The Real Beauty Wasn't Sleeping: A Mash Note to Maleficent

Dan Fields, co-founder of Fields Point Pictures, writes mostly about horror movies, but something must have put him in a nostalgic mood (maybe George Romero gearing up for yet another zombie movie) because this week he wrote about the first movie he remembers watching: not Night of the Living Dead but Sleeping Beauty.

In the first installment of a "Movie Nostalgia" series for the California Literary Review, Dan ponders why an animated movie made in 1959 should have made such an impression upon his youthful self in the 1980s, a time when no self-respecting kid would be caught dead watching a G-rated movie (at least not in public) and when other entertainments like video games, pro wrestling, and MTV were so much cooler than some stupid sleeping girl.

But for Dan, Sleeping Beauty hit better notes than the Buggles and he observes that in this movie the animals didn't need bad attitudes or eccentric behavior, unlike the celluloid critters of today.

As a self-professed fan of horror movie, Dan of course has kind words for Maleficent: 'villainy perfected', he calls her, and for a horror movie fan that's the same as a 'regular' person paying a compliment to the pretty girl down the block. I always thought Maleficent was more ... interesting ... than Sleeping Beauty. Dan seems to concur.

You won't get any film school ruminations or revelations from this article. It's not an incisive look at the movie, though Dan makes several good points about why Sleeping Beauty has held up so well over the years. It's not a mash note to Maleficent, either.

But it is a love note, to the movie itself, from a guy who grew up to make movies of his own.