Spoiled Cocoa: Maleficent

So our first trailer of Disney's new Maleficent has arrived, and ever since I saw the first image of Angelina Jolie wearing the iconic headgear I've been keeping an eye on this quite keenly. Sleeping Beauty is my favourite Disney film (excluding Pixar it is the only Disney film that made my top 50 films list) Why? Mostly because of Maleficent herself, and one fantastic dragon!

How do I feel after seeing this new trailer? Well... reasonably optimistic.



Love that spin on the Disney castle, very unusual!

I suppose one's opinion is allowed to be swayed now. Before all we had was Angelina Jolie in costume (which is great) now we have.... child actors, CG and production value to scrutinise.

(to get this out the way: this is a good teaser trailer! It doesn't spoil anything, doesn't tell us the entire story, just gives us a glimpse. If only more trailers did this...)

I think what I enjoyed most about Sleeping Beauty was how persistent yet subtle Maleficent really was as a villain. She wasn't in your face, she wasn't mugging at the camera or spewing heaps of dialogue. She was almost elemental. A plotter and a schemer with terrible anger. Whether or not Maleficent the film captures this or not will make or break it for a lot of critics. I would hope a lot of the film will be very moody and visually driven (I do like the visuals of her stalking through the fantastical forests) we are dealing with a dark character here.

I've read that the film will give her backstory... this will have to be treated carefully! I don't want to have another case of Episode 2's Boba Fett! See if I sit down for this film and it opens with Maleficent as some rosy cheeked eight year old! 

From the trailer though... they are certainly making note of her shadowy presence at least. Although the similarly iconic thorn sequence looked a little... fake.
For some reason watching this made me wonder, will CG ever stop feeling obliged to make things look realistic? Because surely that's where these things fall down, trying to look real, the uncanny valley. Wouldn't it be cool if the thorns Maleficent created were stylised somehow, shadowy and pitch black, more animated than "real", suggesting her magic created them?

Such an awesome dragon!

Do I want a dragon in this film, you might ask me? You know what? I don't want a dragon in this film. I bet there will be, I bet there will be, but the problem there is it simply won't be as good as the original. 
(prove me wrong film, PROVE ME WRONG!.... please.)

This is, a little unnervingly, the directorial debut of Robert Stromberg, he has little to his name but what there is is in art and production. Matte Painting Supervisor for my favourite film Pan's Labyrinth? I will take that. But that doesn't add anything for directorial skills...

I really want this to be a dark, gothic fairytale story that doesn't ruin one of my favourite villains of all time. Evidently, there's a lot riding on this and I will be in the cinema with trepidation, but...

How cool was Jolie's Maleficent laugh at the end of the trailer!?