Disney’s Sleeping Beauty takes a lot of flak — but its critics are reading it all wrong

polygon.com:

Of all the Disney movies featuring passive female protagonists, Sleeping Beauty might be the most misunderstood. If you view it at face value — with Aurora, the titular Sleeping Beauty, as the center character — then Sleeping Beauty is a peculiar movie about a passive princess. Aurora drops out of her own movie halfway through, after being lured into a trap by a wicked fairy. She basically does nothing but sing sweetly, fall asleep, then get rescued. Almost every plot point in Sleeping Beauty is something that happens to her, not something she does.

As the three oldest Disney Princess movies, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs often get the brunt of modern criticism. None of these movies stray particularly far from their fairy-tale origins, which means the princesses in them don’t have much agency when compared to their modern counterparts. They have their own individual quirks, but modern princess protagonists just do more. As part of the Disney Princess brand, the older movies are routinely dismissed as being about women who wait around to be saved by princes, and who don’t actively take control of their stories.

But when it comes to Sleeping Beauty, that description actually isn’t accurate at all. We just need to remember who the movie is actually about. Even though Aurora is a certified Disney Princess, she isn’t the main character. Neither is Phillip, the dashing prince who swoops in to save her. The main characters are actually her three fairy godmothers, Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather.

Amid all the hullabaloo about the Disney Princess brand, it’s easy to forget that. The three fairies are the ones who volunteer to protect the princess, and ultimately, they’re the ones who have to