Sympathy for the Witch: The Transformation from Villain to Anti-Heroine in Disney’s Maleficent (2014)

Abstract: This essay analyzes Disney’s 2014 live-action film Maleficent, focusing on how the titular character is reimagined from a classic villain into a complex anti-heroine. It explores how the film subverts traditional fairy-tale tropes by centering on themes of female empowerment, solidarity, and defiance of male authority. Unlike Maleficent’s purely evil portrayal in Disney’s 1959 Sleeping Beauty, in which she conforms to the fairy-tale trope of a ‘wicked witch’ by cursing an innocent princess to die on her sixteenth birthday, the new Maleficent is given a tragic backstory. Notably, this involves the princess’s father, King Stefan, whose betrayal—cutting off her wings to gain power and to secure his own kingship—elicits the audience’s pity and sympathy for her. I argue that the narrative of victimization, her contextualization, as well as the cinematographic elements employed in the film are key to reshaping Maleficent’s character, transforming her curse on Princess Aurora into an act of vengeance rather than malice. By merging heroic and villainous traits, Maleficent constructs a multidimensional anti-heroine, both victim and avenger.

Heroes and villains—both are popular archetypes that are firmly entrenched in the American cultural imagination. While heroes are defined by their good and heroic acts, villains represent the opposite and do not possess any redeeming qualities. Both have become “social types of American society which serve prominently as its models” and can “guide people positively by imitation or negatively by avoidance” (Klapp xxiii). In film, heroes usually embark on a journey, representing the perspectives and morals that audiences are supposed to share. Often, they find their quests thwarted by a villain who tries to stand in their way and exhibits negatively connoted values such as vengefulness, vanity, or power-hungriness. While a classic hero “embodies norms we all share” and “defeats a threat to a community to which [they belong],” a villain “breaches those norms and violates the basic rules of civilization such as respect for life and property” (Ryan and Lenos 121), “operates according to their own rules,” and “refuses to conform or be limited by convention or taboo” (Alsford 95). This clear dichotomy in mainstream film and television usually leads to “the heroic respecter of norms” coming out on top in the end. In this sense, narratives that feature distinct heroes and villains “pose a simple model of virtue against an equally simple model of villainous vice” (Ryan and Lenos 121). As Klapp summarizes, “[a] proper villain has the opposite traits of a hero and threatens the group the hero serves” (50), which makes these two concepts seem mutually exclusive.