Nightmare Fuel: Maleficent and the Grimm Reboot

1.

Maleficent is the best of the recent run of Hollywood fairy-tale reboots by a considerable margin, and it has no reason to exist. This enormous, lavish, $100 million blockbuster came into being because somebody, it doesn’t matter who exactly, thought Angelina Jolie looked kind of like a Disney villain from the ’50s. And lo, the latest gritty reboot of a classic story was born, greatest of a line composed of such enduring masterpieces as The Brothers Grimm, Sleepy Hollow, Mirror Mirror, Snow White and the Huntsman and Oz the Great and Powerful, not to mention Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, more aptly known as Alice in Middle-Earth.

This trend is not restricted to fairy-tales and other children’s classics; all kinds of reliable properties are routinely revived in darker, grimier, more ‘adult’ incarnations; the reason I single out the fairy stories is because they are inextricably entwined with animation history, and because they represent the gritty reboot movement at its most bizarre. (And then there is sample size: there are far too many of them.)

Another quick detour into first causes (another preoccupation of the “origin-story” subspecies of reboot): Hollywood does not turn to remakes and reboots because it has run out of ideas, but because it has grown to the point where costs and profits are alike so immense that the risk of investing hundreds of millions on entirely new material has become almost unjustifiable; far safer, and more responsible, to pump that money into exhuming a reliable old property, a proven cash cow. (This is also why studios are ever more keen to ensure that all new material spawn a franchise of its own; the self-contained film stands no chance compared to, say, another Shrek.) Children’s classics, and above all great Disney movies, are ideal candidates for such reanimation (pardon the pun), having as they do an irrevocable hold over the imaginations of all people who are, or have ever been, young.

The one problem with classic Disney films is that they fail to appeal to the most important moviegoing demographic of all: teens and young adults. This group is just old enough to realize that fairy-tales, princesses, and talking animals are not cool, but not yet old enough to not care and enjoy them anyway. I am in no way suggesting they are all like this, of course, but, statistically speaking, the most successful films in this demographic are heavy on violence, cynicism and sexuality, all things absent, but not entirely excluded, from family films.

Hence the grit that makes so many reboots so unpalatable. The old stories must be used; not to do so would be positively wasteful; but they must be changed, somehow, made darker, more serious, more “real”; they must be augmented with warfare; they must be loaded with cosmic significance; the protagonists must be aged a few years up; they must be from the villain’s perspective; they must be improved by the addition of interminable action sequences; they must terminate with an ‘epic’, unequivocal bang.

2.

Walt Disney is often criticized for changing and softening fairy-tales to suit the popular audience; the word “Disneyfication” is now a widely accepted pejorative (Merriam-Webster calls it “the transformation of something real and unsettling into carefully controlled and safe entertainment”). He was, and is, accused of leavening the horror at the heart of such stories with his trademark saccharine sentimentality; even worse, this pandering purveyor of fantasy has been so successful that his watered-down versions of the classics have effectively supplanted the original stories in public consciousness. (This granted, it remains unexplained how extensive backstory, gratuitous use of shadows, and epic effects-laden battle sequences are truer to the source material.) This, then, is the charge — and how does Disney answer it?

First, let us examine this idea of Disneyfication, and whether it has any basis in reality. Let us look to the animated features; they begin: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940), Dumbo (1941) and Bambi (1942); no more features appeared that decade, what with war and recession; all those that followed were essentially subordinate to the company’s theme park ambitions.

One immediately notices that only one of these (Snow White) is a princess fairy-tale, with Pinocchio the only adaptation of a major work. More to the point: there is much to adore in these movies, certainly; there is some degree of sentiment; but what are their most indelible impressions? Snow White contains a Wicked Queen so terrifying, theater seats have been soiled on her account for the better part of a century; Pinocchio is a parade of horrors, from Stromboli’s slave theater to child-trafficking Pleasure Island, and ends in the infernal belly of Monstro the Whale; Fantasia climaxes with Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain”, in which Chernabog, a vast, bat-winged Satan, torments dead souls through a dark eastern night; Dumbo is merciless to its infant hero, basks in the sinister majesty of the Big Top, and its most famous sequence is a nightmarish hallucination; Bambi is unflinching in its portrayal of nature’s violence and the cycles of life and death, and its most famous sequence is a breathless, bloodcurdling hunt, ending in the death of the hero’s mother.

These are the greatest animated films ever made, and the most ferocious. They are all more or less perfect; all variously adept at tapping into the most primal fears of children, and the children inside grown-ups; full of light and wonder, but tempered also with darkness, dread and awe. They are awful in the real sense of the word, and in their awfulness they possess a power and a majesty impossible in modern animation: the power of ancient stories.

The charge of Disneyfication, then, is only to be taken seriously when leveled at films far removed from these, that are indeed shadows of the original stories, and shadows of the early films; many of them made after Disney himself had died. (This does not, however, absolve him of his last decade, which produced cartoons of unmatched wretchedness; and while the renaissance of the early ’90s had its virtues, it was much more to blame for Disneyfication than the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s.)

We all know what darkness and what horrors fairy-tales contain; and we have just covered how Disney movies, at least in their prime, rather than suppressing or sweetening such horrors, brought them to the most vivid life. What is left for the gritty reboot, then, to do, but to become even darker and more frightening? Presumably so; but this they do not do.

It cannot be done; the classics are already too dark for modern consumption; the Disneyfication of these stories is no more than an inexplicably persistent myth, an obstinate nugget of perceived wisdom as unreal as Cinderella’s finery. This is easily demonstrated: cast a cursory glance at Disney adaptations since the ’90s, and you will light upon such artifacts as Hercules, in which Hades is a fast-talking comedian and Zeus a genial, jovial father-figure to the eponymous hero. It is emphatically divorced from the classic Disney method.

Hercules, though, is intended as a parody of Greek myth, Disney itself finally allowing the influence of the Warner cartoons. Maleficent and its brethren, however, are gritty reboots, by and large, and for them to be softer and lighter not only than the source material, but the already leavened Disney versions, is bizarre indeed. Maleficent is less guilty of this than most, but it exhibits all the group’s common failings, and may serve as an illustration.

3.

Maleficent does exactly the opposite of its intended purpose. Instead of making Sleeping Beauty (which is itself not one of Disney’s best movies) more adult, more frightening, and more complex, it makes it childlike, if not childish, more comforting, and reassuringly simple. It takes the villainess of the original and turns her into a heroine; shows us her adorable childhood; invents a bond between her and the heroine of the original; and, most absurdly, explains away her malicious actions as the result of a single traumatic incident with a boy, who clipped her wings without consent.

Is this how modern Hollywood deals with the problem of evil? By pairing it up with an all-explanatory root cause and tying up the package in a neat little bow? But for all the evil Maleficent removes from the original, it adds tenfold more, a tenth as compelling: the good king Stefan, a simple but loving patriarch in the original, is now a deranged, Machiavellian rapist; his predecessor is, if anything, even worse, a bloat of unreasoning malice. If we are to extend our sympathy to poor Maleficent, why not to these unfortunate men, who must also, somehow, have been broken by mischance? Why must their evil, and not hers, be unambiguous?

I have not even touched upon what happens to the character of Maleficent when you turn her from a louring, threatening villain into a wounded, sentimental victim. The power of the woman, the force of the design as originally conceived, is lost. And Angelina Jolie, who does as well in the role as could possibly be expected, is simply unequal to the task of matching Marc Davis, the unrivaled master of female villainy at Disney. It invalidates even her name: why would an innocent, loving child, destined to rule a peaceful kingdom, be called maleficent?

The most intriguing aspect of the business is the once-bad fairy’s bond with Princess Aurora, played convincingly, at least by the former. It makes possible the film’s most effective moments, moments that temporarily suspend the shadow of the original film, and allow Maleficent to take on a life of its own; but even these are not entirely positive, for they obscure Maleficent’s turn towards darkness all the more.

The young Maleficent, who cannot help her name, is an angelic princess of the forest, and the film’s method of aging her into a good but fearsome protector in Jolie is not poorly handled; her response to Stefan’s betrayal, however, makes little sense in context. That such an intelligent and compassionate woman should turn tyrant, terrify and oppress the infantile denizens of Fairyland, and scorn the three Good Fairies, can at first be explained by our having overestimated her intelligence and her compassion, were they not so immediately reaffirmed by her rapid change of heart towards Aurora, who receives clandestine care from the sorceress even in infancy, mere days after being cursed by her.

The aid is not inconsiderable, given that the movie chooses to reduce the Good Fairies to imbecile comic relief. There was plenty of well-meaning silliness in the original Flora, Fauna and Merryweather, growing logically from the fairies’ unfamiliarity with mortal life, but they were, in their strength and their loyalty, worthy of respect; by the end, they were heroic. The fairies in Maleficent are nonentities, seemingly incapable of even earning Aurora’s love: she abandons them for her “fairy godmother” with shocking coolness.

Is the incompetence of the Good Fairies supposed to make some sort of point? That well-meaning stupidity does more harm than good? That those in charge are scandalously ill-equipped for their charge? All right, but what of it? If the fairies are so idiotic, selfish and oblivious, Maleficent should never have been fond of them; Stefan, who is no dolt, should never have entrusted them with Aurora; and, if they are the most intelligent creatures in Fairyland other than Maleficent (I do not include the Ent-like tree guardians, who show no capacity for autonomy), her despotic period becomes even more incongruous. Maleficent rules over toddlers.

Significantly, Maleficent revokes from the Good Fairies even their one all-important function: Merryweather’s gift, modifying Maleficent’s curse of death to an enchanted sleep. Instead it is Maleficent herself who opts for clemency. With that, the fairies become practically inconsequential to the plot.

4.

Maleficent’s relationship with the teenage Aurora is the high point of the film, marred only by the jarring lack of warmth between the girl and her actual fairy godmothers. It culminates in a metafictional subversion of an increasingly common kind, but better executed than others: a prince’s kiss is unable to wake the sleeping beauty, but Maleficent’s does. This is sensible; if one grants the movie’s premise and development, this is just how it should end. Just as sensible is the decision to make the Meet Cute between Prince Philip and Aurora more vapid and juvenile than any in the cartoons.

The movie then proceeds to a superfluous, and interminable, battle sequence — these are apparently non-negotiable, and we must suffer them as best we may. It is not enough to erase the enduring impression of the movie’s best scene, in which a repentant Maleficent attempts to revoke her curse, and fails. This moment is genuinely affecting, and no amount of ham-handed action can undermine it. It is the kind of moment on which the great Disney movies are built; and were it not for all its sentimental trappings, oversimplifications, and cowardly evasions, it is the moment in which we can glimpse the kind of movie Maleficent could have been. The idea of exploring one of animation’s great villains is not a bad one; but, other than this scene and a few minutes else, it has been done badly.

One final note, before I finish: the spinning wheel scene. In the original cartoon, this sequence is intense, frightening, and genuinely suspenseful; it is, like the climax of Cinderella, right out of a Hitchcock movie, a perfectly deliberate decision. Here it is rather underwhelming melodrama, devoid of atmosphere, and framed by the cacophony of combat. It is the movie in miniature: a faithful recreation of Maleficent’s look, but none of her menace. It is not a terrible film, but a meaningless, indifferent one. One hopes this phase will pass.

On editing and horror

I have acquired The Shining, in a version I have never, to my knowledge, actually seen. It’s the European cut, which is 25 minutes shorter than the American.

It is a rather interesting story.

On its first release in North America, The Shining was 146 minutes long. Three weeks into that original run, the director, Stanley Kubrick, issued a directive to all theaters exhibiting the film, instructing them to excise the last two minutes of footage from the picture and return it to the studio. This cut the running time to 144 minutes; the only difference being that an ambiguous hospital-room scene at the end of the film was never seen by the vast majority of the public.

Kubrick did not, however, stop there. Before the film was released in Europe (and, subsequently, everywhere else), he took the knife to it once more, excising another 25 minutes of footage to reduce the total running time to 119 minutes. The removed sequences consisted mostly of references to the outside world, and a subplot regarding Danny’s imaginary friend. Kubrick supposedly did this to improve the film, saying that the expository material was superfluous to requirements now that the film would be seen by a “more intelligent” European audience.

The European or “international” version thus became the official cut until the advent of home video and DVD in particular, when the modern craze for extended editions made the 144-minute version the cut of choice (the 146-minute cut was either unavailable or so markedly inferior as to be beneath consideration). The longer version is still the standard in North America for reasons that have clearly not been thought through, which is why it remains the only cut I am familiar with.

I have at last acquired a copy of a European Blu-ray release of the final, 119-minute cut. I am excited to watch this classic again, given that I have a particular fondness for director’s cuts that make films shorter rather than longer. The obsession with extended editions and deleted scenes (when actually reintegrated into the completed film – they remain very interesting in isolation) is beyond my understanding, given that there is so much to be said for ambiguity and inference, and it is, after all, an editor’s job to shorten a film, not cling to those sequences, interesting and effective though they might be, that would only muddy the waters of a self-contained narrative. The paring down of information has been crucial to the effectiveness of many classics, and while there is as much to be said for the sprawling, digressive epic as the crisp, streamlined thriller, it only stands to reason that a film cannot be both at once.

In the case of horror films in particular, it is generally a good practice to limit the viewer’s knowledge to the absolute minimum that would still allow coherence – every additional scene, be it a visual atrocity or an exposition, is a dilution of the fear that comes of uncertainty, a gradual disenchantment of the spell that horror attempts to weave. The creation of fear in cinema is all bound up in the subversion of logical and rational faculties – if the viewer can think and draw conclusions, he is distancing himself from the work and therefore the immediacy of fear, soothing the unconscious that should instead be muddled, confused, fearful of that which it does not know. The more material provided from which to draw conclusions, the surer the viewer feels in his explanations that it is all right and there is no need to feel threatened. The vague imagination is always more terrifying than the specific, so wherever a horror film has the choice, it should choose to say less.

Having written all of this, I have determined that it should be a blog post, and there will be another after I have seen this shortened masterpiece, to say whether my existing views have been borne out by the evidence. It is good to see you all again.