Maleficent is a fascinating character that has sparked debates about her true nature. Some argue that she is a witch, while others believe she is a fairy. To truly understand Maleficent, we must delve into her origins and examine her abilities and characteristics. Maleficent is most commonly known for her role in Disney's 1959 film "Sleeping Beauty". In the movie, she is described as an evil fairy who places a curse on Princess Aurora. However, the term "witch" is never explicitly mentioned to describe Maleficent.

Maleficent: Finally, Disney Gives us a Positive Witch/Mother

Women’s stories have often been twisted, stolen, and locked away, often in iron-clad phallocentric cages. This has led to benevolent witches turning wicked, powerful woman being framed as bitches, midwives cast as baby-killers, queens/princesses truncated into damsels in distress and, perhaps most pervasively, the demonization/murder of mothers and motherhood.

To hide this ironclad prison house within which women’s lives and stories have been imprisoned, we have been given the fairy godmother, the innocent maiden, the asexual nanny-figure. In ways, the new Disney flm Maleficent—a retelling of Sleeping Beauty from the view of the “villainess”—rights (and re-writes) all of these wrongs, finally breaking down the phallocentric prison within which female tales have been trapped.

Ironically enough the film is brought to us by a key builder of such prisons: Disney. While I am not naïve enough to think Disney has truly turned over a new feminist leaf (more like they are following the money and banking on upping the profits of Brave and Frozen), Maleficent still deserves applause. The intentions of Disney may be profit-driven (when are they not?), but the message of the film is important and groundbreaking nonetheless.

There is much to be said of the film from a feminist perspective, from its wonderful revisioning of the character Aurora, played fantastically by Elle Fanning, to its condemnation of fairies who see beauty and eternal happiness as great gifts for a female, and most significantly, to the fact we finally have a positive, complex depiction of a witch/mother figure in Maleficent, brought to life exquisitely by Angelina Jolie.

If you have not already done so, please fly your horned self to the nearest cinema and see Maleficent! If you read on, though, be aware that THERE ARE MANY SPOILERS TO FOLLOW!

The film opens with the line “let us tell an old story anew,” something Disney has done many times before (although usually by making such stories less feminist-friendly, not more). We then learn of two kingdoms, one that is vain and greedy—the human—and another that “needed neither king nor queen,” as all “trusted one another.” In my read, that’s one kingdom that is patriarchal (human/male) and another that is egalitarian. Is it happenstance that this more feminist kingdom, filled with all sorts of queer creatures, is called “the Moors?” In this kingdom, there is “moor” diversity, camaraderie, freedom, joy. You know what there is not more of? Human males. (And though this post argues Maleficent is “the wrong Disney dyke,” I would suggest the representation does queer the character in positive ways.)

When we first see they young Maleficent (Isobelle Malloy) in Moor kingdom, she is described as a girl but “not just any girl”: a fairy. However, we don’t see human-like males flitting around Moor-land. The first human male we see is Stefan, who will become Maleficent’s friend, then love interest, then the king of the human realm (which he achieves by betraying Maleficent) and ultimately Aurora’s father (perhaps one of the worst father figures ever to grace a fairy-tale film).

Though this is not made overt in the film, masculinity is the true villain in this bi-kingdom world. There are some positive males to round out the villainy of the evil kings and soldiers, such as the Crow turned Man, Diaval (Sam Riley), and the puckish Prince Phillip (Brenton Thwaites). However, for the most part, the film is dominated by females, and complex ones at that—a rarity indeed.

The males, in contrast, are rather one dimensional. Stefan (Sharlto Copley) lacks any backstory to justify his badness. The same goes for his predecessor, King Henry ( Kenneth Cranham ). Likewise, the kill-happy warriors are not given any motivation to war with the Moors, other than orders from above. Here, masculinity, more so than humanity generally, is cast as evil and power-hungry. While the film fails to tease out how norms of masculinity are damaging—not maleness, per se—its suggestion that the power/kill drive that defines traditional masculinity is problematic at least steps away from the image of a savoir prince lionized for kissing deathlike princesses without their consent.

Early in the film we learn that iron burns fairies, and we see young Stefan (Michael Higgins, Jackson Bews) throw away his iron ring so as to not to burn his newfound friend Maleficent. As the film progresses though, males are inextricably linked with iron, from the iron armor warn by the kings henchman to the iron chain Stefan uses to cut off Malificent’s wings to the iron bars that criss-cross the glass case Stefan uses to house her castrated wings to the final battle scenes in which an iron net is thrown over Maleficent. Ultimately, this iron-clad maleness—not Maleficent’s supposed villainy—is what leads Stefan to his death.

Though some have bemoaned the final battle scene as too long, the culmination of the battle in which Maleficent and Stefan face off against one another is made all the more powerful by the dramatic, brutal, lengthy scene that precedes it. High up in the castle, Maleficent faces Stefan and says assuredly, “It’s over.” Given that she does not kill him but turns away to leave, we can take “it’s over” to mean that their relationship is over, their battling each other is over and that she is well and truly done. However, as so many males of Stefan’s ilk often do, he refuses to let it be over. Instead, as she goes to fly off the parapet, he attempts to push her to her death. She takes off in flight, but he has become caught in one of the iron chains he was trying to bind her with. He falls to his death because he could not accept “it’s over.”

In contrast to this steely male kingdom where cruel kings wage pointless wars, in the non-patriarchal realm of Moor kingdom females such as the young Maleficent are allowed to be powerful and healing. Indeed, the first act we witness Maleficent do is heal a tree. We then witness extended images of her flying—not on a broomstick, mind you, but with wings. The imagery is not one of villainy (as in the iconic Wizard of Oz ) but of freedom.

This recasting of the powerful, magical woman as not wicked is a colossal depiction in the world of Disney, a corporation that has heretofore rarely shown positive depictions of magical women, and when they have graced the screen they’ve been asexual (Bedknobs and Broomsticks), practically perfect (Mary Poppins), grandmotherly (Cinderella’s godmother) or, most recently, an icy figure in need of taming by her kinder, more traditionally feminine sister (Frozen).

Though Jolie purportedly insisted throughout the making of the film that “She is still a villain. Still a villain,” and though most reviews frame Maleficent as such, she is far more of a hero. She saves Aurora and returns the kingdom of the Moors to its pre-Stefan glory, doing so with humor, grace and without need of recognition. She has aspects of villainy, yes, but would these be so focused on if she were a male protagonist? Methinks not.

As detailed in a piece at Vox, male villains are often portrayed sympathetically, as with characters such as Dexter or Norman Bates (especially in the new Bates Motel). Alas, Maleficent is still interpreted in the main as a villain (as here and here), even though her main acts of villainy include casting a curse she then tries to remove, and turning a crow into a man—hardly the stuff of a serial killer or sociopath. Perhaps the tendency to still insist she is a villain is linked to her name—something various reviews take umbrage with, noting it makes no sense that this “good fairy” has a name that means nefarious and malicious. However, cannot her name not be linked to her status as female? Women, in much folklore, mythology, and philosophy are often presumed to be evil—as with Aristotle’s famous dictum that females are deformed, lacking men. As such, Maleficent’s name can be read as a reflection of this patriarchal fallacy rather than as something describing her character.

Further, her name reflects the complexity of identity, suggesting we all have some maleficence in us, but also some beauty and goodness. As Aurora fittingly notes at the end, in voiceover, “My kingdom was united by one who was both hero and villain.” Maleficent is both, but as rendered in this reboot, she is all the more marvelous for being mainly a heroic figure misconstrued as a mainly villainous one (as this review recognizes).

Significantly, her acts of villainy are prompted by allegorical rape, another thread of the narrative that implies she is not evil, but society, and particularly patriarchal society, is. Stefan’s drugging of Maleficent and cutting off her wings as she is unconscious is a fairy-tale version of date rape, one rendered horrifically palpable by Jolie’s anguished screams when she awakes to find herself de-winged. Significantly, the loss of her wings causes extreme physical pain and leaves lasting scars, a fact the film emphasizes at length and which echoes the lasting pain and scarring endured by real-world rape survivors. (For screenwriter Linda Woolverton’s explanation of this backstory, see here.)

In the film, this allegorical rape prompts Maleficent to cast her infamous curse on the baby Aurora—not her jealousy or need for vengeance. Is it villainous to enact her vengeance on the daughter of her rapist? Of course. But Maleficent is redeemed when she realizes the error of her curse, and steps in to protect/nurture Aurora (variously played by Vivienne Jolie-Pitt, Eleanor Worthington Cox, Elle Fanning) when the three hapless fairies ignore the starving child, plugging their ears with cotton so as to sleep through her desperate cries. Maleficent prevents Aurora’s starvation, saves her from falling to her death and watches over her as she grows.

Though some condemn this depiction of Maleficent as mother-figure (as here), this protectoress is no June Cleaver with horns; she is not a vapid, ever-smiling baker of goods or band-aider of ouchies. No, she is more like the amazing aunt who does not smother and the mother who encourages her daughter to check out other kingdoms, does not scare-monger about Aurora’s attraction to a hot young prince and encourages her daughter to get dirty, take risks and, most magnificent of all, crowns her as queen, not princess. That she is the type of mother many would frame as “bad” and as “hating children” is not lost within the narrative itself. Indeed, the first time Aurora sees Maleficent as a toddler, she announces “I don’t like children” and then humorously reveals her failure to live up to this claim as she immediately picks up the young Aurora when she says “up, up.” In perhaps the most poignant moment of the film, the toddler first touches her horns and then her wing stubs admiringly, appreciating the beauty of Maleficent’s “beastly” power (her horns) on the one hand, and lamenting the horror of the violence done by wing castration.

Fittingly, Maleficent calls Aurora “beastie,” and she is indeed a beast off the old block—as fearless, wise and headstrong as her stand-in mother Maleficent. This is not a one-sided relationship though—Aurora brings about healing for Maleficent by prompting her to recount the harm done to her, to break the silence about her wings, when she asks, “Do all fair people have wings?” Here, the double play on words indicates not only Maleficent’s fairy being, not only that she is “fair” and beautiful, but also that she is fair as in just. She is not a villainous, vengeful harpy, but a survivor of abuse attempting to make her way in the world after irreparable, unspeakable harm has been done to her. Maleficent’s response to Aurora’s question is, “I had wings once. They were stolen from me. … They were strong … and they never faulted … I could trust them,” underscoreing their theft as horrific violence—a violence that takes away her ability to soar as well as her ability to trust, much as rape does to all too many humans in the real world.

MAJOR SPOILER ALERTS ABOUT THE ENDING AHEAD!

The film also suggests that the infamous “true love’s kiss” upon which the Disney house was built, is itself a violation and a falsity. Once Aurora falls into her inevitable sleep from the prick of a needle (yes, another allusion to rape), Maleficent rushes Philip to the castle, thinking his kiss might save her. She never encourages him to kiss Aurora though–it is the misbegotten fairies that do this. To his credit, Philip replies “I wouldn’t feel right about it,” noting they only just met. However, her beautiful sleeping face wins out over this sentiment and he does, in the end, kiss her at some length—a non-consensual kiss that honestly made me squirm in my seat with dread. Waiting in the wings, Maleficent is saddened this does not awake Aurora from her deathly slumber, even though she had insisted there was no such thing as true love’s kiss, thus delivering Philip to the castle out of sheer desperation.

Saddened, Maleficent goes to Aurora’s bedside and speaks to her as she sleeps, crying, “I will not ask your forgiveness,” adding that her own behavior was unforgivable. Explaining that she was “lost in hatred and revenge,” she bends down and kisses Aurora’s forehead in goodbye and turns away. And yes, you guessed it, this is the “true love’s kiss” that awakens the sleeping Aurora. A Frozen-like moment, but one that takes the love between women in a deeper, more complex direction, and one that does not have a man waiting in the wings. Magnificent indeed.

The positive, complex depiction of female heroines and villains is long overdue in Disney films and films generally. Let’s hope for moor like Maleficent soon!

In ‘Maleficent,’ A New Kind Of Disney Princess—Dark, Sexy, Wicked Good

In that animated feature, it’s never really explained why the iconic, wicked, horned, svelte, fairy witch is so darned mad at the king and queen that she curses their new baby girl Aurora. She just comes off as some random total jerk. But the new live-action Disney film “Maleficent,” opening in Boston area theaters today (Friday) with Angelina Jolie starring as the namesake evildoer answers the question. In fact, it argues that she was justified.

So once upon a time, Maleficent is a happy demonic-looking, winged angel-fairy girl attired in peasant browns who soars around the fairy swamp and above the heavenly clouds. She meets a boy who’s come thieving in her dazzling computer-generated Eden populated by glittery little Tinker Bells, jolly elf-frog men and intimidating “Lord of the Rings” Ent-like tree warriors. It seems boy and gal have a perfect love, as treacly as an old after-school television special, that might just unite the estranged fairy land, of which Maleficent is basically princess and protector, and the world of men. The film never makes it clear if all its world of men stuff—as opposed to using the ungendered term “humanity”—is just the usual retrograde fairy tale gender stereotypes or an actual feminist critique of the patriarchy.

But the romance goes sour when the dude (played by Sharlto Copley) tricks her into downing some sort of date-rape potion. He intends to knife her, but chickens out, so settles for sawing off her wings, and parlays the dirty deed to become ruler of the human kingdom.

Maleficient curses baby Aurora. (Disney)

Time passes and Maleficent crashes the big state party to celebrate the birth of the scumbag king’s Aryan blonde daughter Aurora. Some good fairies have already blessed the baby with beauty and happiness. Maleficent dooms the girl to prick her finger on a spinning wheel on her 16th birthday and fall into a “sleep like death,” a slumber from which she can be awakened only by “true love’s kiss.” The thing is Maleficent's betrayal by the king has convinced her that there’s no such thing as true love.

It’s a nice touch that the curse scene hews closely to the 1959 “Sleeping Beauty”—though in an odd story change, no good fairy follows up to lessen the harm of Maleficent’s spell. (An aside: Is it asking too much to be disappointed that neither film makes any attempt to explain how anyone gets clothes after the king orders all spinning wheels in the kingdom destroyed?)

Maleficent takes Aurora to explore the fairy land. (Disney)

With the king’s blessing, three bumbling comic-relief fairies hide the baby away to protect her from evil spinning equipment. But Maleficent immediately tracks down the girl (played by Elle Fanning)—and turns slowly but steadily sweet on her. The film doesn’t address it, but Maleficent falls for the seductive charms bestowed on the girl by the “good” fairies, so in effect beautiful makeover magic trumps hater magic. Life lesson there.

Adult, revisionist fairy tales

“Maleficent” is a mirror image of the 1959 Disney film. Here it’s the king who’s wicked and Maleficent is so freakin’ good that even though she’s been so terribly wronged, she can’t stay mad at the pretty blonde, bland Aurora. Maleficient is a new sort of Disney princess—the dark, sexy, wicked good villain.

Angelina Jolie as Maleficent. (Disney)

The film is basically a rehabilitation of Maleficent’s bad girl reputation, much as Massachusetts author Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West” sought to refurbish the reputation of Oz’s mean witch or Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith’s 1989 picture book “The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs” offered the Big Bad Wolf’s quite reasonable defense of what went down: “I was framed.”

Maguire’s book (“Unlike the popular 1939 movie and Baum's writings, this novel is not directed at children, and contains adult language and content including violent imagery and sexual situations,” explain the scholars at Wikipedia) and the hit Broadway musical it spawned might be the starting point for all the, um, sophisticated, adult, revisionist fairy tales of the past two decades—from the wisecracking ogre stomping through the celebrities of the fairy tale world in the 2001 computer-animated feature film “Shrek” to NBC television’s fairy tale cop drama “Grimm” and ABC’s “Once Upon a Time,” both of which debuted in 2011, to the brutal 2012 film “Snow White and the Huntsman.” A live-action version of Disney Studios’ 1950 feature animation “Cinderella,” starring Cate Blanchett and “Downton Abbey”’s Lily James and directed by Kenneth Branagh, is due out from Disney in March 2015.

Annie Leibovitz’s Disney theme park advertisement reimagining “Sleeping Beauty” with actors Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens. (Disney)

In “Maleficent”’s sumptuous production design, you also sense the inspiration of the Disney theme park advertisements that photographer Annie Leibovitz elaborately staged, beginning in 2007, with Beyonce Knowles, Scarlett Johansson, Jennifer Lopez, Gisele Bundchen, Tina Fey and other celebrities playing scenes from Disney feature cartoons.

The Sleeping Beauty story, of course, goes back to European folk tales collected and retold by Italian poet and courtier Giambattista Basile as “Sun, Moon and Talia” in 1630s (in his version, a king rapes the unconscious teen and she’s only awakened when her ensuing twin babies are born and suckle at her breasts) and the Frenchman Charles Perrault published as “The Beauty Sleeping in the Wood” in the 1690s. The magic in the tale now feels like pure imagination, but the story’s canonical publications coincide with actual witch trials here in Salem.

The wall of torny trees in "Maleficient." (Disney)

Grrrl power

I arrived for “Maleficent” skeptical, and the film's beginning seemed to confirm my fears, but it grew entertaining. It’s good, but not great. I mean, you can’t go wrong with a femme fatale witch, a fire-breathing dragon, set-piece battles of knights versus forest monsters (in which our hearts are with the monsters), rainbow bright fairy swamps, a ruined castle, a great wall of thorny trees, and magic that Maleficent blows at her victims like malignant kisses.

But it seems a cheat when Sleeping Beauty here hardly sleeps at all. The whole thing feels artificially flavored, lacking the soul of a great Hollywood fairy tale like the 1987 comedy “The Princess Bride.” Plus there’s not much acting going on. Most of the performers are wooden, minor-league talent. Elle Fanning is just a schmaltzy ball of perkiness. But the production holds together because Jolie is magnetic through much of the picture. She accomplishes this by standing around like a fashion model and looking dazzlingly dark and thin and preternaturally poised. But it works. And in Maleficent’s icy wisecracking asides after she turns evil, you might even sense flickers of a sort of Dorthy Parker-ish personality too smart, cynical and quick witted for these humdrum filmmakers to imagine letting roam loose through their movie.

The prince readies to kiss the Sleeping Beauty in "Maleficient." (Disney)

Robert Stromberg—here directing his first picture after doing production design on James Cameron’s “Avatar,” Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland,” and Sam Raimi’s “Oz the Great and Powerful”—often overstuffs his scenes with distracting detail. But Jolie’s costumes by Anna Sheppard are fabulous. She seems to be dressed for a Jay Gatsby shindig in Mordor. Her iconic horns are variously wrapped in snakeskin or flapper beads. When she arrives to curse baby Aurora, she sports a knockout shimmering raven-like gown. During the climatic battle, she runs around in a dark skintight Catwoman suit.

Aurora can't resist the prick. (Disney)

“Maleficient” is roughly the equal of Disney’s 1959 “Sleeping Beauty,” which is better remembered for its medieval-manuscript-inspired designs than its plodding story. Walt Disney seems to have lacked attention for that production, spending his time instead improving his 1955 surprise hit theme park Disneyland (with Sleeping Beauty Castle at its hub), and you can feel it.

The Disney company has been working hard in the past couple decades to codify its princesses brand—while struggling to reckon with how passive “classic” Disney princesses appear as we look back from the other side of feminism and grrrl power. The 1959 cartoon seemed to be about some sort of crazy spite and the awesome healing properties of boy-girl love. While Disney Pixar films continue to rely on the formula of the nerd guy hooking up with the perfect girl, in “Maleficent,” forgiveness and a version of mother-ish love save the day. It harmonizes with Disney’s 2013 animated feature “Frozen,” in which a sister’s love fixes everything. It's feminist derring-do, no Prince Charmings required.

The closing credits of Maleficent” scroll up punctuated by Lana Del Rey singing a breathy, eerie, narcoticized version of Disney’s by-way-of-Tchaikovsky “Once Upon a Dream” “Sleeping Beauty” waltz. Wow.

I suppose we’re intended to take “Maleficent” straight, and come out convinced that she’s been horribly slandered all these years. But I walked out feeling suspicious of such righteous sentiments. I guess I'm just not ready for her to give up the dark side yet. I keep wanting Maleficent to still be so brilliantly, deliciously dastardly that she’s just duped us into thinking she’s really got a heart of gold by funding this self-serving propaganda flick.

Greg Cook is co-founder of WBUR’s ARTery. Geek out with him about fairy tales, princesses and Disney on Twitter @AestheticResear and Facebook.

This article was originally published on May 30, 2014.

Greg Cook Arts Reporter
Greg Cook was an arts reporter and critic for WBUR's The ARTery.

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

Disney's tale of the villain from Sleeping Beauty could have been fairy tale morality's next great battlefield—if it had succeeded.

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.

However, the term "witch" is never explicitly mentioned to describe Maleficent. This ambiguity has led to the ongoing debate about whether she is actually a witch or a fairy. When we consider Maleficent's appearance and abilities, it becomes clear that she possesses characteristics of both a witch and a fairy.

Her physical appearance is more reminiscent of a classic witch, with her dark clothing, staff, and horned headpiece. She also has the ability to transform into a dragon, a power commonly associated with witches in folklore. On the other hand, Maleficent also exhibits traits typically associated with fairies. She has the ability to fly, which is a common characteristic of fairies in mythology. Additionally, she can summon and control magical creatures, such as the goons and the raven Diablo. These powers align more closely with the abilities commonly associated with fairies. Another argument in favor of Maleficent being a fairy is her connection to the Moors, a magical realm inhabited by mythical creatures. Fairies are often associated with nature and the enchantment of the natural world, which aligns with Maleficent's role as the protector of the Moors. Ultimately, whether Maleficent is considered a witch or a fairy is up to individual interpretation. The character is undoubtedly complex and encompasses elements of both witchcraft and fairy magic. This ambiguity is perhaps what makes Maleficent such an intriguing and enduring figure in popular culture..

Reviews for "The Charms of Maleficent: A Witch, a Fairy, or Both?"

1. John - 2/5 stars - This movie left me feeling confused and unsatisfied. I expected a clear explanation of whether Maleficent is a witch or a fairy, but the film never provided a definitive answer. The concept of her being both a witch and a fairy was interesting, but it felt underdeveloped and confusing. The movie seemed more concerned with visual effects and action sequences, rather than providing a coherent storyline. Overall, I found Is Maleficent a Witch or Fairy to be a disappointing and unsatisfying watch.

2. Sarah - 3/5 stars - While the movie had visually stunning scenes and Angelina Jolie gave a great performance as Maleficent, the lack of clear explanation regarding her true nature was frustrating. I wanted a conclusive answer to the question of whether she is a witch or a fairy, but the film left it open-ended. Additionally, I felt that the storyline could have been more engaging and better developed. Overall, Is Maleficent a Witch or Fairy had its moments but failed to deliver a satisfying experience.

3. Robert - 2/5 stars - The movie's title promised an answer to a simple question, but it failed to deliver. The ambiguity surrounding Maleficent's identity left me perplexed and frustrated throughout the film. Apart from that, the overall plot seemed weak and lacked depth. The movie relied heavily on spectacle and visual effects, but failed to provide a compelling and coherent narrative. If you're looking for a clear answer or a well-crafted story, Is Maleficent a Witch or Fairy will leave you disappointed.

4. Emily - 1/5 stars - This movie was a complete waste of time. Not only did it fail to answer the question of Maleficent's true nature, but it also lacked a meaningful plot. The story felt disjointed and left me feeling uninterested and disconnected. The visuals and special effects were impressive, but they couldn't make up for the lack of a coherent storyline. Overall, Is Maleficent a Witch or Fairy failed to deliver any enjoyable or satisfying elements, and I would not recommend wasting your time on it.

Unveiling Maleficent: Understanding the Source of her Power