The Encyclopedia of Walt Disney's Animated Characters: From Mickey mouse to Hercules by
John Grant

Walt Disney Character paglalarawan of Maleficent from "Sleeping Beauty" (1959)

Of all the characters in Sleeping Beauty, the one that everyone remembers, even decades later, is the wicked fairy Maleficent. She is one of the finest creations ever to come out of the Disney studio - and the brilliant transformation of her into the Dragon to fight Phillip merely adds to the strength of the characterization. Even her name - a wonderful combination of "malice" and "malevolent" - testifies to her pure evil. People who thought that the wicked reyna in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs might frighten their children were presumably petrified themselves when they took their grandchildren to see Maleficent. To an extent this is achieved because she is a much madami rounded character than her earlier counterpart - she has something of the dashing style of Cruella De Vil in One Hundred and One Dalmatians - which is hardly surprising, because Marc Davis did much of the work on both of them. In his interview with A. Eisen, Davis described the experience:

"I had nothing to do with dragon [that was Ken Anderson's province] but it was based on Maleficent... There was a consistency; this wasn't just a dragon that she turned into, this was her own particular dragon. Maleficent was a very difficult character, because she always raised her arms and gave a speech. This is a very difficult thing to make come off. When one character is working with another character, you get the contact, you feel the reaction... Once you have two characters that work together, then they come to life."

Despite these difficulties, Disney succeeded in making Maleficent come to life in both her forms. Tall and thin with a black horned headdress and a capacious swirling cloak, with a contemptuous face and highly arched eyebrows, with a long neck that seems to be nothing madami than thinly covered vertebrae, she is a terrifying figure even in her rare moments of repose. Her driving emotion is hatred, hatred of all things good - and as a result she incidentally hates faires, human beings, animals... Anything capable of displaying the gentler emotions. Her reason for cursing the newborn infant is a trivial one - she was slighted sa pamamagitan ng the failure to send her an invitation to the festivities - and its triviality is emphasized sa pamamagitan ng the fact that she is so superior in terms of power and influence to anyone else in the movie that one would not expect her to notice, one way or the other, whether or not she received an invitation at all. No, her "reason" for setting the curse is not that at all: it is merely an excuse for her to exercise her all-consuming malevolence and hatred.
The Dragon into which she transforms herself has physical similarities to her, but the animators also managed to endow it with the same bitterness and maliciousness. In its every movement we see that it is intent upon the destruction not only of Phillip, the immediate problem, but also of the forces of good in general. No greater contrast could be found than between this monster and Ken Anderson's other famous dragon creation, Elliot in the much later Pete's Dragon.
Maleficent is a frightening character even for adults audiences, let alone children. However, the screen force of her evil is diluted to non-toxic strengths sa pamamagitan ng her companions, the imcompetent Goons - dimwitted travesties of various animal forms - and the rather madami competent but nevertheless not especially scaring Raven. This familiar of hers has a far bigger role than its equivalent in Snow White, and not only its personality but also its physical appearance are ibingiay to us in much madami detail. Clearly it worships Maleficent - or, at least, is too terrified of her to ipakita any other attitude - but at the same time it has a certain likeable goofiness. The only time that it seems to be really evil is when the three mga engkanto are inadvertently lighting up the skies with their varicolored blasts of escaping magic; then the Raven's appearance and its manifest realization that it has succeeded in carrying out its mistress's assignment do strike a definite chill to the heart. However, this effect is as much created sa pamamagitan ng the music as sa pamamagitan ng the character itself. madami than one child in the average cinema audience will shed a secret tear when Merryweather turns the Raven to stone.