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Personally, Sleeping Beauty is the greatest achievement in the Disney canon, as far as narrative features are concerned. Nothing has come close to matching the sheer visual audacity, invention, beauty, and scope of the film. It’s a densely populated film, and any still from the film could be framed and hung in a museum. It is a truly glorious spectacle to behold.
Uncle Walt’s reoccurring line to the animators was to top what they had accomplished with Snow White, and that feat is achieved on every conceivable level. Snow White’s satanic villainess is bettered here, as is the sweet and sleepy heroine. The backgrounds are overpopulated with visual details and intricate work. The amount of care and love in each part of the frame engulfs you as only truly great animation can. It’s transfixing in its ability to transport to its various imagined locations, and the fairy tale woods are as alive and enchanting as Maleficent’s twisted stone palace is foreboding and ominous.
None of its troubled birth or lackluster reception show onscreen. Spending the entirety of the 50s in some state of production – with the story ironed out in 1951, the voices recorded in 1952, and from 1953 to 1958 spent in the animation process – it finally arrived in 1959. But many of the greatest works have disastrous productions, or they’re under-appreciated in their time. Sleeping Beauty is no different. And if the Disney canon has a film that is widely beloved and considered great while still being undervalued, it is this one.
It’s hard to think of a film which has become as ubiquitous in the Disney merchandise machine as this to be undervalued, but for all of the garish pink products emblazoned with Princess Aurora’s face, few people talk about this film as being one of their perennial favorites. You’re more apt to hear titles like The Little Mermaid, The Lion King, Cinderella thrown around. While each of those films contains their own merits, and a few of them are even classics in their own right, Sleeping Beauty needs to be placed among the top five narrative animated features the studio has produced.
The high-praise for the film should begin with the true auterist, Eyvind Earle, the background designer and painter, who was given complete control over the settings and color palette. Earle’s influences are immediately obvious – Renaissance art, elaborate tapestries, illuminated manuscripts – in the ways in which the settings are so detailed that objects in the back of the frame are as finely rendered as those in the very front. The settings engulf the characters in their expressionistic splendor, with dreaming orbs and hazy shafts of light dancing around the good characters, while Maleficent’s castle is filled with swirling black and purple hell-fire.
The angularity of the characters is a lovely change from the more rounded, softer animation style that Disney had preferred. The animation here feels less embalmed and more alive with possibilities. Princess Aurora’s curls and geometric body shape calls to mind the gamine qualities of Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday. She even demonstrates some personality in the brief passage of the film that allows her to speak. Aurora, disguised as wood nymph peasant girl Briar Rose, communicates with animals, displays flashes of intelligence in knowing exactly what the three fairies are up to in sending her out, even some signs of independence in her initial reactions to the realization that her entire life has been a lie. Of course, the story demands that she soon become silent and passive, a slumbering object of desire of the plot machinations.
No matter, orbiting around Aurora are a series of fully alive and endearing characters. The three good fairies are a fun trio, and the true dominating force of the plot’s various twists and turns. Verna Felton, a reoccurring performer during this era, voices Flora, the sweet but slightly dotty leader of the group. Barbara Jo Allen voices Fauna, the kindest of the three who is prone to moments of bubble-headed naivety. Barbara Luddy voices Merryweather, and her voice suites the sarcastic and fiery Merryweather much better than the sweet-but-bland Lady. Their voices interact well with each other, and each of them is animated with an individual sense of character and lively spirit. The trio represent the change in fairy folk post-Christianity, in which they became more benign and helpful to mankind. They create moments of great comedy, continually prove themselves to be the real heroines of the film, and are lovable from the first moment to the last.
Appearing against them is the dark fairy, a figure of equal parts elegance and menace, and my still-standing favorite villainess in the Disney canon, Maleficent. If naming a character is half of the battle in their creation, Maleficent came out a winner. The very sound of it is sensual, elegant, and slightly doomed. Then she appears, in all of her pagan regality and bitchery, damning an infant for its parents perceived slight. Maleficent is a fairy folk of old, a creature demanding respect and subservience at all times, and free-handed in dolling out punishments for any wrong-doing against her. I frequently find myself rooting for her, completely enamored with her wrath, sense of style, and the brilliantly animated sequence in which she transforms from haute-couture fairy tale bitch goddess into a fiery demonic dragon, a creature intent on bringing about the apocalypse on this kingdom. Maleficent alone proves my theory that a Disney movie, much like a Bond film, is only as good as its villain, and she is, without a doubt, one of the all-time greats of cartoon villainy. This hasn’t even taken into consideration the vocal work of Eleanor Audley. Audley’s smoky delivery alternates between a wicked purr and harsh pronouncements and demands. The combination of audio and visual is perfection.
Individual moments in Sleeping Beauty have become justifiably famous, but the film is abundant in riches of character animation and smart choices. Everyone loves the scene of the two kings getting drunk, but King Stefan’s paternal worrying is touching. He doesn’t want to overwhelm his daughter with too much new information and changes at once, and is still anxious about her safety, and his character’s rigid body posture begins to loosen up you can track his inebriation. Or Maleficent staring at the celebratory bacchanal after fulfilling her curse on Aurora, a look of boredom overcoming her while she mindlessly pets her raven. This is a tiny bit of character detail that is easy to miss in-between the surreal blessing of the good fairies gifts and the green hell-fire finale of her dragon form. Another solid moment is the emerging cursed thorns sprouting from the ground. They begin by wrapping around the castle before eventually covering the frame and projecting towards the camera like they’re about to burst through and overtake the audience. It’s fantastic work.
I could keep praising the virtues of Sleeping Beauty, talking about the film frame-by-frame and lovingly looking at all of the tiniest of details. The craftsmanship on display has never been rivaled by any of the subsequent productions. In fact, the film was so monstrously expensive (for the time), that it’s under-performance threatened to sink the studio’s animation division. And if they had to close up shop, at least they could have ended on a note of tremendous power and grace. Here is a fairy tale given a luxurious treatment, and a studio operating at the zenith of its powers.
