Once upon a dream, Aurora sings in the woodland that she will find her prince in the 1959 film Sleeping Beauty. And out of this romantic, idealized fantasy, a gorgeous prince appears and begins singing back to her: hooray, true love! As the story goes, Aurora was cursed by the evil Maleficent, and on her sixteenth birthday, Aurora pricks her finger on a spinning wheel and falls into a death-like, enchanted sleep. Yet the prince defeats the evil witch-gone-dragon and with true love’s kiss, the spell is broken. “True,” heterosexual love is what saves Aurora; her father’s or fairies’ love doesn’t quite cut it. Like so many of these 1950s Disney stories, the male protagonist saves the day. Second only to Dumbo, Aurora has the second-to-least amount of speaking lines for a Disney character.1 So she’s sweet, beautiful, and needs saving. These “family values” don’t look great in today’s society, but back in the 1950s, they reinforced the political and social structure of the day.
Today, Disney is going through what some may say as a slight identity crisis. How do you uphold Disney’s traditional values while still remaining current? This is an issue myths undergo (think of Adam and Eve modern adaptations) and film, like any myth, needs to be retold, reshaped. So Disney released Maleficent this year. Here Disney features strong female characters, including Maleficent. She is multi-faceted: neither purely good or evil. She was terribly wronged by romantic, “true love” and seeks revenge on her perpetrator. So Aurora’s father also has a character make-over, and becomes more evil as the movie goes on. Like the original, Aurora is cursed and lives in a wooden cottage, but she’s visited in dream-like adventures by Maleficent, who has watched her cursed victim grow up with somewhat loving eyes. In the end, is it the boy prince, who Aurora barely knows, who saves the day? The strong Maleficent shows a maternal, unwavering, and true love who’s power can break any curse.
As the family structure in America changes, Disney needs to spin new adaptations of family movies to remain relevant. Maleficent shows that Disney is trying to reclaim its somewhat sexist past and create more female-centered stories.
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