A Villain With A Heart Of Gold

Bilge Ebiri isn’t sold on Disney’s multi-dimensional villains, epitomized by Angelina Jolie’s performance in Maleficent:

Disney’s recent move away from classic villains is, on some level, a good thing, in that it allows them to delve into some heretofore unexplored types of relationships, and to find psychological complexity where once there was none. But I can’t help but feel like something has been lost as well. The Evil Queen, Maleficent, the Coachman, Shere-Khan. We didn’t spend a lot of time getting to know them. They were mysterious, elemental, totemic. And so, we could fill them with our own fears. They were charismatic enough that we brought our own complexity to them. These bad guys also put our heroes into sharper focus: Try to imagine Snow White without the Evil Queen, Peter Pan without Captain Hook.

Devon Maloney also has misgivings about Maleficent:

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.