Fairy Tales

I am a firm believer in fairy tales. They encourage creativity and imagination. They are filled with examples of good versus evil, courage, perseverance, the importance of problem solving and that there are always consequences for your actions.

I also think it's good for fairy tales to be dark and/or scary. Their purpose is to paint a picture, not literally of life, but as a metaphor. Some are meant to encourage, but most try to teach a lesson. They shouldn't sugar coat things or dumb down the consequences of poor decisions...like in Pinocchio (1940), when the little boys decided to rebel and run away to Pleasure Island, they literally turned into jackasses. Dark and a bit creepy, but a good visual of what happens to you as a person when you do stupid things.

This leads me to the inspiration of this post. While Maleficent - Disney's reincarnation of the Sleeping Beauty story - was visually beautiful and very well acted, due to it's lack of black-and-white good vs evil, it ultimately just made me want to watch the 1959 version. It's hard to beat a classic.

I have to say that Disney did a good job with the original. The Grimm's fairy tale "Sleeping Beauty" is quite short and their embellishments enhanced the story, instead of taking away its life lessons, which they tend to do. If you've never read Hans Christian Anderson's Little Mermaid, you should. The ending is quite different from the Disney movie (SPOILER ALERT: she dies).

In the original Sleeping Beauty (1959), the king and queen are good, loving people who are finally blessed with a daughter. All the fairies were invited to a celebration, except one - Maleficent, who shows up anyway and places a curse on the baby, Princess Aurora - that states before the sun sets on her sixteenth birthday, Aurora will prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel and die. Post-curse, one of the other fairies alters the curse so that Aurora will only sleep and at true love's kiss, the spell shall break. In Maleficent (2014), she builds that part into the curse herself (sleeping, true love's kiss), as a dig at the king, an ambitious man who had betrayed Maleficent and stolen her wings in order to become king (the first 20 minutes of that movie are very "human = greedy & evil"). They created a back story for Maleficent, so that you feel sympathetic towards her and are more understanding of her wrath and vengeance towards the king. No real surprise, since the movie is named after her and not the "real" heroine, Sleeping Beauty. I had hoped it would be more like Snow White and the Huntsman (2012), where the evil stepmother is provided with a back story that makes you feel sorry for her, but in no way justifies her actions. In the end, she still needs to die. Sadly, this was not the case in Maleficent.

The aspect of Maleficent I disliked the most was the lack of good versus evil. Changing the one Disney prince who is worth a damn comes in close second. One of the best scenes in Sleeping Beauty is when Prince Philip fights with Dragon-Maleficent, where she literally calls upon "all the powers of hell" to assist her, ultimately to no avail. Prince Philip shows courage in fighting against evil, even after Maleficent tries to make him despair when showing him what his future would look like after being locked up in her dungeon. The movie also shows that you can't hide from evil (the fairies taking baby Aurora into the forest), but that you need to meet it head on in order to defeat it. All these lessons are lost in Maleficent. The only thing I did like is that it was a child, coming to know and love Aurora as she grew up, that redeemed Maleficent.

So that's my two cents on the subject.

Enjoy and happy Tuesday!


~ Katie