The last hand painted animated Disney film, before the dawn of
xerography, sleeping beauty was also the most expensive Disney movie
ever made at the time of it’s release....it was also the studios biggest
financial disappointment and its failure so discouraged Walt Disney
that he would never again, as was his former inclination, put so much
time, energy, or money into an animated
feature as long as he lived. The man who had always pushed the envelope
to such extremes, all while ignoring financial constraints like any
sensible person, gave in to tighter schedules and smaller budgets over
and against artistic realization. This is fine with me because Walt
Disney would instead pour out his creativity and intense perfectionism
into Disneyland which would only continue to improve throughout the late
fifties and early sixties. Ever been on Pirates of the Caribbean or the
Haunted Mansion? Yeah, that’s what he was up to, so I guess it all
worked out in the end.
The main reason Sleeping Beauty did so poorly at the box office was simply that it cost too much to make, having spent nearly a decade in production. Thus while it did sell tickets during its initial release it just didn’t sell enough to balance out the costs. Critically, I don’t think any other Disney movie has ever enjoyed such a reversal of opinion, from bad to good that is. Back then Disney was artistically done with as far as the intellectual elite were concerned. For some he had almost come to embody the 1950s Eisenhower era, buzz-cut sporting square conservatism that would make old pictures of my dad so awesome and which so many educated people still love to hate.... which is really ironic considering Disney’s populist roots.
Anyway, Disney was no longer cool. He was too mainstream, too darn popular, and had given testimony against people he took be communist enemies of America (I don’t know if they were) during the red scare days and, really, that was probably enough to turn critical opinion against him almost as a matter of principle. Sleeping Beauty was described as boring, drawn out, and lacking in detailed character development or story. All the things that avant-garde elitists pretend to love but suddenly hate when it comes time to analyze a Disney movie. More than 50 years later, however, this Disney classic is back on top where it belongs and now critics will typically describe it as not only one of the greatest animated films of all time but probably one of the very best films of all time.
I second this sentiment. Sleeping Beauty is an astonishingly beautiful and experimentally dreamlike movie. Based on the eponymous french fairytale, Sleeping Beauty tells the story of a princess named Aurora who is cursed as an infant to die by the time of her sixteenth birthday by a vindictive evil fairy named Maleficent who was apparently the sole person not invited to what I assume must have been the princess’s baptism. Thankfully, though, the cursed princess is blessed, literally, to also have had three fairy Godmothers present (at her baptism?) who are able to mitigate the spell so that instead of dying young she will instead simply sleep perpetually until she is awakened by the kiss of someone who truly loves her....you know, loves true kiss. (You better know, it’s a narrative tool that’s been used in like half a dozen major Disney films since the 1930s!) But just to make sure, the three good fairies take Aurora away from the palace of her parents, rename her Briar Rose, and raise her themselves as a peasant until her 16th birthday at which time they intend to reunite her with her parents so that she can marry Prince Philip to whom she is betrothed. As Providence would have it, Philip and Briar Rose meet prior to this in what I think is the greatest single musical sequence ever to be produced by Disney, “Once Upon a Dream” (we all know it), and they fall in love unaware of Briar Rose’s identity as the princess.
Of course Maleficent eventually finds them out and executes her curse against Aurora leaving Prince Philip and the three fairy Godmothers in a dramatic struggle against powerful evil forces that must be overcome if Aurora is to be awakened and order restored to the land. This eventually leads to an incredibly memorable battle between Prince Philip (armed with a shield of virtue and a sword truth) and a fire breathing dragon.... and mark my words, every movie dragon in history, to this very day, pales in comparison to this one (bring it on Peter Jackson!). Except for maybe Bruce Leeroy in the Last Dragon. That guy caught a bullet with his teeth. Sho-nuff!
The visuals in this movie, as I’ve said, are stunning and unique within the Disney canon. Based on medieval art, the scenery and characters have a angular, two dimensional quality akin to images on stained glass and yet the world is richly textured and lush with beauty. The animators did a great job of making the contrast felt between Maleficent’s dark castle and the rest of the world apparent. The forest where Aurora and Philip dance with each other is full of light, lush greenery, charming Disney critters, etc. The castle shines in the distance with medieval utopian splendor, and yet Maleficent lives in darkness surrounded by her goblins, brooding about how pissed off she still is that she wasn’t invited to a child’s party. They must have had one of those inflatable jumping things.
The score is also maybe the best ever used in a Disney film, based entirely on the music for the ballet of the same name written by Tchaikovsky, it will haunt your mind for days after seeing the movie.
The story itself gets a lot of flack for featuring and developing the main characters so little but I don’t think it ought to. The main characters in this movie aren’t Aurora or Prince Philip. The genius of Sleeping Beauty is that it is a highly stylized visual metaphor for the struggle between good and evil with evil being represented by the beautiful and powerful Maleficent and good being represented by, well, everyone else. That is, this isn’t a Manichean world of good and evil locked in endless struggle but rather a world, like our own, that is fundamentally good in itself with deviations that are driven, at root, by the pride of individuals. Maleficent, far and away the most menacing of all Disney villains, isn’t pure evil either, as the good fairies point out, but rather she has obscured the goodness of the larger reality around her with the shadow of her own contingent glory. It is no accident, I think, that Maleficent is cerebral, sophisticated, tall, powerful, and beautiful whilst her benevolent and humble foils, in the good fairy Godmothers, are short, frumpy, weak, and just a little bit slow witted in comparison. Yet in spite of their short comings an invisible hand always comes to their aid in much the same way that Aurora and Prince Phillip are miraculously brought together. The goodness that surrounds them, it seems, is always on their side and in the end the sword of truth, safe guarded by virtue, slays the dragon and wins the world for the light and love.
Yes, I am essentially saying that Sleeping Beauty is a cleverly disguised and aesthetically stunning Christian allegory. I don’t know how it came to be from such a secular company as Disney but it did and I am very glad that it did because now I have something awesome to watch with children and it provides bridges in our conversation toward such issues as “what a virtue is”.
I give it 4.6 ghostly spinning wheels
The main reason Sleeping Beauty did so poorly at the box office was simply that it cost too much to make, having spent nearly a decade in production. Thus while it did sell tickets during its initial release it just didn’t sell enough to balance out the costs. Critically, I don’t think any other Disney movie has ever enjoyed such a reversal of opinion, from bad to good that is. Back then Disney was artistically done with as far as the intellectual elite were concerned. For some he had almost come to embody the 1950s Eisenhower era, buzz-cut sporting square conservatism that would make old pictures of my dad so awesome and which so many educated people still love to hate.... which is really ironic considering Disney’s populist roots.
Anyway, Disney was no longer cool. He was too mainstream, too darn popular, and had given testimony against people he took be communist enemies of America (I don’t know if they were) during the red scare days and, really, that was probably enough to turn critical opinion against him almost as a matter of principle. Sleeping Beauty was described as boring, drawn out, and lacking in detailed character development or story. All the things that avant-garde elitists pretend to love but suddenly hate when it comes time to analyze a Disney movie. More than 50 years later, however, this Disney classic is back on top where it belongs and now critics will typically describe it as not only one of the greatest animated films of all time but probably one of the very best films of all time.
I second this sentiment. Sleeping Beauty is an astonishingly beautiful and experimentally dreamlike movie. Based on the eponymous french fairytale, Sleeping Beauty tells the story of a princess named Aurora who is cursed as an infant to die by the time of her sixteenth birthday by a vindictive evil fairy named Maleficent who was apparently the sole person not invited to what I assume must have been the princess’s baptism. Thankfully, though, the cursed princess is blessed, literally, to also have had three fairy Godmothers present (at her baptism?) who are able to mitigate the spell so that instead of dying young she will instead simply sleep perpetually until she is awakened by the kiss of someone who truly loves her....you know, loves true kiss. (You better know, it’s a narrative tool that’s been used in like half a dozen major Disney films since the 1930s!) But just to make sure, the three good fairies take Aurora away from the palace of her parents, rename her Briar Rose, and raise her themselves as a peasant until her 16th birthday at which time they intend to reunite her with her parents so that she can marry Prince Philip to whom she is betrothed. As Providence would have it, Philip and Briar Rose meet prior to this in what I think is the greatest single musical sequence ever to be produced by Disney, “Once Upon a Dream” (we all know it), and they fall in love unaware of Briar Rose’s identity as the princess.
Of course Maleficent eventually finds them out and executes her curse against Aurora leaving Prince Philip and the three fairy Godmothers in a dramatic struggle against powerful evil forces that must be overcome if Aurora is to be awakened and order restored to the land. This eventually leads to an incredibly memorable battle between Prince Philip (armed with a shield of virtue and a sword truth) and a fire breathing dragon.... and mark my words, every movie dragon in history, to this very day, pales in comparison to this one (bring it on Peter Jackson!). Except for maybe Bruce Leeroy in the Last Dragon. That guy caught a bullet with his teeth. Sho-nuff!
The visuals in this movie, as I’ve said, are stunning and unique within the Disney canon. Based on medieval art, the scenery and characters have a angular, two dimensional quality akin to images on stained glass and yet the world is richly textured and lush with beauty. The animators did a great job of making the contrast felt between Maleficent’s dark castle and the rest of the world apparent. The forest where Aurora and Philip dance with each other is full of light, lush greenery, charming Disney critters, etc. The castle shines in the distance with medieval utopian splendor, and yet Maleficent lives in darkness surrounded by her goblins, brooding about how pissed off she still is that she wasn’t invited to a child’s party. They must have had one of those inflatable jumping things.
The score is also maybe the best ever used in a Disney film, based entirely on the music for the ballet of the same name written by Tchaikovsky, it will haunt your mind for days after seeing the movie.
The story itself gets a lot of flack for featuring and developing the main characters so little but I don’t think it ought to. The main characters in this movie aren’t Aurora or Prince Philip. The genius of Sleeping Beauty is that it is a highly stylized visual metaphor for the struggle between good and evil with evil being represented by the beautiful and powerful Maleficent and good being represented by, well, everyone else. That is, this isn’t a Manichean world of good and evil locked in endless struggle but rather a world, like our own, that is fundamentally good in itself with deviations that are driven, at root, by the pride of individuals. Maleficent, far and away the most menacing of all Disney villains, isn’t pure evil either, as the good fairies point out, but rather she has obscured the goodness of the larger reality around her with the shadow of her own contingent glory. It is no accident, I think, that Maleficent is cerebral, sophisticated, tall, powerful, and beautiful whilst her benevolent and humble foils, in the good fairy Godmothers, are short, frumpy, weak, and just a little bit slow witted in comparison. Yet in spite of their short comings an invisible hand always comes to their aid in much the same way that Aurora and Prince Phillip are miraculously brought together. The goodness that surrounds them, it seems, is always on their side and in the end the sword of truth, safe guarded by virtue, slays the dragon and wins the world for the light and love.
Yes, I am essentially saying that Sleeping Beauty is a cleverly disguised and aesthetically stunning Christian allegory. I don’t know how it came to be from such a secular company as Disney but it did and I am very glad that it did because now I have something awesome to watch with children and it provides bridges in our conversation toward such issues as “what a virtue is”.
I give it 4.6 ghostly spinning wheels
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