Per un paio d'ali. Variazioni sul mito della Bella addormentata. Lettura di Maleficent (USA 2014)

In the last two years, the tale of the ‘sleeping Beauty’ has been the subject for four film adaptations regarding the main variants of the central character, the princess named either Snow White or Aurora. In 2012 two interesting, although not memorable, versions have been released – the first one with Charlize Theron, the second with Julia Roberts, in the role of the bewitching wicked stepmother – Snow White and the Huntsman (UK, 2012); Mirror Mirror (USA, 2012) – to which other two learned and refined adaptations are now to be added: Blancanieves (ES, FR 2012, by Pablo Berger), and more recently Maleficent (USA 2014, by Robert Stromberg). With Maleficent, Disney Production turns towards the register of an epic fantasy, and brings to the highest intensity the black-Gothic hue already present in the ‘classic’ Disney animation picture (1959). The reading of the movie here suggested by Stefania Rimini and Monica Centanni highlights the dramaturgical twist that the tale has undergone, not in the fabula itself – i.e. in the actual events occurring according to the plot – but in the interpretation of the facts and the characters; the paper draws particular attention to the axial overturn that gives prominence to the witch Maleficent as a leading role, and colors the story with a slight 'gender' tinge. The device of this variant in narration generates a double involvement in the viewer, a double empathy: the (comforting) remembrance of the well-known fairy tale, and a (disorienting and intriguing) surprise in discovering (or seeing invented) an unpublished back-story of the tale, that finally is not the one we think we knew so well.