I watched Maleficent this week. It’s Disney’s live action revision of the studio’s own Sleeping Beauty, told from the point of view of the eponymous villain. I enjoyed it; Angelina Jolie pulls it out the bag with a great performance that forms the central pillar of the film. It got me thinking about the style of modern Disney films, and about the modern approach to adapting or reimagining fairy tales. Subverting fairy tales, to be exact.
The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothes
I’m conscious that putting a new spin on a fairy tale is nothing new to cinema. The Company of Wolves, Neil Jordan’s 1984 adaptation from Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, springs to mind as an early and particularly well-realised twisting of a classic tale.
The Company of Wolves is a loose mutation of Little Red Riding Hood. But the film isn’t so much a subversion of a fairy tale as a stripping of it; a skinning away of lupine flesh and fur to reveal the skeleton of the story. Beneath the surface it’s a cautionary tale that warns of the dangers of stepping off the woodland path, of meeting strange men in the forest. There’s the wolf of horror nestled inside the approachable fairy tale sheep.
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