What a fairy tale is has shifted over time. The dark and rather extreme stories of the Brothers Grimm have been displaced in the popular consciousness by the nice and friendly Disney take. So really for a modern day Hollywood to go back to the source and make some grittier films is neither unexpected nor an inherently bad thing. But what's been going on with the recent spate of new fairy tales (be it new takes like Snow White And The Huntsman or repurposing like Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters) isn't that. Instead, taking the baton from Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland, we've seen a bunch of films that use the most currently popular version of fairy tales (normally Disney's) and paint them with moral ambiguity and muted CGI colours. It's a reimagining for the sake of it, with no care what the source material originally was. This year's Maleficent had the central conceit that the Disney classic Sleeping Beauty was actually nasty propaganda against a wronged and totally not evil fairy. Because... erm... Angelina Jolie can't be a bad guy? Audiences seem to find some appeal in these - Maleficent was the second highest grossing film of 2014 - and yet there's not one that's got anything close to a good review.
