Latest Maleficent Trailer Implies She’s Not All Evil
When I was younger, I really wanted a lot of live-action versions of things I had seen animated. How cool would things like Dragonball Z and Evangelion be with real people? (Turns out not so well.) Now that I’m older, I’m perfectly content with these things to stay the way they are, because good animation can do things live-action can’t and should be respected as its own art form, not just something to distract kids. But Disney seems committed to redoing its most famous animated movies in live-action. Alice in Wonderland came out in 2010, Cinderella will be out in 2015, but this year is Maleficent, the Sleeping Beauty reimagining that focuses on its main villain of the same name.
Besides these live-action versions continuing the Hollywood trend of rehashing perfectly fine movies for nostalgia’s sake, this movie feels particularly unnecessary. Maleficent has long been considered one of Disney’s most evil villains. It’s also worth noting how petty she is, taking some pretty drastic actions just for not being invited to a birthday party. (And she probably wasn’t invited because she did other bad things in the past!) So Disney is going to try and say that there’s still some good in her, and that she only turned evil because of how others treated her? Eh, it all rings a little false. Maybe that could work like when Jim Carrey played The Grinch, but I have a hard time believing Maleficent has ever done anything nice for anyone.
And let’s take into account that Sleeping Beauty is one of the most beautiful films ever made, with incredibly rich animation and art that puts it near the peak of animation. The trailer actually juxtaposes these scenes with the new live-action scenes, and while they’re not bad on their own, they certainly don’t look as good as the original. This is one of those instances where adapting the animated adaptation of a work into live-action doesn’t bring anything to the table but weirdly-mixed CG.
Source: YouTube