Disney’s Sleeping Beauty doesn’t deserve the flak it gets

Of all the Disney movies with passive female protagonists, Sleeping Beauty perhaps the most misunderstood. If you look at it at face value – with Aurora, the titular Sleeping Beauty, as the central character – then Sleeping Beauty is a peculiar film about a passive princess. Aurora stops midway through her own movie, after being trapped by an evil fairy. She basically does nothing but sing sweetly, fall asleep and then be rescued. Almost every plot point in it Sleeping Beauty is something that happens Unpleasant her, not something she does.

Like the three oldest Disney Princess movies, Sleeping Beauty, CinderellaAnd Snowwhite and the Seven Dwarfs often bear the brunt of modern criticism. None of these movies stray particularly far from their fairytale origins, meaning the princesses in them don’t have much freedom of choice compared to their modern day counterparts. They have their own individual quirks, but modern princess protagonists are common Doing more. As part of the Disney Princess brand, the older movies are routinely dismissed as being about women waiting to be rescued by princes and not actively taking control of their stories.

But when it comes down to it Sleeping Beauty, that description is actually not accurate at all. We just need to remember who the movie is actually about. Although Aurora is a certified Disney Princess, she is not the main character. Neither is Phillip, the dashing prince who swoops in to rescue her. The main characters are actually her three fairy godmothers, Flora, Fauna and Merryweather.

Amidst all the buzz about the Disney Princess brand, it’s easy to forget that. The three fairies are the ones who voluntarily protect the princess, and in the end they are the ones who must figure out how to thwart the dark fairy Maleficent, who wants revenge on Aurora’s family for not being invited to Aurora’s christening. Defeating the big bad is usually the hero’s job. Aurora hardly plays a role in that.

The film devotes a lot of screen time to the adventures of Flora, Fauna and Merryweather. They have different personalities: Flora is a bit bossy and overbearing; Fauna is emotional and sentimental; Merryweather is grumpy and stubborn. They struggle with raising a teen ward. They process the grief of handing her over to her parents after treating her like a daughter for so long. In the end, they must face the worst case scenario when the fate they protected her from does happen. But they bounce back and figure out how to implement the failsafe they devised years ago, which involves getting a prince out of a dungeon and it to fight the dragon.

Image: Disney

Phillip fans (if they actually exist) could certainly argue that they are merely supporting his hero story. But consider two big points: First, the fairies have a lot more screen time and more personal motivation to save Aurora. And two, for the second half of the movie, Phillip doesn’t even talk. Both he and Aurora are silent characters after she pricks her finger and collapses. All the discussion comes from the three fairies plotting to save the kingdom.

Unlike other Disney matriarchs, who step in briefly to offer worldly advice (like Pocahontas‘ Grandmother Willow) or to wave their magic wands and solve problems (like the Fairy Godmother in Cinderella), the three fairies stay stuck in the story and fight the good fight every step of the way. While they’re technically waving their wands to get Phillip out of jail, he’s just the means to their end. He is their avatar and gives them the physical abilities to storm the castle. Unlike most hero-enabler characters, they don’t disappear after freeing him. As Phillip hacks through a wall of thorny briars, they are the ones who dispel Maleficent’s spells and clear the obstacles. Phillip stabs the dragon, but they literally lead his sword to pierce his heart.

Image: Disney

Disney heroines — the princesses in particular — face the burden of rapidly evolving audience expectations when it comes to fulfilling young women’s arcs. Characters like Ariel and Belle were once considered forward-thinking just because they made their own choices, putting them one step ahead of their previous Disney counterparts. When their films first debuted, they were hailed as active agents in their own stories, unashamedly going after what they wanted.

But a decade or so later, many people criticized their stories for being romantically orientedwith the characters throwing their dreams aside for men. Storylines that were groundbreaking in one time period don’t necessarily carry the same weight in the next generation. Looking back through modern lenses, these older movies understandably don’t hold up. But sometimes they get a lot of flak for problems that don’t actually exist, simply because we look back at them the wrong way.

Image: Disney

Of Sleeping Beauty, we just need to recalibrate our expectations for what makes a main character. Here it is not the young woman, nor the young man. It’s the three older women. Through this lens is not alone Sleeping Beauty surprisingly groundbreaking in terms of female roles, it also gives the fairy tale a strangely modern touch.

It is now popular to reimagine fairy tales from different angles, such as enchanted‘s playful dismantling of Disney movie tropes, or any modern Cinderella update that attempts to flesh out the folktale’s original heroine, with varying degrees of success. 2014 malicious give it a twist Sleeping Beauty by telling the story from the villain’s point of view, but Sleeping Beauty yourself already strayed from typical fairytale conventions.

After all, Aurora is on most merchandise, but the real stars of Sleeping Beauty are three elderly women, all with different personalities, who bicker about the best way to carry out their plans, but are immensely capable in magic, saving not just a princess, but an entire kingdom. Forget 1959; that’s rare to see in 2023.

Sleeping Beauty streams on Disney Plus and can be rented or purchased on Amazon, redboxand other digital platforms.