Disney Daze: Sleeping Beauty

FoxJuliedde Haziran 23, 2021

Sleeping Beauty (1959)

Disney Animated Classic Number 16

Starring: Mary Costa, Eleanor Audley, Verna Felton, Barbara Jo Allen, Barbara Luddy & Bill Shirley

Directed by: Clyde Geronimi, Les Clark, Eric Larson & Wolfgang Reitherman

Rating: ★★★★½

As a child, I loved Sleeping Beauty for two main reasons: the terrifying dragon and the squabbling fairies. The best parts of the film are, without a doubt, when the fairies are arguing while using their magic for a surprise party, and anything involving the horrific dragon- especially when it spectacularly dies. As a child who always had a perchance for horror, the dark undertone that Sleeping Beauty has made it hugely enjoyable, because dragon slaying and manic magic are always appealing to little boys. And on the other side, Sleeping Beauty is also appealing for little girls too: because it’s all about a beautiful princess who falls in love with a heroic prince!

The infamous kiss between the Prince and Princess.

I’ve always considered Sleeping Beauty as one of the better ‘princess’ movies since it appeals to both genders, and is equally funny, enchanting, exciting and terrifying. The animation is so spectacular: you can tell a huge amount of effort went into making this movie. In fact, it took five years to be animated, and added together with the writing and vocal recording, the entire film was in production for well over eight years. That’s an incredibly long time to spend on one film, and as a result, it was vastly expensive to make.

Maleficent as a dragon is the star of the show!

Disney intentionally wanted Sleeping Beauty to have a unique aesthetic: he wanted it to be medieval in appearance to remain in keeping with the setting of the story, and so differentiate itself from the other Disney fairy tales that came before it. Since Disney was building his theme park simultaneously with Sleeping Beauty, he decided to make the centre piece for the park, the now iconic castle, Sleeping Beauty’s own in order to promote the movie, as it was originally going to be Snow White’s. Unfortunately, Sleeping Beauty was not well received by film critics of the time, and audiences did not really warm to it, so it badly underperformed at the box office. Because of this, Disney studios decided not to make a film based on a fairy tale again until The Little Mermaid.

The fairies get to give their gifts to Aurora at the beginning of the movie...

Over time, however, due to the movie being rereleased into cinemas, Sleeping Beauty gradually became beloved by audiences and critics alike, and is now considered one of the best animated feature films ever made.

Who doesn't love the dragon??

And you can see why. I watched the restored Platinum version, and the animation is absolutely phenomenal. I don’t remember it looking quite like this as a child. Everything about the movie is intricately designed. The backgrounds look amazing. The foregrounds look brilliant. The characters are all visually stunning. It really is an optical feast.

The animation looks fantastic.

In terms of the story, Disney obviously took liberties with Charles Perrault’s classic, but for good reason. By making the fairies Flora (Felton), Fauna (Allen) and Merryweather (Luddy) and Maleficent (Audley) essentially the main characters, Sleeping Beauty has a strong sense of comedy and menace. Maleficent has to be one of my favourite villains ever, mainly because she is so horrible for no real reason, and because she actually succeeds in screwing over Princess Aurora’s (Costa) life. She also turns into a dragon, and has a wickedly cruel voice, cackles likes a witch, lives in an awesome and terrifying castle and has evil accomplices that aren’t annoying and/or comic relief. I kind of feel sorry for her though, because she lives with a group of trolls and a crow, extradited from the rest of the Kingdom, and doesn’t get an invite to the party. We never know why she’s evil, she just is, and the fact she curses a baby to die justifies why the King and Queen didn’t want her there to begin with.

Maleficent is an excellent villain.

The fairies are also scene stealers, mainly when they fight between themselves, most notably over the colour of Briar Rose’s/Aurora’s dress. This bickering always appealed to me because I too had siblings that I used to argue with, and so they feel more genuine as characters, even though they are supernatural entities. My favourite bit involving them was always when they try to make a dress, clean the house and bake a cake without magic, and then give up and use magic to hilarious effect. Who wouldn’t want to have a magic wand fight against their annoying sister? Even though this bout results in Maleficent discovering Briar Rose’s/ Aurora’s hideout, their stupidity is our gain. I’m sure that everyone who loves this film has a favourite fairy, probably based on their own personality.

Who doesn't bicker with their siblings? Merryweather and Flora fight over 'pink or blue'...

Briar Rose/ Princess Aurora suffers a similar fate as Cinderella in Cinderella in that she isn’t really the main character and is hardly in the film. For at least half of it she is a baby or is asleep, so she doesn’t really get much time to shine, except when she sings the duet ‘Once Upon a Dream’ with Prince Philip. This makes Sleeping Beautya film of two halves: the happy first half mainly about Princess Aurora and her fairy guardians, and the thrilling second half when the witch enacts the curse and captures the Prince. I always loved the bit when Aurora is in a trance and walks up the stairs to the spinning wheel with Maleficent saying ‘touch the spindle on the spinning wheel’ over the top. It is suitably chilling, and prepares you for the horrors to come.

The creepy spinning wheel is a terrifying but brilliant moment.

Sleeping Beauty is fairly slow paced, but this isn’t a bad thing at all. It actually helps give the film a certain ‘feeling’ that other Disney films don’t have: and that is one of an innocent wonder. We don’t need lots of action scenes to be mesmerised, because the film is so well paced that we are immediately drawn into it. Even though Prince Philip, who is named after Queen Elizabeth II’s husband, doesn’t get much character development, we still root for him and want him to succeed, mainly because Princess Aurora has done nothing to deserve her twisted fate.

Prince Philip- named after the Duke of Edinburgh- gets a better role than previous Princes...

His chance to shine, when he fights through the forest of thorns, and then fights Maleficent as a dragon, will always be my favourite part of the movie, because it is so dark and exciting. Not only do the fairies free the Prince, Merryweather turns the crow to stone, and all three of them essentially kill the dragon by assisting the Prince in plunging his sword into its heart. I always loved the bit when the dragon dies, as well as the memorably horrifying image of the sword sticking out of a pile of black goo on the floor. Brilliant.

The battle at the end is the most memorable and my favourite part of Sleeping Beauty.

The title of ‘Disney Animated Classics’ was coined because of movies like Sleeping Beauty. It has everything we want in a Disney film: royalty, romance, enchantment, horror and, most of all, a happy ending. Sleeping Beauty is one of the reasons why people have such happy (or disturbing) childhood memories of Disney to begin with. We all wish that we could live in a magical world where good conquers evil and true love always prevails.