London - A hit Disney movie with a metaphor for rape?
According to Angelina Jolie, the star of ‘Maleficent’, the harrowing scene in which the wings are ripped off her character’s body by a childhood friend while she is in a drug-induced sleep symbolised sexual assault.
Jolie, a UN Special Envoy, was attending the End Sexual Violence in Conflict Global Summit in London, when she spoke about the scene.
“We were very conscious, the writer [Linda Woolverton] and I, that it was a metaphor for rape,” she explained. 'And that this would be the thing that would make her lose sight of that.
“At a certain point, the question of the story is what could possibly bring her back?” she added.
Jolie, a mother of 6, described Maleficent as “an extreme Disney” and that at the film’s core was a tale about “abuse, and how the abused then have a choice of abusing others or overcoming and remaining loving, open people”.
“The question was asked: ‘What could make a woman become so dark and lose all sense of her maternity, her womanhood and her softness?’ Something would have to be so violent and aggressive,” she explained.
Maelficent is a retelling of the classic fairytale ‘Sleeping Beauty’. - Tonight Reporter