Maleficent ....

*Maleficent*

Maleficent and the Big Problem With Disney’s Fairy Tale Reboots

After two centuries of telling—and selling—our most iconic fairy tales, we’ve finally come to grips with the fact that those stories probably don’t send the best messages. Whether in search of more diverse offerings or just new ways to spin old yarns, entertainment gatekeepers have realized black-and-white stories, where “good” always triumphs over “evil,” are in need of a reinvention. But a retold fairy tale only works if it actually tells a better story.

The most recent of these efforts, of course, is Maleficent. As with similar fairy tale subversions like Wicked, Once Upon a Time, or Frozen, director Robert Stromberg’s movie (which flips Sleeping Beauty on its head) attempts to reconsider the nature of villainy by turning antagonist to protagonist. Pop culture has rarely, if ever, been this ripe for a reexamination of these issues, and Maleficent could have been fairy tale morality’s next great battlefield—if only it had succeeded.

Spoiler alert: spoilers for the plot of Maleficent follow.

In a nutshell, Disney’s Maleficent humanizes Angelina Jolie’s evil fairy by giving her infamous decisions (cursing the infant princess Aurora to a deep slumber) understandable, if not entirely just, cause. It comes on the heels of Frozen, and is of a piece with the animated film: Like Frozen’s take on The Snow Queen, Maleficent pointedly places familial bond and female empowerment above the traditional princess/prince romantic arc.

In this version, Maleficent is the protector of a peaceful kingdom that lies next to (and hidden from) the bellicose world of a power-hungry king and his army.

When her “true love,” a human named Stefan, steals her wings for the king in return for becoming his heir, Maleficent is beside herself.

So when Stefan and his queen have a child, Maleficent seeks vengeance with a curse: the child will prick her finger at age 16 and fall into a death-like sleep, from which only her true love’s kiss can awaken her.

Over the years, Maleficent gets to know the child and ultimately regrets her actions. When she fails to undo the curse with magic, she ends up breaking it with a regretful kiss on Aurora’s forehead, which fulfills its “true love’s kiss” caveat. (As in Frozen, a previous attempt by a dopey prince’s “true love’s kiss” totally fails.) As Aurora narrates, Maleficent was “both the villain and the hero” of the story after all.

It’s a much better fairy tale to tell young children, especially girls, who have for so long been taught that validation and happiness only come with the love of a man. But a closer look shows it becomes clear that Disney has missed the point: Maleficent isn’t as progressive as it seems.

Rather than defining Maleficent as a flawed and complex character, the movie bestows her with the very qualities the Sleeping Beauty tale once reserved for the Princess Aurora: gorgeous, feminine, pure of heart, and beloved by all. By the movie’s denouement, those flighty emotions that set her on a path to revenge have dissolved, a hindrance to her ultimate redemption. (She does, however, become a powerful leader of her own accord—an admirable screenwriting decision that shouldn’t be ignored.)

What’s more, the flatly evil king Stefan is vanquished completely, just as the flatly evil Maleficent was in the original version—he’s a nuance-free caricature of bad, a violent yet incomplete metaphor for imperialism and misogyny. (The wing-theft scene, in which he drugs Maleficent and literally rips them from her body while she’s unconscious, is both disturbing and unmistakably symbolic of real-life violence against women.) Even in defeat, Stefan never regrets his actions, never apologizes.

Role reversals in fairy tale retellings like these, when wielded well, are tools of rehabilitation. They provide an alternative to boorish archetypes and flat concepts of “good and evil,” and they prompt children (and adults as well) to consider the nuances of morality. But rather than restructuring the stories, these new retellings simply swap the characters around. (In a great criticism of Frozen writer Kip Manley calls that structure “the Rules.”) Villains wind up with the exact same traits as their “good” nemeses; no discomfiting outlier behavior for them. Evil—actual, absolute evil—is always obliterated. Good women remain feminine and kind, and always morally understandable, as they should be, and the villainess almost always regrets the qualities that made her an outcast. By the end, she’s been absorbed into the very “happily ever after” template the retelling purported to subvert.

Sure, that’s a story better suited for our more enlightened age—in 2014, who wouldn’t prefer the triumph of a badass fairy queen?—but its lessons are exactly the same. So why retell these old stories at all?

Even more frustrating is that this problem can be so easily rectified. Take Wicked, for example. Based on Gregory Maguire’s novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, the musical finds a complicated protagonist, and lets her stay complicated. Elphaba (a young Wicked Witch of the West) is an outcast whose rage, like Maleficent’s, is perfectly justifiable: her community reviles her from birth for her skin color. When she uncovers corruption in her land she’s given a choice to accept the status quo or be exiled. Instead of returning to the community that rejected her, she sticks to her complicated, messy guns—making bad decisions that, while fueled by good intentions, ultimately lead to her downfall. Elphaba’s story is a tragedy, but it’s an empathetic—and true—examination of good and evil. It’s also perfectly suitable for children (the musical version, at least), and has been a hit on Broadway for more than a decade, raking in more than $3.1 billion in ticket sales worldwide.

It’s difficult, even a little heartbreaking, to criticize a movie like Maleficent. As with Frozen, its release shows an institution making a concerted effort to evolve beyond its conservative comfort zone. The film will no doubt fiercely empower the young girls who will grow up obsessing over it, as we once did over the princess movies of yesteryear.

In the theater where I saw Maleficent, there was a little girl sitting in front of me. Like many little girls, she turned to her father repeatedly throughout the movie, asking loudly: “Why’d she do that?” “But why?” Most children have no idea what they’re consuming in these stories; internalizing their messages is just as much a part of early education as any classroom curriculum. In that regard, Maleficent isn’t nearly as damaging as previous fairy-tale films. But do we really need to settle for “not terrible”? Until we can make progressive, flawed stories that prompt meaningful discussion with our kids, the stories they’re absorbing haven’t really evolved at all.