Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (Joachim Rønning, 2019) and the Construction of Fantasy Spaces

Fig. 1 - Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (Joachim Rønning, 2019).

The Walt Disney Company does not have the best record when it comes to diverse ethnic and racial representation. Despite spending the latter half of the last decade trying to rectify this problem across its Disney, Pixar, and Marvel Studio offerings, attempts to broaden on-screen representation still leaves both audiences and critics wanting. The recent live-action/CGI sequel Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (Joachim Rønning, 2019) proves an interesting case study in terms of what the development of better constructions of otherness in Disney fantasyscapes might look like, while still indicating how the studio’s medievalist fairy-tale aesthetic contributes to a simultaneous undercutting of their attempts at greater inclusivity. This blog post examines the politics of representation in Joachim Rønning’s feature film, arguing that diverse representation is about more than just inserting more people of colour into Disney fantasyscapes

Maleficent: Mistress of Evil continues the narrative arc that began in Maleficent (Robert Stromberg, 2014), Disney’s reiteration of its own 1959 fairy-tale adaptation of Sleeping Beauty (Clyde Geronimi, 1959). The first Maleficent remediates the cel-animated film through a combination of live action and CGI, broadening the story world via the screenwriting talent of Linda Woolverton. As Disney’s first foray into their contemporary live-action retellings of their iconic fairy tales, Maleficent had to do more than recreate the original story. The CGI-shaped world had to achieve what the prior fairy-tale films had also done: tap into a shared aesthetic that signaled to viewers that not only were they about to see a fairy-tale, but they were about to see Disney’s version, and that Disney’s version was the most authoritative version ­– the “real” story, so to speak.

Throughout its cel (and now computer-) animated features, as well as a number of its live-action remakes, Disney have always retained a medievalist fairy-tale aesthetic. This is largely achieved via the imagery of the castle, knights, the forests, and even the interweaving of the magical into the tableau of the Middle Ages (something explored in depth in Tison Pugh and Susan Aronstein’s edited collection The Disney Middle Ages) [1]. The voiceover introductions of both Maleficent (see right) and it subsequent sequel Maleficent: Mistress of Evil follows this particular trend, invoking a storyteller and calling back to the storybook framing of their earlier animated films such as Sleeping Beauty and The Sword in the Stone (Wolfgang Reitherman, 1963). Paralleling the opening of the first film, seen in the two clips below, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil also opens with the Disney castle title card, and then the film’s castle, before showing audiences what has come to be the expected fairy-tale forest landscape that conventionally established the setting and location [2].

Maleficent - Title Card.

Maleficent - Opening scene.

Though not a storybook, the storyteller’s voiceover in Maleficent still serves to frame the story and direct the narrative.

In the world set up by the first film, Maleficent is no longer an uncomplicated antagonist, and her victim is also now her adopted daughter. This story has been pulled out of the narrative realm of fairy tale and placed firmly into the space of fantasy; it has been expanded beyond the structure and duration of the classic European fairy tale, and opened up to new narrative possibilities and importantly, a world where further stories can take place. Yet despite the changes, the setting remains constant: the quasi-European romanticized forest dotted with enchanted creatures and stunning castles where wonder just waits to unfold for the special chosen few who are allowed to enter. These spaces have been largely white, Anglo, with a small handful of token Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) characters visible in small parts in more recent Disney films, but overwhelmingly lean into a particular myth of the medieval to construct their aesthetic.

Fig. 1 - Maleficent: Mistress of Evil and the Moors.

Maleficent: Mistress of Evil expands the idyllic magical world established in the first film. It complicates viewers’ ideas of what evil might look like, while also being the third film from the wider Disney corporation since 2017 to openly deal with the problems in their narratives of imperialism and colonialism, including depicting genocide and experiments on the magical creatures by the humans looking to encroach into The Moors (Fig. 1) for the resources the land holds [3]. However, diversity and how to represent different ethnicities and races within a layered, Othered context still feels like it is handled without understanding of the politics inherent in diverse representation.

Flying through the Dark Fey’s island.

There are more BIPOC faces in among the human ranks of soldiers and peasants, but the bulk of ethnically diverse representation in Maleficent: Mistress of Evil remains problematically within the non-humans. While I’m sure the choice was made to visually signal how human encroachment into the natural world has affected Dark Fey globally and how they have been reduced to inhabiting one, single island together to preserve themselves and their culture, it results in multiple layers of postcolonial exoticization. The humans have expanded with no regard for the natural world or other beings and the Dark Fey become the exoticized, de facto ‘indigenous’ and guardians of nature and the other magical creatures in opposition to human expansion. This construction repeats a trope in Hollywood film of equating indigeneity with magic, thereby reducing the recognition of indigenous people as people outside of the scope of the film. From the Water Protectors at Standing Rock to the Waiapi guarding the Amazon rainforest, we can see why this is a dangerous parallel to embed in a fantasy film screened internationally. Maleficent: Mistress of Evil perpetuates and continues to normalize positive stereotyping that strips people of their real lives and selves, reducing them to mythic occupants of symbolic spaces.

Furthermore, to facilitate Maleficent finding her place among her people, the narrative of Mistress of Evil also leans on the magical negro stereotype – a trope where a supporting Black character aids white protagonists with special insight or powers [4]. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Conall, a foil to Ed Skrein’s Borra (Fig. 2). Conall’s death is the catalyst for Maleficent achieving her full potential, while Borra lives beyond the film’s concluding marriage scene. Deployment of racially-based positive stereotypes is compounded by the fact that Japanese musician and actor Miyavi plays Udo, who primarily fulfills the role of teacher and spiritual leader for the young. Positive stereotyping of BIPOC in fantasyscapes where complex, leading roles are dominated by whiteness undermines any purported disruption of hegemonic hierarchies of race. In short, it is not enough just to have non-white bodies on screen. How producers/film writers use and work with those bodies within the narrative to shape and construct full fantasy landscapes and aesthetics is more important. While some might argue that a fantasy landscape would be better off attempting to use a so-called ‘color-blind’ lens, the fact that these tropes are recognizable even on a first watch indicates that they have become encoded for future viewers. Positive stereotypes are still stereotypes, and still harm to minoritized communities. Disney might have done better than their past, but that is a low bar. We can recognize growth and demand better from a company that helps shape and the reaffirm the worldviews of billions globally through their fantasyscapes.

Fig. 2 - Conall (Chiwetel Ejiofor) in Maleficent: Mistress of Evil.

Additionally, in Maleficent: Mistress of Evil it becomes clear that Disney does not know what to do with a strong, literally empowered and powerful woman capable of leadership. Despite, or perhaps because of, how Maleficent embraced her full potential, there was no space for her in that new world being built from the end of the imperialist, violent conquest led by Queen Ingris (Michelle Pfeiffer). Maleficent’s fully-realized, Othered self must step away from leadership over a twice-united kingdom, leaving her adopted human family to take over leadership [5]. A young queen who married an appropriately human male takes the throne; they look out across the lands of the three kingdoms they are now rulers of (Aurora united two in the first film) and children and the continuity of cis-hetero patriarchal rule are implied. Maleficent is left to roam the skies with her “real” children – those who are dark fey, and thus othered like her. It is hard not to think that the ending leans into medievalist tropes of fantasy that undo some of the more potentially subversive moments of the first film, and reestablish hard lines around ideas of who gets to rule and belong in the magical kingdom. In writing this reflection, I do find that I am already considering at least one more re-watch of it, so, well-played Disney. For better or worse, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil is a step forward for the Walt Disney Corporation in their storytelling and construction of their fantasy aesthetic, though, where that step leads and whether or not they can recast their traditional fantasy aesthetic to push past the hegemonic constructions they thus far invariably uphold with regards to race and ethnicity, and even gender, will remain to be seen.

**Article published: February 7, 2020**

Notes

[1] See also Bettina Bildhauer’s Filming the Middle Ages.

[2] Further recommended readings: Fairy Tales Transformed? by Cristina Bacchilega; Donald Haase’s “Hypertextual Gutenberg: The Textual and Hypertextual Life of Folk Tales and Fairy Tales in English Language Popular Print Editions”, originally printed in Fabula vol. 47, 2006; and Jessica Tiffin’s Marvelous Geometry.

[3] Thor: Ragnarok (2017), Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (2019), and Frozen 2 (2019).

[4] See also: Glenn, Cerise L., and Landra J. Cunningham. “The Power of Black Magic: The Magical Negro and White Salvation in Film.” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 40, no. 2, 2009, pp. 135–152. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40282626.

[5] This is not unlike how Elsa’s story resolves in Frozen 2; it will be interesting to see if this decision is made again in a future film, thus establishing a narrative pattern.

Biography

Michelle Anya Anjirbag is a PhD Candidate at the University of Cambridge, and a member of the Centre for Research in Children's Literature at Cambridge in the Faculty of Education. Her research interests include adaptations of fairy tales and folklore, and cross-period approaches to narrative transmission across cultures and societies. Her current research is on depictions of diversity in Disney’s fairy tale adaptations from 1989 through the present. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in Social Sciences and Jeunesse.