Love, Animation: Sleeping Beauty (Dir. Wolfgang Reitherman, Eric Larson, and Les Clark, 1h17m, 1959)
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| Sleeping Beauty US Half Sheet (1959) |
Sleeping Beauty is the greatest film Walt Disney ever made. It may not be his most critically appreciated; that accolade goes to either Mary Poppins (1965) or Pinnochio (1941); nor, losing the Walt Disney Company nearly a million dollars and leading to the company's entire animation department being restructured, his most financially successful film. This is, of course, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937), which, when adjusted for inflation, grossed just under $2 billion. To repeat, Sleeping Beauty is the greatest film Walt Disney ever made, a nigh-perfect synthesis of everything he and his studio had learnt in the past thirty years; a film that, alongside Fantasia (1940) arguably marks the studio's artistic high-point, adapting the Charles Perrault tale into a musical and visual feast, featuring, via Tchaikovsky's ballet, one of the studio's best scores, one of its best villainesses, and, for this month of February, one of the most charming romances in Disney's fairytale adaptions.
Once upon a time, in 1938, Walt Disney, fresh off Snow White, turned to another fairytale, Perrault's 'Sleeping Beauty'-preliminary artwork was produced, but keenly aware of becoming known as a creator with only one trick, something that had driven Disney's innovation since the early 1920s, the film was shelved. When work recommenced on the idea in 1950, the film entering production in November of that year , much had changed. The studio had reached near-bankruptcy, with several now-classic films (Pinocchio, Fantasia and Bambi (1942), underperforming at the international box office, as the storm-clouds of war gathered, the war itself, turning propaganda machine for the US Navy, and a summer-long strike in 1941, but there had been light through these circling clouds. Dumbo (1941) had essentially kept the studio afloat, whilst the studio's mild desperation in re-releasing many of its previously underperforming films, and low-budget live action nature documentaries filled the coffers and the award cabinets respectively in the post-war period.
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| Layout artist McLaren Stewart, Walt Disney, and Eyvind Earle, during the production of Sleeping Beauty, c.1959 |
Confirmation of the studio's turnaround came in 1950, with an adaption of a Charles Perrault fairytale...Cinderella. Its release met by critical acclaim, and colossal box office receipts, second only to Snow White, this rags to riches tale would utterly reverse the studio's fortunes. It's thus hardly surprising that another Perrault tale would quickly become the studio's next project. However, it would take them nearly nine years to release it.
We begin, as many of classic Disney films do, with the (live-action) storybook, which recounts, as generations already know, of the birth of Princess Aurora (voiced by Mary Costa). Here, effortlessly, enters the overarching visual-and audiotory-trend of the film. The world is that of lushly detailed backgrounds via Eyvind Earle's concept art, influenced by another French tale of sorts, in the form of The Unicorn Tapestries, a series of Medieval French tapestries that now hang in the Metropolitian Museum of Modern Art's Cloisters in Upper Manhattan, and illuminated manuscripts.
The soundtrack is Tchaikovsky, via the man who would become Disney's main in-house composer until the early 1970s, George Bruns. It is also where the film's production struggles begin, with months of the film's production wasted by back and forth arguments about its art direction, between focus on these elaborate backgrounds and the characters that inhabit them, none of this helped by the film's gargantuan scale due to producing the film for the ultra-widescreen Super Technirama 70 (the same format used by epics like Spartacus (1960), El Cid (1961) and Zulu (1964)), and an increasingly distant Walt insisting on the film's stylised appearance. Bruns' score, meanwhile, was the result of more indecision, an entire Broadway score thrown out, save for a love duet between Aurora and Prince Phillip (Bill Shirley), and the score rebuilt around its use of Tchaikovsky's score for the ballet, Sleeping Beauty a far more fitting score for the now stylised medieval world the film depicts.
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| Concept art from Sleeping Beauty, by Eyvind Earle |
The art direction for Sleeping Beauty is magnificient. It has a scale and visual splendour, a look that Disney have rarely matched, from beginning to end. The first shots, in which we are introduced to the gathered gentry, nobility, and Aurora's parent, is a beautifully done multiplane camera shot, through banners into the medieval hall below. Yes, this shot seems to say-this is a medieval fairytale, yes, this is a medieval throne room, but we are entering a dream, a story in which anything can happen-and will! In a moment, the audience are taken to a styilised otherworldly place. As if to emphasise this, enter the film's three fairies-our main comic relief- Flora, Fauna and Merryweather (recurring Disney voice actresses, Verna Felton, Barbara Jo Allen, and Barbara Luddy), who have come to bring gifts to the child, whilst the young Phillip is introduced to his betrothed. Into this happy scene enters the film's masterstroke, the evil fairy, Maleficent (Eleanor Audley).
Maleficent is the best villain Disney have ever created. From her very first moments on screen, from her jet black clothing against the vivid colours of the world around her, only heightened in the film's finale when she transforms into a colossal dragon, to Audley's performance, to her quasi-expressionist colouring.; Her design and lighting takes undeniable, and since proved influence from television horror host, Vampira (played by Maila Nurmi), a campy take on horror tropes, who herself, ironically, took influence from the Wicked Queen from Snow White, alongside Morticia from The Addams Family. Maleficent is the embodiment of the film's strengths, a perfectly realised character, whose droll feigned surprise at not being invited to the child's christening quickly sparks into fury-she is often seen wreathed in acrid green fire-as she curses the child to die, her fate only spared by Merryweather's gift-that she will fall into a deep sleep instead.
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| Maleficent concept art by Marc Davies (c.1959) |
With the fairies agreeing to take on the appearance of peasants-and forgo magic-to raise the child in secret-they are the film's main source of comic relief, alongside Maleficent's bumbling henchmen, as an amicable if bickering trio-the scene in which they make a cake and a dress for their young charge sans magic is amusing but perhaps the film's only true moment of more typically Disney-esque frivolity and slapstick. So the film leaps forward (nearly) sixteen years. Here we arrive at Sleeping Beauty's central love-story: its unshakable sense that love conquers all, even a seemingly inescapable fate. It is also here, undeniably, that the film's chaotic and protracted production is most notable. Aurora, now disguised by her wards as Briar Rose, is a charming enough heroine, but compared to Disney's other, far more proactive, Princesses of the period, feels a little one-dimensional as a character. She is, after all, either a baby or asleep for a good half of the film's runtime, and whilst she gets arguably one of the best songs of the entire Walt era of the studio, the recurring "Once Upon A Dream", she often feels like a composite of previous Disney heroines. Phillip, for his part, is at least a charming foil to her, whilst his initial encounter with Aurora is hearing her voice whilst wandering through the forest in vain search of her.
United is the film is at its strongest. They are, simply, a better couple on screen than their consituent parts-their first actual meeting in the film is a remarkably charming sequence, in which, from dancing with several animals, inhabiting the stolen boots, cap and cloak of the Prince, and thus presenting the playful side of Aurora, playing pretend, before Phillip, unaware of her true identity, and immediately falling in love with her, replaces the animals as her dance partner. There is, throoughout their first meeting, a sweetness that has often reappeared in the more recent, and particularly Disney Renaissance-era films-they have fallen in love with each other, and their chemistry, seen and heard in their duet, is one of the best Disney 'dates' of the studio's entire history. Sadly, Phillip's duty calls, as he returns to the castle to tell his aghast father that he plans to marry a peasant woman, proceeding to ride off to find her once more
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| In one of the most famous sequences of the entire film, music and song replaces speech as the couple dance. |
Aurora in turn has the revelation of her true name and parentage-and her betrothal to Prince Phillip, whose identity she is unaware of-dropped upon her, and becomes upset at the idea that her true love will never be, and sinks into tearful depression. Thus, they are separated again, and a despondant Aurora is brought to the castle, there to wait until the end of the day and her 16th birthday. But, with the hiding place of the fairies and their charge revealed via their use of magic, so Maleficent manifests in the room, and, in a spine-tingling scene that emphasises the evil fairy's malevolence, and the gothic sensibilities otherwise seen only in Chernobog in Fantasia in Disney's filmography, particularly in the-genuinely unnerving-shots that show only her glowing green glare, renders the girl under her spell, and proceeds to fulfil the prophecy, her minions capturing Phillip shortly after as the trio of fairies put the rest of the castle into a deep sleep. All seems lost.
What follows, though, is a magnificent sweeping finale, of Disney at their most emotionally resonant, at their grandest visually, of true love triumphing against seemingly insurmountable odds. It is Disney's storytelling, its art, its entire cinematic aesthetic on the grandest scale, and the studio itself at its most commanding. Sleeping Beauty's legacy, as the film reaches sixty-five this year, casts a long shadow over the studio that made it-a re-recreation of the castle at the centre of the film juts into the sky at the centre of Disneyland, Anaheim, California, which opened four years before the film's release, whilst Eyvind Earle's imaginative style is now synonymous with the Disney Princess films, influencing many of the studio's more recent films, including Pocahontas (1995), and Frozen (2013), and practically became the template for Disney's late 80s return to form in the Disney Renaissance.
To return, once more: Sleeping Beauty is, simply put, the best film, the grandest film, the most emotionally resonant film, that Walt Disney ever made, a beautiful dream of a film in which love triumphs over evil.
Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)
Sleeping Beauty is available to stream via Disney+,
and on DVD and BluRay from Walt Disney Studios. It is also currently available via these platforms in the United States
Next
week, we continue in matters of love, with the idiosyncratic world of Charlie Kaufman's stop-start comedy-drama, Anomalisa
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