoon character, she'd probably have serious grounds for a misrepresentation/overly Photoshopped lawsuit. She is, IMHO, surprisingly slender, given her original appearance. I mean, yeah. Maybe I'm reading too much into the design of a tiny Lego toy, but still. Part of Ursula's design -- and her appearance did evolve; in early concept art she was based on eels/manta rays/lion fish rather than her now-iconic squidlike similarities -- is her corpulence. The late 80s/early 90s was also the time for heroin chic in fashion, so it (unfortunately) makes sense that the heroine would be impossibly thin and the villainess would be the opposite. (Compared to, for instance, rail-thin Cruella De Vil in the 1960s.)

Again, I don't think Disney or Lego is making a statement about female body image through Lego characters...I just think it's really interesting that Ursula is so much slimmer -- and that she's even in a toy set at all. Just scrolling through the first few pages of the Disney Legos on Target's website, the closest thing to a villain in the other sets -- excluding the Star Wars ones because they make villains cool -- is Marshmallow from Frozen, and even then, he's not the uber-villain of the movie.