If a gang of knife-wielding toddlers ever presses you for the name of the best Disney film, Sleeping Beauty (1959) is a pretty good answer. It has everything you expect from those features animated during Walt’s life: a simple story translated from a fairy tale; beautifully painted castle and forest scenes; a baddie that you can really root against, and all that. But it also has more: widescreen; a wild and luminous colour palette; and a score borrowed from some bloke called Tchaikovsky. Today’s animators are given to cooing about its invention and daring. I’d join them if I had a switchblade raised to my knees. Even if I didn’t.
Which brings us bloodlessly to the latest film from Walt Disney: Maleficent. This is what they call a ‘reimagining’ of the studio’s original Sleeping Beauty movie. It is live-action rather than animated. It shifts its attention away from Aurora, the Sleeping Beauty, and on to Maleficent, the villainess…or is she? And, in what is the most wonderful innovation of all, it’s also grade-A awful.
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