I have not thus far watched a single one of Disney’s CGI-heavy live-action remakes of their old animated classics, judging them to be of doubtful artistic merit. However as a friend recently asked us to find a full set of them for her children, I thought we might as well watch them ourselves, spreading them out over time. They take very little effort to watch and might even be a little entertaining. I picked this one to start with as it is chronologically the earliest.

Maleficent is a fairy who lives in the magical land of the Moors that is next to a human kingdom. As a child, she befriends the human boy Stefan but after they grow up, Stefan becomes more ambitious and greedy while Maleficent becomes the foremost protector of the Moors due to her magical power. After she rebuffs an invasion led the aging human king, he offers to pass on the crown to anyone who can defeat her. Stefan visits her and taking advantage of their friendship cuts off her wings after drugging her. He becomes the new king and marries the previous king’s daughter while she becomes vengeful and angry. Using magic to turn a raven into a spy, she learns that Stefan’s daughter is being christened. She barges into the ceremony and curses the baby to fall into a death-like sleep after pricking her finger before her 16th birthday. The baby Aurora is then sent away to grow up with the three little good fairies but Maleficent secretly watches over her.

Obviously this is a modern take on the familiar Sleeping Beauty fairy tale with a twist that anyone with any intelligence can see coming a mile away. It’s interesting to note that while this is a major Disney production and dates from only a few years ago, yet its CGI is visibly deficient. I suppose that’s partly the fault of the art direction which insisted on making the Moors look fantastical but also makes it look completely fake. Pasting real actors’ faces on the CGI bodies of the little fairies looks horrible as well. Angelina Jolie does have the appropriate look for Maleficent and all of her flying and magical powers look great but overall this film looks kind of underwhelming given its prominence. It just lacks any kind of visual wow factor.

A more insidious charge that the entire point of this film is that it is a sort of postmodern update on an old fairy tale but goes about it in a half-hearted way. Maleficent herself is indeed a fully developed character but everyone else in this film is cartoonishly simple. The film fails at even such simple storytelling like making it clear that the princess Aurora is actually still living with the three little fairies when most of the time she is seen with Maleficent anyway. Since the whole point is to develop Maleficent into Aurora’s mother, the film ruthlessly neutralizes all competing maternal figures. So the three fairies are reduced to incompetent, quarrelsome idiots who aren’t even funny. The film is positively savage towards Leila, Stefan’s queen. It’s hard to understand how she could agree to Aurora being raised away from her in the forest for 16 years and she ends up dying without seeing her daughter or having Stefan’s love. Worst of all, no one even cares that she’s dead, including Aurora. It’s pretty horrible. Meanwhile the film is far too family friendly to show Maleficent doing anything really bad. When her grief drives her to turn the Moors into a dark kingdom, the only thing that really changes is a palette shift. It’s pretty pathetic.

It’s obvious in this case that Disney realized that a faithful remake of the original Sleeping Beauty would be unacceptably regressive in this day and age and so tried to update it. Yet their hands were still tied by this being a Disney film and the need to reference familiar elements like the three fairies. The result is a highly unsatisfying compromise that doesn’t even have the saving grace of being entertaining. So thumbs down on this one. I understand that the newer films are more faithful remakes that don’t suffer from this problem and so can at least bank on pure nostalgia value.