Sleeping Beauty was Disney’s return to the
fairytale formula that had served him so well just a few years before with Cinderella and jump-started animated
cinema with Snow White. Once again there are the usual fairytale trappings:
a princess, a prince, magic, etc. But
the story of Sleeping Beauty presents a problem for a movie retelling; watching
the title character sleep does not make for a compelling movie. The story also involves a large time gap that
needs to be bridged, between the princess being cursed and the curse being
fulfilled. Disney solved this problem by
shifting focus to more of the characters, so the titular character wasn’t carrying
the entire film. We see more of the
Kings and the Prince, but the real stars are the fairies.
Flora, Fauna and Merryweather provide a stable group of
character for the movie to focus on.
They are there at the beginning, providing a crucial role of bestowing their
gifts on Aurora, most notably altering Maleficent’s curse. They also conceive and initiate the plan to
keep Aurora hidden until after her 16th birthday. Though they seem to serve primarily as comic
relief, they are actually the ones driving the story forward.
Aurora has her brief period of action as she meets the
prince, falls in love, finds out she’s a princess and then fulfils the curse
and falls asleep. But from there the
focus is fully back on the fairies as they realize Prince Phillip’s kiss will
break the curse and mount a rescue. Then
do all the heavy lifting as he escapes and slays Maleficent. Ultimately Prince Phillip does little more
than act as a warm body to hold the magical weapons they conjure up. Even the death blow against Maleficent in
dragon form is more Flora casting a spell on the sword, than the actual
flinging of the sword. The only reason
he’s useful at all is the curse-breaking kiss.
But even as the action follows the fairies, they maintain
the feel of side characters, operating just off to the side of the Prince and Princess;
giving the feeling the movie is still more about them. The way they are used in this movie in
general demonstrates how a story can still be made to work by still providing
interesting characters to support it, even if they’re not the characters that
are expected. The fairies are what hold
this movie together. Without them it would be a disconnected series of scenes
and lacking in much of the depth and humor.
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