Movies - Sleeping Beauty

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Sleeping Beauty is the sixteenth animated feature in the Disney animated features canon. It was produced by Walt Disney, and originally released to theatres on January 29, 1959 by Buena Vista Distribution.

It was the last animated feature produced by Walt Disney to be based upon a fairy tale (after his death, the studio returned to the genre with 1989's The Little Mermaid
). Sleeping Beauty is also the first animated feature to be shot in Super Technirama 70, one of many large-format widescreen 70mm film processes (only one more animated film, The Black Cauldron
, has been shot in Super Technirama 70). The film spent nearly the entire decade of the 1950s in production: the story work began in 1951, voices were recorded in 1952, animation production took from 1953 until 1958, and the stereophonic musical score was recorded in 1957.

Production

The film was directed by Les Clark, Eric Larson, and Wolfgang Reitherman, under the supervision of Clyde Geronimi. The script was adapted from the fairy tale Sleeping Beauty by Charles Perrault by Erdman Penner, with additional story work by Joe Rinaldi, Winston Hibler, Bill Peet, Ted Sears, Ralph Wright, and Milt Banta. The film's musical score and songs are adapted from the 1890 Sleeping Beauty ballet by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

The name of the titular Sleeping Beauty is "Princess Aurora" in this film, as it was in the Tchaikovsky ballet. The prince was given the only princely name familiar to Americans in the 1950s: "Prince Philip", named after Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. The witch was aptly named Maleficent (which means "Evil-doer") - Maleficent is traditionally portrayed as the leader of the female Disney villains, due to her significance and awesome powers. In the film Aurora's father is named Stefan and Philip's father is named Hubert.

Live actors in costume served as models for the animators. The role of Prince Phillip was modeled by Ed Kemmer, who had played Commander Buzz Corry on television's Space Patrol five years before Sleeping Beauty was released. For the final battle sequence Kemmer was photographed on a wooden buck. All the live actors' performances were later screened for the animators' reference.

Among the actresses who performed in reference footage for this film included Spring Byington, Frances Bavier, and Helene Stanley who was the live reference for the title role of 1950's Cinderella. Also, Princess Aurora's long, thin, willowy body shape was inspired by that of Audrey Hepburn.

In addition, Walt Disney had suggested that all three fairies should look alike, but veteran animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston contrasted this idea saying that having them be like that wouldn't be exciting. Additionally, the idea originally included seven fairies instead of three. The elaborate background paintings usually took a week to ten days to paint; by contrast, a typical animation background took only one workday to complete.

Several story points for this film came from discarded ideas for Disney's previous fairy tale involving a sleeping heroine: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
. They include Maleficent's capture of the Prince and the Prince's daring escape from her castle. Disney discarded these ideas from Snow White because his artists were not able to draw a human male believably enough at the time.

Release and later history

When it was first released, Sleeping Beauty returned only half the invested sum of $6,000,000, nearly bankrupting the Disney studio. Since then, the film has gained a following, and is today hailed as one of the best animated features ever made, thanks to its stylized designs by painter Eyvind Earle, its lush music score, and its large-format widescreen and stereophonic sound presentation. The film was re-released theatrically in 1970, 1979, and 1986 and was first released on home video that same year under the Classics collection, becoming the first Disney Classics video to be digitally processed in Hi-Fi stereo. Then the film underwent an extensive digital restoration in 1997, and that version was released to video as part of the Masterpiece collection, and in 2003 was released to DVD in a 2-disc "Special Edition" that included both the original widescreen version and a pan and scan version as well.

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Movies - Sleeping Beauty

Production

Release and later history

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