HORN STAR

You might forget the somniferous title character of Disney’s 1959 favorite Sleeping Beauty, you might forget her friendly fairy allies, you certainly might forget her crooning Prince. But few people who have seen that film are likely to have forgotten its horned sorceress Maleficent. This imperious, black-clad menace has long been rated among the all-time great screen villains.

Now, in a gesture that will likely cause traditionalists to bemoan the moral relativism of contemporary pop culture, she gets her own movie. Maleficent, starring Angelina Jolie in the title role, is both a backstory and a whitewash. It offers a coherent case for the spite which led her to curse the infant Princess Aurora, and it details her exculpatory relations with the adolescent Princess (Elle Fanning).

The script, by Linda Woolverton of Beauty and the Beast, takes most of the story’s actual wrongdoing off of Mallie’s shoulders and places it where it must, of course, ultimately belong—on a man. The trouble all starts because of the rat-fink behavior of Aurora’s dad Stefan (Sharlto Copley), who was Maleficent’s first love when she was a happy young fairy princess, spreading her wings. Circumstances later bring her into contact with Aurora, and lead her to repent her curse, but she finds she’s unable to revoke it. It’s one of the terrors that a fairy tale can dramatize better than almost any other form—that a momentary moral lapse may be impossible to come back from.

From its idyllic early scenes to its final battles, Maleficent has no shortage of Disney-style kitsch, banality and playing-it-safe platitudes. But the movie entertains anyway, and that’s almost entirely to Jolie’s credit. In an era when few screen actors, even talented ones, can lay claim to the title with confidence, she’s a true movie star. But it’s easy to forget that she’s also a real actress. She’s so inhumanly beautiful that it may be hard for her to find roles that fit her—wings and horns seem almost more plausible on her, somehow, than contemporary street clothes—but she was born to play this part, and it allows her to show off her way with a line, and her riveting poise.

There are other capable performances in the film. Copley, the striking fellow from the brilliant District 9, is striking again as the rotting-from-the-inside King, and Fanning’s Princess, who mistakes Maleficent for her Fairy Godmother, is amusing, mostly because her guileless glee is bounced off of Jolie’s dry reactions. If the kindly fairies—Juno Temple, Lesley Manville and the great Imelda Staunton—make less of an impression here, it may be because they get less interaction with the star. Almost certainly the best of Jolie’s foils is Sam Riley as Diaval, her shape-shifting servant and spy, who’s not afraid to give her backchat.

These filmmakers are to be commended for eschewing the standard, absolutist good-or-evil template usual to the Disney movies. It has to be said, though, that by turning Maleficent into a heroine, they’ve left a vacuum where the villainy should be that Copley’s King just doesn’t fill—he’s a despicable character, but not a strong one. The result is that the final clashes, though they carry plenty of high-fantasy spectacle and a lovely plot twist, aren’t deeply exciting.

There’s always been a certain ruthlessness to the way the classic Disney films engaged the base emotions of children—often through the death, or apparent death, of a beloved character, or by working up hatred toward a witch or other (often female) villain. Maleficent, like last year’s smash Frozen, is shaped as a fantasy for postmodern women and girls, and it wants to have it both ways—to enjoy the droll glamour and power of the sinister, but to take any deep evil out of it. The movie is rescued by the performance at its center, but ironically, in this tribute to the ultimate bad girl Jolie is finally forced to play a little too nice.

BUCCANEER-PERFECT

You could learn a lot from The Pirates! Band of Misfits. I certainly did. I never knew, for instance, that Charles Darwin was a whiny sort who really just wanted to get a girlfriend, or that Jane Austen and The Elephant Man had a personal connection, or that Queen Victoria was a member of a secret society that enjoyed…well, I don’t want to give too many of the film’s astounding revelations away.

From the hero, known simply as The Pirate Captain, I learned that the best thing about piracy is Ham Night. At one point he also proclaims that the friends you make after you become famous are far better than the ones you had before, and at another point that certain undertakings are only impossible if you stop and think about them. But he too must learn his lessons—most importantly, he learns that you can’t just say “Arrrr” at the end of a sentence and think that makes everything OK.

Voiced by Hugh Grant, The Pirate Captain commands, not very despotically, a crew of sensitive-souled types such as The Pirate With a Scarf (Martin Freeman), The Pirate With Gout (Brendan Gleeson) and The Surprisingly Curvaceous Pirate (Ashley Jensen), who may possibly be a woman in pirate drag and a false beard. He’s really not a bad sort, as pirate captains go, but he has a tragic weakness—for recognition by his peers. His lifelong ambition has been to be named Pirate of the Year, but alas the only award he’s landed so far is “Best Anecdote About a Squid.”

Many of us might regard such an accolade as achievement enough for any career, but The Pirate Captain just can’t give up on Pirate of the Year, an unrealistic goal in light of his lack of booty (in the older sense of the term). When he raids a ship that turns out to be HMS Beagle, The Captain learns from Darwin (David Tennant) that his beloved, unusually large avian mascot Polly isn’t actually a parrot at all, but rather a surviving dodo, and that if the young naturalist could present it to the Royal Academy, it would surely be named discovery of the year.

The Captain is sure that this will somehow be a stepping-stone to Pirate of the Year, so he hoists sail for London.

Adapted from Gideon Defoe’s 2004 book The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists (under which title the film has been released in the UK), this stop-motion Aardman Studios feature was directed by Peter Lord, of Chicken Run. It’s far more freewheeling and absurd than the tense, dramatic Chicken Run, however.

I loved how The Pirates! turned anachronism into a virtue, creating a mash-up of a 19th Century in which Darwin, Victoria, Jane Austen and The Elephant Man all rubbed elbows, and, for that matter, also encompassing the 17th and 18th Centuries, during which, after all, most of the so-called Golden Age of Piracy actually took place. I loved Darwin’s stone-faced simian butler, and the alternately furious and flirtatious Queen (Imelda Staunton), and the movie’s odd, persistent fixation on ham, right down to the Skull and Crossed Hambones on the flag.

Silliness like this—cheerful, defiant silliness as only the Brits, it seems, can do it—is, I think, good for one’s health from time to time, and so is the low-tech, hand-wrought madness of stop-motion animation. Both have become rarities, and their confluence makes The Pirates! a small treasure.

ARTHURIAN LEGEND

Literalism is the joke behind the new computer-animated feature Arthur Christmas. It’s right there in the poster: “Ever wonder how 2 Billion presents get delivered in 1 night?”

2 billion kids have wondered the same thing, & also how reindeer can fly, & how Santa gets down the chimney, etc. According to Arthur Christmas, nowadays it’s accomplished via a massive, technologically sophisticated process involving a city-sized, rocket-powered sleigh, & countless elves operating like commandos, rappelling down the sides of buildings & through windows SWAT-team-style to plant gifts & leave traces that simulate Santa’s visit.

The real Santa (voiced by Jim Broadbent) is at the center of it all, as an ineffectual figurehead, hustled here & there by the elves. The real brains of the outfit, & his itching presumptive heir, is his son Steve (Hugh Laurie), who runs the show from a palatial mission control back at the North Pole & resents his father’s refusal to retire & pass him the reins. The retired senior Santa (Bill Nighy) watches & scoffs at the newfangled spectacle from his rooms.

The title character is Santa’s recessive younger son, who works answering letters, & truly cares about the kids. When Arthur (James McAvoy) learns of a glitch in Steve’s system—a little girl in a small town in Cornwall hasn’t been given her bicycle—he’s appalled that his father & Steve are prepared to just blow it off, as within the margin for error. With just a few hours left before sunrise in England, Arthur & his grandfather set out to make the delivery old-school, using a sled, reindeer, a gift-wrap-obsessed elf & a bit of magic dust. All does not go smoothly.

It does go hilariously, however. This blend of “Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus” with Apollo 13 is one of the more inventive Christmas movies I’ve seen in a long time.

A product of Aardman Studios—the folks that brought us the Wallace and Grommit films—it’s dizzyingly imaginative on a visual level, & despite the sentimentality inherent in the storyline, it isn’t mawkish, probably because it’s so bracingly honest about creeping institutional impersonality. I also liked the shades of gray in the characters—Arthur is lovable but clueless; without his less warmhearted, more competent relations he’d be helpless. The crotchety Santa emeritus, also lovable, has his own selfish reasons for wanting to make the run, & Steve & father aren’t presented as soulless.

In reality, of course, the charming tradition of giving Christmas gifts has degenerated over the decades into an angst-ridden consumerist nightmare driven by a technological juggernaut far more pitiless than that depicted in the film, with Santa Claus, that fascinating composite of diverse cultural traditions, reduced to its mascot. Arthur Christmas carries, & is deepened by, a rueful awareness of this corruption under its merry, bright surface.

Happy Thanxgiving everybody, by the way. The holiday weekend box office will likely be dominated by Muppets, & that’s fine, but it would be a pity if, because of that, Arthur Christmas was overlooked by audiences.

Speaking of the Muppets…

Monster-of-the-Week: …in honor of their new movie, here’s a Halloween greeting I received, depicting the iconic Miss Piggy as another icon…