Princess Ariel is the protagonist of Disney's 1989 animated feature film, The Little Mermaid. She is the seventh and youngest daughter of King Triton and Queen Athena, the rulers of the undersea kingdom of Atlantica. Ariel lived through much of her young life with a passionate, yet forbidden admiration of the human world, and longed to someday experience life on the surface. She is loosely based on the nameless protagonist of the Danish fairytale of the same name by Hans Christian Andersen. However, unlike the Andersen tale in which the heroine dies and loses her prince, the Disney adaptation features a much happier ending. Ariel is the fourth official member of the Disney Princess line-up. She is also the very first princess to be developed after Walt Disney's lifetime, having been conceived over two decades after his passing in 1966. Incidentally, Disney himself made efforts to adapt The Little Mermaid in the late 1930s and early '40s.
