Sleeping Beauty (1959 film) Totally Explained

Everything about Sleeping Beauty 1959 Film totally explained

Sleeping Beauty is a 1959 animated feature produced by Walt Disney and originally released to theatres on January 29, 1959, by Buena Vista Distribution. The sixteenth animated feature in the Disney animated features canon, 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). In addition, Sleeping Beauty was the first animated feature to be shot in Super Technirama 70, one of many large-format widescreen processes. Only one more animated film, The Black Cauldron, was ever shot in Super Technirama 70.
The film was directed by Les Clark, Eric Larson, and Wolfgang Reitherman, under the supervision of Clyde Geronimi. The film was based on the fairy tale Sleeping Beauty by Charles Perrault, 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, featuring the work of the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, are adapted from the 1890 Sleeping Beauty ballet by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

Plot synopsis

Princess Aurora is named after the Roman goddess of the dawn "because she fills her father and mother's lives with sunshine." While still an infant, she's betrothed to the also-young Prince Phillip. At her christening, the good fairies Flora (dressed in Pink), Merryweather (in blue), and Fauna (in green) arrive to bless her. Flora gives her the gift of beauty, which is described in a song as "gold of sunshine in her hair" and "lips the shade of the red, red rose." Fauna gives her the gift of song. At this point, Maleficent, the film's villain and Mistress of All Evil, appears on the scene. Claiming to be upset at not being invited to Aurora's christening ceremony, she curses the princess to die when she touches a spinning wheel's spindle before the sun sets on her sixteenth birthday. Fortunately, Merryweather hasn't yet blessed Aurora, so she uses her blessing to weaken Maleficent's curse: Aurora won't die when she touches the spinning wheel, instead, she'll fall asleep until she's awakened by first love's kiss. In addition, Aurora's father, King Stefan, orders all spinning wheels in the kingdom burned, but knowing Maleficent is extremely powerful and will stop at nothing to see her curse fulfilled, the three good fairies take Aurora to live with them in the woods, where they can keep her safe from any harm until she turns sixteen and the curse is made void. To fully protect her, they even change her name to Briar Rose.
Rose grows into a very beautiful young woman, with shining blond hair, rose-red lips, attractive eyes, and a marvellous singing voice. She, although very beautiful and sweet, doesn't care for her appearance but she hopes that someday "her song will go winging" to a handsome man. She is raised in a cottage in the forest by the three fairies, who she believes are her aunts. Meanwhile, the evil creatures employed by Maleficent admit to their mistress that they've not been able to find the princess, despite looking in every cradle they could find. Maleficent realises that they've been looking for a baby for 16 years and sends her "last hope," her pet raven Diablo, to look for Aurora. On the day of her sixteenth birthday, the three fairies choose to use magic to make Rose a gown and a cake. As Flora and Merryweather fight it out to have the dress their signature color, Maleficent's raven flies over the forest and spots the magical glitter fluttering in the air and reports back to Maleficent. While out picking berries, Rose sings to entertain her animal friends; her angelic voice gains the attention of Prince Phillip, who has grown into a handsome young man and is out riding his horse in the woods. When they meet, they instantly fall in love. Realizing that she's to return home, Aurora flees from Phillip without ever learning his name. Despite promising to meet him again, she's unable to return, as her "aunts" choose that time to reveal the truth of her birth to her and to tell her that she's betrothed to a prince named Phillip.
They leave the woods, and Aurora makes it into the castle. Unfortunately, Maleficent uses her magic to lure Aurora away from her chambers up into the tallest tower of the castle, where a spinning wheel awaits her. Fascinated by the wheel, she touches the spindle, pricking her finger. As had been foretold by the curse, Aurora is put under a sleeping spell. The good fairies place Aurora on her bed with a red rose in her hand, and cause a deep sleep to fall over the entire kingdom until they can find a way to break the curse. They find out the answer is Phillip, but he's been captured and imprisoned by Maleficent to prevent him from kissing Aurora and waking her up. The three good fairies sneak into Maleficent's lair, The Forbidden Mountain, aid the prince in escaping and explain to him the story of Maleficent's curse. Armed with the magical Sword of Truth and The Shield of Virtue, Phillip battles Maleficent when the sorceress turns herself into a gigantic fire-breathing dragon. The sword, blessed by the fairies' magic, is plunged into the dragon's heart, killing her. Phillip climbs to Aurora's chamber, and removes the curse with a kiss. As the film ends, the prince and princess both happily learn that their betrothed and their beloved are one and the same. They dance a waltz as once again Flora and Merryweather squabble over the color of Aurora's dress.

Production

Overview and art direction

Sleeping Beauty 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, partially based on Tchaikovsky's ballet of the same name, was recorded in 1957. The film holds a notable position in Disney animation as the last Disney feature to use hand-inked cels. Beginning with the next feature, One Hundred and One Dalmatians, Disney would move to the use of xerography to transfer animators' drawings from paper to celluloid. Its art, which Walt Disney wanted to look like a living illustration and which was inspired by medieval art, wasn't in the typical Disney style. Because the Disney studio had already made two features based on fairy tales, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Cinderella, Walt Disney wanted this film to stand out from its predecessors by choosing a different visual style. The movie eschewed the soft, rounded look of earlier Disney features for a more stylized one. Since Super Technirama 70 was used, it also meant the backgrounds could contain more detailed and complex artwork than ever used in an animated movie before.
Disney artist Eyvind Earle was the film's production designer, and Disney gave him a significant amount of freedom in designing the settings and selecting colors for the film. Earle also painted the majority of the backgrounds himself. The elaborate paintings usually took seven to ten days to paint; by contrast, a typical animation background took only one workday to complete. Disney's decision to give Earle so much artistic freedom wasn't popular among the Disney animators, who had until Sleeping Beauty exercised some influence over the style of their characters and settings.

Characters and story development

The name of the beautiful Sleeping Beauty is "Princess Aurora" (Latin for "dawn"), in this film, as it was in the original Tchaikovsky ballet; this name occurred in Perrault's version, not as the princess's name, but as her daughter's. In hiding, she's called Briar Rose, the name of the princess in the Brothers Grimm variant. The prince was given the only princely name familiar to Americans in the 1950s: "Prince Phillip," named after Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. He is also the first Disney prince to be given a name. Snow White's prince was nameless, and Cinderella's is merely referred to as "Prince Charming." The dark fairy was aptly named Maleficent (which means "Evil-doer").
Walt Disney had suggested that all three good fairies should look alike, but veteran animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston objected, saying that three identical fairies wouldn't be exciting. Additionally, the idea originally included seven fairies instead of three, as there are seven fairies in the story's main reference, Perrault's version. In determining Maleficent's design, standard depictions of witches and hags were dismissed as animator Marc Davis opted for a more elegant look centered around the appearance of flames, ultimately crowning the villain with "the horns of the devil."
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. Also discarded from Snow White but used in this film were the ideas of the dance with the makeshift prince, and the fantasy sequence of the prince and princess dancing in the clouds, which was also considered but dropped from Cinderella.

Live-action reference footage

Before animation production began, every shot in the film was done in a live-action reference version, with live actors in costume serving 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. Among the actresses who performed in reference footage for this film were Spring Byington, Frances Bavier, and Helene Stanley. Helene Stanley was the live action reference for Princess Aurora. The only known surviving footage of Stanley as Aurora's live-action reference is a clip from the television program Disneyland, which consists of the artists sketching her dancing with the woodland animals. It wasn't the first or last time Stanley worked for Disney; she also provided live-action references for Cinderella and Anita from One Hundred and One Dalmatians, and she also portrayed Polly Crockett for the TV series Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier. An episode of The Mickey Mouse Club television series features Stanley re-enacting scenes from the Sleeping Beauty for the Mousketeers to watch (a clip from this episode is included as a special feature on the Cinderella Platinum Edition DVD).
All the live actors' performances were either screened for the animators' reference or rotoscoped (traced from live-action to animation), as Walt Disney insisted that much of Sleeping Beauty's character animation be as close to live-action as possible.

Release and later history

Theatrical release

Disney's distribution arm, Buena Vista Distribution, originally released Sleeping Beauty to theaters in both standard 35mm prints and large-format 70mm prints. The Super Technirama 70mm prints were equipped with six-track stereophonic sound; some CinemaScope-compatible 35mm Technirama prints were released in 4 channel stereo, and others had monaural soundtracks.
During its original release, Sleeping Beauty returned only half the invested sum of $6,000,000, nearly bankrupting the Disney studio. It was mainly criticized as being slowly paced and having little character development (which is a debatable point, since this was a differently formulated film than other classic Disney fare). 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 who also was the art director for the movie, its lush music score and its large-format widescreen and stereophonic sound presentation.
The film was re-released theatrically in 1970, 1979 (in 70mm 6 channel stereo, as well as in 35 mm stereo and mono),1986, and in 1993. When adjusted for ticket price inflation, the domestic total gross comes out to $478.22 million, placing it in the top 30 of adjusted films.

Home video release

Sleeping Beauty was released on both VHS and Laserdisc in 1986 in 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 both VHS and Laserdisc again as part of the Masterpiece Collection. In 2003, the restored Sleeping Beauty was released to DVD in a 2-disc "Special Edition" which included both the original widescreen version and a pan and scan version as well.
A 50th Anniversary Platinum Edition release of Sleeping Beauty, as a 2-disc DVD/Blu-ray Disc combo set, is currently scheduled for October 7, 2008. This release will make Sleeping Beauty the first entry in the Platinum Edition line to be released in high definition video. The Blu-ray version will feature BD-Live, an online feature, and the extras will include a virtual castle and multi-player games.

Other appearances

Aurora is one of the seven Princesses of Hearts in the popular Square Enix game Kingdom Hearts (although her appearances are brief), and Maleficent is a villain in all three Kingdom Hearts games. The good fairies appear in Kingdom Hearts II, giving Sora new clothes.
   Princess Aurora, Prince Phillip, Flora, Fauna and Merryweather were featured as guests in House of Mouse, and Maleficent was one of the villains in Mickey's House of Villains.
   The first all-new story featuring the characters from the movie appeared in, the first volume of collection of the Disney Princesses. It was released on September 4, 2007.
   In the Disney Princesses line, Disney currently portrays Aurora's princess gown as pink, even though it's blue during majority of the film, including the most crucial scenes. It is likely that this is because the franchise is targeted towards young girls, who are generally more attracted to the color pink. Also, Cinderella's dress is colored as blue in the Princess line, so Aurora's princess gown is pink to avoid confusion.
   In the future Kingdom Hearts game,, Terra is seen fighting his way through the forest of thorns while heading for a castle, which concludes that the setting of this film will be featured in the game. There is also a cutscene where Terra is talking to Maleficent.
   Various characters from the film also appear in the board game of the same name.

Sleeping Beauty release history

Worldwide release dates

Brazil: February 6, 1959

Argentina: July 9, 1959

U.K.: July 29, 1959

Australia: September 10, 1959

West Germany: October 30, 1959

Italy: December 1, 1959

Turkey: December 9, 1959

France: December 16, 1959

Finland: December 18, 1959

Sweden: December 19, 1959

Mexico: December 24, 1959

Denmark: December 26, 1959

Norway: December 26, 1959

Austria: January 15, 1960

Hong Kong: May 26, 1960

Japan: July 23, 1960

Spain: October 3, 1960

Portugal: April 2, 1961

Yugoslavia: June 13, 1964

Peru: October 15, 1966

East Germany: October 10, 1969

Zaire: November 14, 1977 (Kinshasa)

Poland: August 18, 1995

Estonia: August 12, 1997

Kuwait: May 24, 1999

Brunei: February 12, 2005

Characters

Flora, Merryweather, and Fauna (The Three Good Fairies), voiced by Verna Felton, Barbara Luddy, and Barbara Jo Allen respectively.

Maleficent, voiced by Eleanor Audley.

Princess Aurora/Briar Rose, voiced by Mary Costa.

Prince Phillip, voiced by Bill Shirley.

King Stefan, voiced by Taylor Holmes.

King Hubert, voiced by Bill Thompson.

The Narrator, voiced by Marvin Miller.

Maleficent's Goons, voiced by Candy Candido, Pinto Colvig, Bob Amsberry and Mel Blanc.

The Owl, voiced by Dallas McKennon. Characters who are unvoiced include Maleficent's raven and the lackey. The actress who voiced King Stefan's queen is unknown.

Directing Animators

Milt Kahl (Prince Phillip)

Frank Thomas (Flora, Fauna, Merryweather)

Ollie Johnston (Flora, Fauna, Merryweather)

Marc Davis (Aurora, Maleficent)

John Lounsbery (King Stefan, King Hubert)

Awards and nominations

Nominated (2)

Academy Awards

Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture (George Bruns)

Grammy Awards

Best Soundtrack Album, Original Cast - Motion Picture or Television

Sleeping Beauty in the Disney theme parks

Sleeping Beauty was made while Walt Disney was building Disneyland (hence the four year production time). To help promote the film, Imagineers declared the castle there was Sleeping Beauty's (it was originally to be Snow White's).
   Several years later an indoor walkthrough section was added to the castle, where guests could walk through dioramas of scenes from the film. It closed shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks, supposedly because the dark, unmonitored corridors were a risk. Currently, the former attraction is being used as extra space to house parts for the new fireworks show for Disneyland's 50th anniversary celebration. As a result, none of the original walkthrough remains intact. Le Château de la Belle au Bois Dormant at Disneyland Paris is a variant of Sleeping Beauty Castle. The version found at Disneyland Paris is much more reminiscent of the film's artistic direction. Hong Kong Disneyland opened in 2005, also with a Sleeping Beauty Castle, with a fairly-similar design to Disneyland's.
   Princess Aurora (and, to a lesser extent, Prince Phillip, the three good fairies, and Maleficent) makes regular appearances in the parks and parades.
   In Sleeping Beauty's castle at Disneyland Paris, a sleeping dragon, designed to look like Maleficent's dragon form, is found in the lower level dungeon.

Soundtrack listing

Main Title/Once Upon a Dream/Prologue

Hail to the Princess Aurora

The Gifts of Beauty and Song/Maleficent Appears/True Love Conquers All

The Burning of the Spinning Wheels/The Fairies' Plan

Maleficent's Frustration

A Cottage in the Woods

Do You Hear That?/I Wonder

An Unusual Prince/Once Upon a Dream

Magical House Cleaning/Blue or Pink

A Secret Revealed

Skumps (Drinking Song)/The Royal Argument

Prince Phillip Arrives/How to Tell Stefan

Aurora's Return/Maleficent's Evil Spell

Poor Aurora/Sleeping Beauty

Forbidden Mountain

A Fairy Tale Come True

Battle with the Forces of Evil

Awakening

Finale On, this includes Once Upon a Dream on the and I Wonder on the . And on Disney's Greatest Hits, this also includes Once Upon a Dream on the blue disc.

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