Sleeping Beauty
DISNEY’S SLOW-BURN ANIMATED TREASURE
IT’S IRONIC: ON initial release, Sleeping Beauty was… well, slept on. Today, Disney’s take on the tale of princess Aurora (aka Briar Rose, and never actually referred to as ‘Sleeping Beauty’ in the film) is more than just a pop-cultural staple — it’s held up as among the highest artistic achievements of the Walt Disney Animation Studio. It’s clear to see why — it’s a breathtaking accomplishment of animation, a moving tapestry rendered in a striking medievalinspired visual style, a feat of full-on fantasy filmmaking. Every frame of Sleeping Beauty is a work of art in and of itself.
But at the time, audiences didn’t care for it. Like many of Disney’s greatest works, it launched as a colossal flop, resulting in a level of financial failure that — not for the first or last time — nearly bankrupted the studio entirely. Even its critical reception was thorny, crueller than a christening gift from Maleficent. But the scope of its baffling dismissal and eventual reappraisal hews to the inescapable nature of Sleeping Beauty: everything about it is big. Its ambition, its budget — even its Super Technirama 70 widescreen presentation, with a dramatic aspect ratio resulting in astonishingly wide frames. That luxuriously vast canvas was so broad, it effectively demanded twice as much work from its creators to fill, often to their chagrin.
The idea to make Sleeping Beauty big — a landmark achievement from America’s premier animation studio — was there from the start. While much of Disney’s early feature output leaned into the bouncy cartoonal qualities of the studio’s Silly Symphonies shorts, Walt was adamant that its third princess-centric fairy-tale feature (after Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs and Cinderella) should shoot for greater heights. “What we want out of this is a moving illustration,” he told sequence director Eric Larson when production began. “I don’t care how long it takes.” As it turned out, it took a very long time. The studio first registered the title ‘Sleeping Beauty’ with the MPAA in January 1950; the finished film didn’t hit cinemas until
January 1959, following a slew of delays owing to — among other factors — major rewrites, a heart attack (suffered by supervising director Wilfred Jackson, replaced by Larson), and much of the crew being ported over to the creation of Walt’s other unwieldy artistic ambition: Disneyland.
Looking at Sleeping Beauty now, the length of its gestation is hardly surprising. To call it lavish would be an understatement — owing not just to Walt’s demand for a “moving illustration”, but the desire to more authentically integrate the visual style of New York artist Eyvind Earle. For years, the studio had been hiring distinctive artists like Mary Blair to contribute to the development of their features. But where Cinderella featured mere hints of Blair’s playful imagery in the finished film, this time Walt Disney was insistent that Sleeping Beauty would more faithfully recreate — as he dubbed it — the “original styling” of Earle’s work.
It’s Earle’s modernist aesthetic that most distinguishes Sleeping Beauty even among the upper echelons of Disney masterpieces — with its geometric shapes, vertiginous natural landscapes, and distinctive line-work. The sumptuous scenery is on clearest display in the ‘Once Upon A Dream’ sequence, the movie’s swoon-worthy waltzing meet-cute, in which Aurora dances through the forest with Prince Phillip (and, more crucially, with a sarcastic owl dressed as Prince Phillip), twirling through a verdant paradise to the Tchaikovsky-inspired score — another element of the movie’s high-art leanings.
That astonishingly beautiful visual style accompanies the most assured narrative of Disney’s three Walt-era princess movies — taking the Charles Perrault version of the story and playing it straight, without the housecleaning montages or mouse-centric detours of Snow White and Cinderella. While Aurora fulfils all the requirements of Disney princessdom (virtuousness; great pipes, here courtesy of Mary Costa; affinity with all animals), she has more spark than those prior characters too, more alive and self-possessed.
But as ever, it’s the villain who looms largest — and Maleficent is the greatest of them all, a cackling, yellow-eyed, horn-wreathed sorceress who makes no apologies for her wickedness. In fact, she embraces it, declaring herself “the mistress of all evil”; true to her word, she enters the film by crashing the kingdom’s celebration of baby Aurora’s arrival, cursing the child to