Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty

Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty

Once upon a time, in a kingdom far away, a beautiful princess was born ... a princess destined by a terrible curse to prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel and become Sleeping Beauty. Masterful Disney animation and Tchaikovsky's celebrated musical score enrich the romantic, humorous and suspenseful story of the lovely Princess Aurora.
 

The three magical fairies Flora, Fauna and Merryweather, and the valiant Prince Phillip, who vows to save his beloved princess. Phillips bravery and devotion are challenged when he must confront the overwhelming forces of evil conjured up by the wicked and terrifying Maleficent. Embark on a spectacular adventure of unprecedented scale and excitement in this thrilling, timeless Disney Classic.

Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty: Background Information

During the 1950's, many critics were praising the UPA studios for their stylistic experimentation, while accusing Disney animation of being too "old fashioned". In response, Walt Disney planned his masterpiece, a film that would merge modern design sensibilities with state-of-the-art wide-screen and stereophonic sound technology. Without question, Sleeping Beauty is Disney's lushest feature, with an unprecidented attention to detail and bold stylization in the use of color, character, and background design. The influence of Sleeping Beauty can be found in the design of many recent animated features, like The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and The Swan Princess.

Interestingly enough, as modern and forward thinking as Sleeping Beauty appears on the surface, it still echos the story elements and plot points of Disney's earliest feature, Snow White & The Seven Dwarfs. In fact, several sequences, including the dance with the Scarecrow Prince and the scenes of the Prince's capture and imprisonment, were originally planned for Snow White [See Note #3], but were cut from the film before they could be animated. Two decades later, they were incorporated into Walt Disney's last great fairy tale feature, Sleeping Beauty.

In his quest for quality, Disney allowed his top artists: Marc Davis, John Lounsbery, Milt Kahl, Eric Cleworth, Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston and John Sibley, extra time to pencil test and refine their scenes until they were absolutely perfect. Sleeping Beauty was the last animated feature to receive Walt's full attention, but since his time was also required in Anaheim for the building of Disneyland, he was often away from the studio for weeks at a time. To keep busy, animators who were waiting for approvals often did their own inbetweening and preliminary clean-up on their scenes. These delays and Disney's unrelenting attention to detail ended up driving the budget up to an unheard-of amount of six million dollars. Combined with the cost overruns of Disneyland, the film drove the studio very close to bankruptcy, but the effort and sacrifice was worthwhile. Even though the comic characters, like the Kings and the Fairies, pale in comparison to earlier creations, the realistic ones, like the Prince, Briar Rose and Maleficent are among the most subtle, expressive and natural characters that the studio ever produced. Overall, Sleeping Beauty stands as an impressive achievement, displaying a level of refinement and sophistication that no animated feature has ever surpassed.

Sleeping Beauty: The Storyboard

Sequence 01.0: Opening to entrance of Maleficent

Director Les Clark
Animators

Throng of vassals, trumpeters and Herald

Nicholas, Youngquist, Bailey, Kopietz, Carlson

King Stefan & King Hubert

Lounsbery, also: Carlson, Sibley, Gibson

The Queen

Davis

The Fairies

King, Gibson, Lusk, Ambro, Johnston

Gift Montages

Boyd

Effects

MacManus

 

Sequence 02.0: Entrance of Maleficent

Director Eric Larson
Animators
 

Maleficent

Davis

The rest is basically same as in Sequence 01.0

 

Sequence 07.0: The Fairies Plan

Director Eric Larson
Animators
 

Fairies

Thomas, Johnston, also: Lusk, Ambro, King

Objects

Tanous

 

Sequence 06.0: Fairies try to make dress and cake for Briar Rose

Director Eric Larson
Animators
 

Briar Rose

Davis, also: Ambro

Fairies

Thomas, King, Johnston

Objects

Lusk, Tanous

 

Sequence 07.1: Maleficent kicks the Goons around

Director Woolie Reitherman
Animators
 

Maleficent

Paliwoda, also: Cleworth, Davis

Goons

Lounsbery, Kahl, also: Lucas, Keil, Goepper

 

Sequence 08.0: Boy Meets Girl

Director Eric Larson
Animators
 

Briar Rose

Davis, also: Ambro, Gibson

Prince & Sampson

Kahl, Lounsbery

Animals

Lounsbery, King, also: Lusk, Nordberg, Stanchfield

Scarecrow Prince

Lounsbery, also: Gibson

 

Sequence 09.0: Fairies finish dress and cake

Director Eric Larson
Animators
 

Fairies

Thomas, Johnston, also: Lusk

Objects

Lusk, King, Toombs, Gibson

Effects

Carlisle

Raven

Gibson

 

Sequence 12.0: Girl returns

Director Eric Larson
Animators
 

Briar Rose

Davis, also: Ambro

Fairies

Thomas, Johnston, also: Ambro

Raven

Gibson

 

Sequence 13.0: King Stefan's castle

Director Gerry Geronimi
Animators
 

Stefan & Hubert

Kahl, Lounsbery, also: Sibley, Carlson,

Lackey

Sibley

Prince & Sampson

Kahl, Lounsbery

 

Sequence 14.0: Girl pricks finger

Director Eric Larson
Animators
 

Aurora

Davis

Fairies

Johnston, also: Toombs, King

Maleficent

Davis

Effects

Meador

 

Sequence 15.0: Fairies put castle to sleep

Director Gerry Geronimi
Animators
 

Stefan & Hubert

Lounsbery, also: Carlson

Fairies

Thomas, also: King, Clark

Soldiers & Vassals

Kahl, King, Carlson

 

Sequence 17.0: Prince captured, Fairies discover his capture

Director Gerry Geronimi
Animators
 

Prince

Kahl, Sibley

Fairies

Johnston, Gibson

Maleficent

Davis

Raven

Gibson

Goons

Sibley

 

Sequence 18.0: Maleficent meets the Prince, Escape from castle.

Director Gerry Geronimi
Animators
 

Prince & Sampson

Kahl, Hathcock

Fairies

Thomas, Johnston, also: Clark, Youngquist, Kopietz, Hathcock

Maleficent

Davis

Raven

Davis, Gibson, also: Nicholas, Hathcock

Goons

Clark, Sibley

Effects

MacManus

 

Sequence 19.0: The fight

Director Woolie Reitherman
Animators
 

Maleficent

Paliwoda, also: Cleworth

Prince & Sampson

Hultgren, Keil, Lucas

Dragon

Cleworth

Fairies

Keil

Effects

MacManus

 

Sequence 21.0: Girl awakens and ending

Director Gerry Geronimi
Animators
 

Prince

Kahl, O'Brien

Aurora

Davis, O'Brien

Stefan & Hubert

Lounsbery

Fairies

Johnston

Queen

Davis

Vassals

Carlson

Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty: Disney vs. the Brothers Grimm

Walt Disney's "Sleeping Beauty" presents a sharp contrast from "Brier Rose," the version presented by the Brothers Grimm. This is to be expected for a number of reasons. In the following paragraphs I intend to explore the following differences and the possible reasons for their existence. To be sure, a primary source for these differences, indeed a major difference itself, is the length of the two stories. The Grimms' tale is barely 3 pages, while the Disney version is almost 80 minutes long. Keeping that in mind, I will concentrate in the following; First, I will discuss the role of the uninvited fairy in the story. This is the character who sets everything in motion by cursing the newborn princess at her christening. Second, the actions on the part of the prince are vastly different in each of the two stories. Finally, there is a vast difference between the way to the two stories handle the princess' interaction with the prince.

In the Grimm's "Briar Rose," the thirteenth fairy is not invited because the king and queen posses only twelve plates. Of course, she comes anyway and is much offended by the lack of an invitation. She proceeds to exact her revenge by cursing the princess to die by pricking her finger on a spindle in her fifteenth year, and she promptly leaves the story, never to be heard from again. More aptly put, she has fulfilled her role as evil protagonist and now exits the story, having set the future conflict in motion.

In the Disney version, things are hardly this simple, and yet they are also simplified greatly. Disney has only four fairies, the three good fairies, and the one who casts the curse. The last fairy is more a witch than a fairy, being garbed fully in black and appearing and vanishing in a thick cloud of green smoke. In addition, the is named. She is called Maleficent, a name for a witch, if there ever was one. Here, it is not a matter of begin embarrassed for lack of dishware that causes the omission of her invitation to the ceremony. The king and queen did not invite her because she is an evil character. This is in sharp contrast the (presumed) initial lack of alignment for the thirteenth fairy in the Grimms' story, in which it is only outrage at being denied an invitation which causes the fairy to follow the dark side, so to speak. Beyond this, Maleficent does not leave the story once she has cast her evil spell. Indeed, once the princess (here known both as "Briar Rose" and a birth name of "Aurora") reaches the designated age, it is Maleficent who eventually coaxes her into touching the spinning wheel so that the prophesy may come true. By making Maleficent an inherently evil person, Disney sets up an evil for the audience to hate, and thus an easier conflict to identify. Disney seems to consider this especially necessary in dealing with young children. It makes all the sticky moral questions go away, and the children can simply hate the witch. Even after this point, Maleficent's role is still not complete, as I shall discuss this a little later in my discussion of the prince's actions.

In the old tale, the princess does prick her finger and she sleeps for exactly 100 years. It is at this time that a wandering prince is able to penetrate the thick thorn hedge which has grown around the princess and all in her castle, though many previous princes have tried and failed, dying on the horrible thorn hedge. The prince comes, as though he is fated to, indeed he is in this story, and awakens the princess from her slumber after the hedge parts for him easily. All that is required for him to do this is to kiss the princess.

In Disney's version, this is hardly the case. First of all, (as I will mention shortly) the prince is already in love with Briar Rose and thus has a more concrete motivation. He must fight his way through the thorns, hacking them to pieces valiantly with his sword. Upon surpassing this obstacle, he must then deal with the evil Fairy. She assumes the form of a horrible dragon (black and green, of course), and they do battle, whereupon the prince kills the dragon. This represents a considerably more significant effort on the part of the prince, as well as creating a sort of test to demonstrate that he is truly worthy of the princess. It also serves to put some action into a tale otherwise devoid of any violence, again appealing to youths who are used to action-packed cartoons.

Finally, in the Grimms' tale, Briar Rose never meets the prince prior to being awakened by him. Indeed, if she had not slept, she would have been dead long before the prince's birth. However, once the prince sees her, he kisses, she wakes up, and they are married immediately. Hardly the modern model of a cautious, mature relationship based on love and affection.

Again, Disney makes things a good deal more complex and this results in a slightly convoluted plot line. To begin with, the princess and the prince meet at least once before she ever goes to sleep. While walking in the woods, she encounters him, and they dance, all the while the audience knows that they have met even once before, if only in their dreams. This serves to create a more realistic basis for them to fall in love and get married later on. Whereas in the Grimms', the princess served her full term on sleep, a full 100 years, Disney has her sleep for only a short while (about a day) before the prince comes to her rescue. The conflict with the original statement of how long she must sleep is conveniently overlooked. After defeating Maleficent, he awakens the princess and the kingdom, and the prince and princess are married. Here, it is much easier to see the, as a couple which might get married, and much easier for the child audience to wish for it to happen.
The Grimms' and Walk Disney versions of sleeping beauty are extremely different versions of a ubiquitous tale found in many forms. Major differences added by Disney include the treatment of the uninvited fairy, the effort required on the part of the prince, and the development of the relationship between the princess and the prince. The changes serve primarily to make the tale more accessible to today's youngsters, making it more compelling and more appropriate, and thus more likely to be watched, at least one person (the one who made the following graphic) has even referred to it as...

Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty Context

Walter Elias Disney was born in Chicago on December 5, 1901, to an Irish-Canadian father and a German-American mother. The family raised Walt, his sister, and his three other brothers on a farm near Marceline, Missouri. An unusually energetic boy, Walt developed a passion for drawing at an early age, along with an equally intense passion for salesmanship. He sketched relentlessly, then sold his sketches to neighbors, friends, and family. Moving back to Chicago for high school, Disney continued to draw but also took photographs, wrote for the school paper, and attended the Academy of Fine Arts in the evenings. A thirst for adventure led him to attempt military service in 1918, but he was too young to enlist. Instead, he joined the Red Cross as an ambulance driver and official chauffeur. In 1923, Walt followed his older brother, Roy, to Hollywood, carrying with him only a few drawing implements, one completed short animated film subject, and almost no money. Securing borrowed funds, he and his brother began an animated production company in their uncle's garage. Disney's entrepreneurial spirit and inspired imagination led quickly to the development of the Disney empire.
While Walt Disney's success as a businessman is legendary, his artistic accomplishments should not be overlooked. Over the course of his career, he stretched the limits of animated film by constantly innovating and perfecting new methods of animation. Before he was twenty, Disney became the first animator to seamlessly combine live-action footage with drawn animation. In releasing the world's first fully synchronized sound cartoon, "Steamboat Willie," in 1928, Disney also introduced the public to the character of Mickey Mouse. He introduced Technicolor to his productions in the early 1930s and used a revolutionary multiplane camera technique as early as the mid-1930s. Throughout his career, Disney and his teams innovated in the realms of effects animation, special processes, multiple exposures, props, and camera tricks.
The amazing success of Disney's early films gave him unusual freedom to expand and experiment further, despite the Great Depression and World War II. In the thirties, when the nation's economy was at its lowest ebb, the budgets for his films seemed staggering-Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, for example, cost an astonishing $1.4 million. Still, the studio (constructed in Burbank in 1940) tightened its belt a bit during wartime, devoting much of its money and energy to the production of government-commissioned propagandist and military training films. In the 1950s, Disney created the Disneyland theme park in California and debuted the wildly successful "Disneyland" anthology series, later renamed "Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color." By the time the workaholic Walt Disney died on December 15, 1966, his studio had released eighty-one feature films and won forty-eight Academy Awards. Today, the corporation which bears his name continues to expand and forge ahead in the fields of computer animation and restoration.
Sleeping Beauty was Walt Disney Pictures' sixteenth animated feature and, at the time, the most expensive of his films to produce. Making the film took more than six years at an estimated cost of $6 million, a figure that was totally unheard of for an animated feature in Disney's day. The lengthy production period resulted in part from the fact that Disney was preoccupied with the creation of Disneyland and the development of future projects. He rarely visited the studio, yet much of the creative process depended on his explicit approval.
The film process for Sleeping Beauty employed a new film size-Super Technirama 70. The 70-millimeter filmstrip was twice as wide as the 35-millimeter usually used both then and now and captures backgrounds with stunning clarity. It also employs a 2.35:1 aspect ratio, meaning that the width of the screen runs 2.35 times as wide as its height. Even today, 1.33:1 and 1.85:1 aspect ratios are more commonly used. The super-widescreen format allowed for the radical content and design of the film to be presented in a noticeably new way, with crystal clear focus and ultra-sharp backgrounds spread over more frame area. In contrast, other famous Disney films like Cinderella, Peter Pan, and Alice in Wonderland employ softer geometries and softer focuses.
Background painter Eyvind Earle based his radically detailed backgrounds on medieval, pre-Renaissance, and Gothic art. Artists who influenced his designs include Pieter Breughel and Jan van Eyck, as well as other Dutch, Italian, and Greek masters. The incredible detail of the art parallels the more adult content of this film as compared with Disney's earlier animated features. Sleeping Beauty, unlike the Mickey Mouse films or even Snow White, emphasizes human characters and renders death, sadness, and longing with realistic displays of emotion. The epic widescreen style also lends to the importance of spaces in conveying the emotional temperature of a scene. Earle answered directly to Walt Disney but supervised the visual design of the film by using an assembly line to divide up the labor. For example, Frank Armitage, an acquaintance of the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, focused on the wide, sweeping backgrounds. Marc Davis supervised Princess Aurora's and Maleficent's characters.
Beginning in 1956, widescreen blockbusters rose in popularity, a trend that Disney attempted to capitalize on with Sleeping Beauty. Mammoth epic films shot in widescreen format changed the film world as they appeared one after another, including War and Peace (directed by King Vidor, 1956), The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. DeMille, 1956), Ben-Hur (William Wyler, 1959), and Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962). These epic films are longer than Sleeping Beauty-all of them are over three and a half hours long-but given its artistic scope and ambition, Sleeping Beauty deserves the title of epic as well.
Sleeping Beauty also stands out among other animated films because of its score. The music of the instrumentalists and singers plays for the duration of the movie. Only in rare moments does all instrumentation or song drop out. In most cases, a moving score sweeps the film along as an undercurrent. Disney chose to adapt Tchaikovsky's music for "The Sleeping Beauty" ballet, and in choosing to draw from such a grand composer for his seemingly simple family film, Disney declared the timelessness and artistic merits of Sleeping Beauty and brashly placed it in a canonical tradition. Disney spared no expense for its technical production, either. George Bruns, who is also noted for composing original tunes for Pirates of the Caribbean, The Jungle Book, and the 1950s hit The Ballad of Davy Crockett, recorded the score in Germany with state-of-the-art equipment.
Sleeping Beauty has the distinction of being the last film that Disney personally produced. Recently, Sleeping Beauty became the second film to receive a thorough computer restoration, in which a team of forty computer technicians pored over all 108,000 frames of the film to clean and refurbish the colors. The print that the crew succeeded in creating, with its rich hues and subtle saturations, actually surpasses the print of the film's initial 1959 release.

Home - Natural Sleeping Fashion Beauty Directory - Link to us - Contact us