Villains Week: Sleeping Beauty (1959)

2 years ago

Villains Week: Sleeping Beauty (1959)

AHAHAHAHAHA, AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

by Michelle Said

I think we can all agree that Maleficent is the best villain of the entire Disney princess franchise, right?

It’s no contest when you compare her to the film’s eponymous heroine, Sleeping Beauty—a.k.a. Aurora. I think it makes perfect sense that she was named after the dawn, seeing that she is as boring and tedious to me as staying up all night for the purpose of seeing the sun rise over the horizon. As in, “Oh, that’s pretty. But I would really rather be in bed right now. In addition, I am now hungry and it’s five a.m. and Starbucks won’t be open for like another hour.” Aurora is just a 16 year-old girl raised in the woods who somehow gets woodland animals to do all her bidding. She’s pretty and she can sing well (thanks to presents from her fairy godmothers) but that’s about it. Yawn! Please.

I’ve always been on Team Maleficent. I think we’d have a good time together. We would probably go out for a few mojitos while she got her servants to fetch us tapas (or sushi, if she’s feeling seafood) and then we would settle in for a night of tales about existentialism and makeup and the impossibility of finding good minions. You know. I think we’d have a pretty rocking time.

While other Disney princess villainesses tend to illicit cries of, “Bitches be crazy! Bitches be hating other bitches! Bitches always be jealous!” Maleficent is, comparatively speaking, totally badass. First of all, she’s drop-dead gorgeous in that evil kinda way. Look at that bone structure! Look at that fashion sense! Her color scheme is beyond reproach—phosphorescent green accented with regal purple and flecks of gold surrounded by a dark-as-night black background. It could be at home in a fashionable Manhattan bar as well as an Evil Castle. Plus, it almost goes without saying, she has the best hat ever. Seriously. Look at that hat. Are those horns? You betcha! Also, how incredibly awesome do you have to be to rock yellow eyeballs?

Answer: EXTREMELY AWESOME.

Not that Maleficent’s intrinsic awesomeness is down solely to her attire. No. Her personality is fit to match. For one thing, she doesn’t have a case of the New Niceness—she will not suffer fools. If you look at the Wicked Stepmother from Cinderella or Ursula from The Little Mermaid, they hate on the princesses just because they are young and pretty and—-dare I say?—they bring all the boys to the yard. Maleficent, on the other hand, put a curse on a baby. She cursed a freaking baby! You cannot get any more evil than that. That is, of course, until you turn into a freaking DRAGON.

Yeah, that’s right. Maleficent has an alternate form and that form happens to be a DRAGON. A quick run-down of her other powers/abilities/resources:

teleportation
shape-shifting (the aforementioned DRAGON as well as a floating, hypnotic light she uses to spy on her enemies)
lightning
minions
an awesome raven sidekick named Diablo (!!!)
moxie
lots and lots of evil magic

All of this is topped off with a wicked sense of humor. (Zing!) She does not bumble, she does not drop stupid one-liners and she absolutely, positively, will take matters into her own hands if need be. Maleficent is so evil that she transcends the definition of the word. Maleficent is maleficent. Try googling that. Guaranteed you’ll see about five results on her before you get to the definition of the word. By contrast, try googling Aurora. That boring product of stereotypical Disney obsequiousness doesn’t even make the top 20. And even if you go with the more interesting pseudonym Briar Rose, she still doesn’t hit until the third one down.

All that said, I do think that the story is extremely one-sided. Can we get Gregory Maguire to write in a back-story, please? I know he’s been busy doing public relations for the Wicked Witch of the West, but I honestly think he would do a fab job with another similarly-hued villainess. We’re lead to believe that Maleficent put a death curse on an infant just because she was not invited to her Christening. I mean, for real? For real, for real? That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard! That’s the kind of implausible reasoning that reeks of revisionist history. Kind of like, “Oh, we invaded Iraq because…. Hey, remember 9/11?” Maleficent may not like bad manners but she’s not totally insane. There has to be another reason behind this knee-jerk death sentence. I am hoping that Tim Burton will explore this in his rumored big-screen adaptation so we can glean a little more into her perverse reasoning. (Fingers crossed it will be better than Alice in Wonderland.)

In conclusion, Maleficent is the best. That’s probably why they keep bringing her back over and over again for all of the editions of Kingdom of Hearts, why Angelina Joile reportedly wants to play her, and why she’s always going to be ultimately more interesting and better-dressed than any of the Disney princesses. Maleficent forever!

Michelle Said is a writer living in New York who thinks that Prince Phillip was pretty hot even if he fell in love with a comatose chick. She tumbls here.