[otness_e]

Quite frankly, I think this bit, far more than even the 2017 live action remake for Beauty and the Beast, ruined the 1991 Disney film, at least for me. Didn't help matters much that I had to deal with a radical feminist professor in college only a few years before then, and started suspecting that movie pushed the same messages when thinking back on it. And here's another tidbit as well: Did you know that Maleficent being made into a full good guy in a complete disrespecting of the original movie and the entire POINT behind her character was Woolverton's idea, and more to the point, even Angelina Jolie, Maleficent's actress in that film, tried to rein in on her? It's mentioned in that making of documentary... by Woolverton herself.

[icclearly]

So she speaks from experience when she says that Maleficent, which stars Angelina Jolie as the titular villain, couldn’t have existed until this point in time — because the world wasn’t necessarily ready for such a strong, complicated female protagonist.

You know what, lady?

The world STILL ain't ready!

[robowombat]

The cultural left is deeply devoted to the morally divergent. A character with the amoral mentally of Cesare Borgia is not ‘a strong woman’ but an ethically debached one. Making such a character a sort of hero in a children’s oriented media presentation is propagandizing deviance to those to intellectually informed to know they are being manipulated.

[TalBlack]

From what I recall we’re talking about a character with the intellectual emotional development of a particularly mean self obsessed 12 yr old. Stupid vicious cow will do for me.

[Chicory]

I don’t know... having read the plots of both Cruella and Maleficent in Wikipedia, I think that cruella is the “bad” movie in that Cruella does not reform. Maleficent is betrayed and this embittered and tries to get revenge, but regrets it. Cruella just stays bad and does not reform.

The whole issue of Maleficent being a strong and complex woman the world is not ready for is utter BS. It is disturbing when people make drastic changes to stories that are embedded in tradition, because people don’t like their views jostled like that, but the story of the movie Maleficent is also a common one: person is betrayed, vows revenge and becomes evil, sees the results, and reforms.

Cruella seems (from the description in Wikipedia) to be a story of someone who is embittered and just gets worse.

[Roadrunner383]

Go with the 1946 French version by Jean Cocteau, as restored by Criterion.