Angelina Jolie is all cheekbones and horns in the new teaser trailer for Disney’s Maleficent. The film follows the Wicked template of lending sympathy for the evil queen/stepmother/middle-aged magic practitioner. It’s a film trend I’ve previously described as “the new spate of princess movies, with an Oscar-winning villainess and flavor-of-the-month ingenue as the princess-heroine.” Elle Fanning plays the doe-eyed innocent here.
The original Maleficent story from Sleeping Beauty has a witch essentially putting a teenage girl into a coma because she (the grown-up) doesn’t get invited to a party. Here’s hoping this prequel from director Robert Stromberg and writers Paul Dini and Linda Woolverton has a much better story.
The film will be out May 2014.
Watch the Maleficent teaser trailer:
