Behind the Fairy Tale: Sleeping Beauty

Check out the dragon – woot!

Sleeping Beauty is one of my favorite Disney movies for one main reason: Maleficent.  This is one evil fairy you don’t wanna mess around with.  She will CUT YOU.  Forget to invite her to your baby shower?  Expect one death curse on your baby.  Also she can turn into a dragon and all sorts of crap when she’s angry.  Try not to piss her off.

Sadly, Sleeping Beauty’s parents didn’t get the memo.  The good fairies give the baby princess the gifts of Song and Beauty which begs the question – would the girl would have been tone deaf and ugly as a post without the gifts?  Who knows?  It’s just a good thing they didn’t come up with something silly to give her like, say, intelligence.  That’s what beauty is for!  Anyway, Maleficent shows up in a ball of fire to liven things up.  Check it!  And here’s another great power this lady has –the power of extreme sarcasm.

I am soooooo freaking awesome.

“To show I bear no ill will, I too will bestow a gift on the baby . . .” she coos.  Hahaha, SNAP, she slaps a curse on the kid, dooming her to death by spinning wheel on her sixteenth birthday.  Oh, the third chubby fairy tries to make it better, by simply dooming her to eternal sleep until true love wakes her up, but the king is having none of this.  Like all politicians, he promptly overreacts and burns every spinning wheel in the country.  I mean, come on, the fairy said 16^th birthday.  You could have waited, I’d say, at least 15 years before burning all the spinning wheels and dooming your people to sew every darn thing by hand.   Not that it would do any good against a fairy who, considering she has the ability to appear and disappear in fire, probably can make a spinning wheel too.

The three fairies figure this out and come up with a plan to raise the kid alone without use of magic.  Again, the kid is an infant at this point.  16^th birthday, people.  Still, the king and queen are freaked and so let these dimwitted fairies take their only child to be raised in the woods.  I can’t forsee any problems with this.

Yeah, I’d trust ’em.

It works for a while, mostly because Maleficent relies on her stupid henchmen to search for the child, and they search every cradle – for the entire 16 years.  So hard to find good help these days.  I love how she says, “Sixteen years you’ve been looking for a baby . . . .” before completely losing it and zapping the heck out of her minions.  I’m not sure what Mal was doing all these years – being freaking awesome I guess.  Anyway, she finally gets wise and sends out her crow to look for a pretty girl who can sing.

Crap, I’m bored.

And said pretty girl – the fairies name her Briar Rose – grows up trapped in a cottage with three irritating old women.  She has no one else to talk to but forest animals, so it is kind of hard to blame her when the first man shows up and she falls for him right away.  I think I would too at that point.  Like the prince in Snow White, he’s first attracted by her singing.  This movie does have some of the best songs – partly because they are words put to the original music from the ballet.  Anyway, she’s singing about meeting this hottie in her dreams and boom, real hottie shows up.  He has a name too – Phillip – and shock of all shocks, a bit of a personality too!  Big steps here, Disney.

A name, lines, everything. I’m like a Renaissance Prince, dude.

Anyway, she doesn’t realize he’s the prince she was originally promised to as an infant (I love the scene where five year old Phillip looks down at his future bride and makes a disgusted face).  And he, like her, thinks she’s a peasant.  Mistaken identity for the win!  It’s pretty much the only thing taking the girl away from her parents all this time has accomplished, since the fairies, eager to make a halfway decent cake and dress for her birthday, start using magic.  Not sure how they’ve been sewing and cooking all this time, but whatever.  It quickly devolves into two of them shooting the crap out of each other with wands, which the crow notices while flying overhead.  Brilliant.

In between, while waiting for the princess, there’s a great scene where the two kings get falling down drunk.  I’d love to see that happen in one of their movies today.  But drinking is wrong!  Except when it’s funny!

Anyway, Phillip informs his father that he’s marrying hot peasant babe (great quote: “Come on, father, it’s the 14th century – times are changing!), and Rose gets the great surprise that hey, we’ve been lying to you all this time, and now that you’ve finally met someone, you get to go be a princess and marry some prince you don’t know!  Happy birthday!  After this a series of mishaps happen resulting in Phillip getting captured by Maleficent and Rose (or Princess Aurora, whatevs) getting possessed and touching a – wait for it – magic spinning wheel created by evil fairy magic.  Dun dun dummmm!

One possessed princess comin’ up. Touch itttt, touch itttt . . .

Well, now that the good fairies have managed to royally screw up EVERYTHING, they try to fix it.  Since the princess is asleep, why not put all the rest of the castle asleep, you know, to spare the king and queen any suffering (and spare their own behinds, I wager.)  This is just one example of hero has misfortune, the entire staff has misfortune.  They finally figure out the mixup and go rescue Phillip from prison and give him a shiny sword and shield.  So he rides off to the castle but wait, Maleficent ain’t goin’ down easy.  She puts up thorns, then turns into a freaking dragon “Prepare to face ME and all the powers of HELL!”  Whoa.  I don’t know about Phillip, but I’d be wettin’ ’em.

Craaaaaaaaaaaap!

I like the Disney version better than the original fairy tale.  At least in this one, she’s only asleep a short time, and she’s woken up by someone who knows she’s under a spell and who she’s actually met before.  In the original, the princess and the castle are all asleep for 100 years, which means when the prince finally gets there, she’s woken up by a stranger (again kissing what for all he knows is a dead girl) in a completely different universe.  Think falling asleep in 1913 and waking up today.  Yeah, slight culture shock there.  That would have to totally suck.

Who the heck are you? Get out of my room!

So Phillip kills the dragon, and goes upstairs to wake the princess.  Of course she looks perfect in sleep, holding a rose, her beautiful, perfectly styled blond locks (very peasant like!)  laying across the pillow just so.   Yeah, that’s a natural sleep position.  I think it would have added a nice touch if the princess were snoring and drooling into her pillow.  Oh well.  Phillip kisses her and she wakes up.  Next thing you know, they’re downstairs dancing around the ballroom.  The stupid fairies continue to change her dress from pink to blue because some people NEVER LEARN.  I find it amazing how the peasant girl instantly knows how to dance in court (did the birds and racoons teach her?), but whatever.  The only disappointing thing is that Maleficent has to die (by the sword and Disney plummet death).  She was totally the most interesting character.

Realism in fairy tales.

I’m not sure what the thing is with fairy tales and incapacitating women.  It’s looking like a bit of a trend here.  Maybe they figure if women are asleep, they’re more likely not to notice all the crap the men are doing.  I know that’s why I like napping today.  What do you think?

Stay tuned next time for the original “failure to launch” Peter freakin’ Pan.