She tearfully apologizes to her sleeping goddaughter and gives her a farewell kiss on the forehead. However, just before she can walk away, a miracle happens: Aurora wakes up. Maleficent's strong and genuine motherly love for Aurora was enough to break the curse that she herself had cast.
In a twist reminiscent of Frozen, it is ultimately Maleficent, not the prince, who bestows True Love's Kiss on Aurora's forehead, unexpectedly waking her from her cursed slumber.
Flora and Fauna persuade Merryweather to use her gift to weaken Maleficent's spell. Through her gift, Aurora wouldn't die from the prick of her finger, but only sleep until her true love awakens her with a kiss.
[Spoiler Warning] After Maleficent is killed while saving Aurora, she turns to dust, and Aurora sheds several tears over her ashes. The powerful expression of spontaneous love in turn resurrects Maleficent, causing her to literally rise from the ashes as a phoenix.
After they leave, Maleficent tearfully apologizes to Aurora and kisses her on the forehead. This unexpectedly wakes Aurora, as Maleficent truly feels maternal love for her. As Maleficent, Aurora, and Diaval attempt to leave, Stefan and his guards ambush them.
She is represented as an evil fairy and the self-proclaimed "Mistress of All Evil" who, after not being invited to a christening, curses the infant Princess Aurora to "prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel and die" before the sun sets on Aurora's sixteenth birthday.
Since watching Aurora over her childhood years, Maleficent soon grew a maternal love for her. One day Aurora thought that Maleficent was her faerie godmother and often visited the Moors while Maleficent tried to stop the curse but she herself had said no power on Earth could cure it apart from true love's kiss.
Emma immediately does some research and uncovers the truth that the woman, Lilith "Lily" Page, is not only Maleficent's daughter, but was once the childhood friend of Emma, who also discovers that fate has controlled her life down to the finest detail, which includes influencing the one friend she ever had.
The curse sadly has a no-backsies clause, so Maleficent instead races a magically unconscious Prince Phillip to the castle to kiss the now sleeping Aurora, and break the curse.
The last sound ever heard from Aurora in the original film is after she arrives at the castle and is gifted her crown from the fairies; she begins crying over thinking she'll never see Phillip again.
The benevolent Fairy cannot remove the Fairy of Darkness' curse, but she can soften it. She promises that Aurora shall not die from the prick of her finger, but will fall into a deep sleep for one hundred years and be awakened by a prince's kiss.
Rod cells, concentrated in the periphery around the outside of the fovea, can detect much fainter light at night, but only see in black and white and shades of gray. [Aurora] only appear to us in shades of gray because the light is too faint to be sensed by our color-detecting cone cells."
Even though Maleficent is a heroine, she is still presented as a satanic figure. Her iconic horns (which Disney artist Marc Davis, who designed Maleficent, says were inspired by the traditional look of the devil, to “frighten everybody half to death”) are present even before Stefan's betrayal.
This means the earliest likely release date for Maleficent 3 would be 2026 or 2027. This comes down to the franchise's rather ambitious production scope. The second film came with all the thrills of an epic fantasy, and it's likely that Disney would want to top this—and that takes time to achieve.
However, they were right, the kiss from Philip didn't work, for it wasn't true love. Who really saves Aurora is Maleficent, in which Dival, Maleficent's crow sidekick, describes, “there's no truer love.” I think he is talking about the maternal relationship that Maleficent had with Aurora.
Background. In the Enchanted Forest, presumably, Maleficent's dragon form mates with another dragon which results in her becoming pregnant and eventually having a daughter named Lilith, or "Lily".
Fortunately, the baby found an adoptive family in the real world, and it's revealed that the child has a star birthmark on her wrist, just like the one young Lily and Emma bonded over as children.
On cue, Maleficent in the present wants to know what Charming and Snow did with her child. In the past, Snow and Charming steal Maleficent's egg in order to have the Sorcerer's apprentice put Emma's evil inside of it.
Maleficent and Aurora have a close relationship, like a mother-daughter relationship. Even after learning Maleficent's identity and going away from her, after realizing that her father, Stefan, does not show any love or genuine care for her, Aurora sees Maleficent as her fairy godmother.
The irony is that Aurora was taken from her mother to protect her from Maleficent, but, to Aurora, Leila is simply the woman who gave birth to her while she refers to Maleficent as her Fairy Godmother.
Later, Stefan betrays Maleficent and steals her wings so he could claim that he killed her and become king. After the painful loss of her wings, Maleficent becomes enraged over his treachery, and as her heart of gold turns to stone, she becomes the evilest magical being in the land.
When the dark fairy's curse is at last fulfilled, despite her efforts to renounce it, Maleficent herself (rather than Phillip) breaks the spell with a remorseful kiss on Aurora's brow. Aurora then saves Maleficent from her royal father, by returning the dark fairy's wings to her.
Aurora is officially Queen of the Moors and rules the tranquil kingdom kindly and fairly. But when Prince Phillip (Harris Dickinson) asks Aurora to marry him, all of Maleficent's fears of losing her adopted daughter come to the surface.
Maleficent is based on the evil fairy godmother from Charles Perrault's fairy tale Sleeping Beauty. In Perrault's version, she's an evil, old fairy who was left out of the princess' christening because she hadn't left her tower in years, and most of the kingdom thought she was dead.
