What Makes An Epic Villain?

The concept seemed appealing to me: taking an evildoer and giving her a second chance, a makeover if you will. I had never seen the original movie Sleeping Beauty, but I knew full well who Maleficent was, even if I could not remember her name half the time. I sat through the movie and remember not being incredibly impressed with the plot line or story telling style. The original concept had intrigued me, but for whatever reason, the development of the character and expansion of the plot seemed to take away from Maleficent’s original power and awesomeness. Maleficent had been changed from a truly villainous villain to a misunderstood heroic antihero. And the question that fluttered through my head was: but why? Why would Disney take a perfectly
Dictionary.com defines a villain as “a cruelly malicious person who is involved in or devoted to wickedness or crime” (“Villain”). Five characteristics of an epic villain, as outlined by Antonio del Drago, a fiction writor and professor, are being powerful, intelligent, immoral, wounded, and determined (Del Drago). If these characteristcs are to be taken as the boiled down basis for most villains, what are the characteristics of their counterpart, the hero? Once again we turn to Dictionary.com, which defines a hero as “a man of distinguished courage or ability, admired for his brave deeds and noble qualities,” or “a person who, in the opinion of others, has heroic qualities or has performed a heroic act and is regarded s a model or ideal” (“Hero”). Similar to del Drago’s list, Bill Murphy Jr., executive editor of Inc.com, has come up with a list of the top five characteristics that heroes possess. Courage, selflessness, humility, patience, and caring comprise this list (Murphy). While not exactly opposites of each other, the two lists do show the main differences between heroes and villains. Villains are more self-driven while heroes are more
This story embodies the classic “good versus evil” fairytale in which the hero lives happily ever after and the villain either dies or is cast off, never to be seen again. The main antagonist in Sleeping Beauty, Maleficent, is subdued and killed by the heroic prince towards the end of the story (Sleeping Beauty). In Sleeping Beauty, Maleficent is a cunning, powerful, determined sorceress who is a very good representation of the definition of a villain: she is a “cruelly malicious person who is involved in… wickedness” (“Villain”). However, Maleficent recently starred in her own movie which reveals her backstory and puts a new spin on the point of view from which Sleeping Beauty is