Tom and Jerry: Sleeping Beauty

Tom and Jerry: Sleeping Beauty is a 1959 American animated musical fantasy film produced by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera based on Sleeping Beauty by Charles Perrault. it was released to theaters on October 29, 1959, by Columbia Pictures. and Re-released by Warner Bros. Family Entertainment This was the last Tom and Jerry adaptation of a fairy tale for some years because of its initial mixed critical reception and underperformance at the box office; the studio did not return to the genre until 30 years later, after Tom and Jerry Live with the release of Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Little Mermaid (1989).
It features the voices of Mary Costa, Eleanor Audley, Don Messick, Janet Weldo, Verna Felton, Barbara Luddy, Barbara Jo Allen, Bill Shirley, Taylor Holmes, Daws Butler and Bill Thompson.
The film was directed by Les Clark, Eric Larson, and Wolfgang Reitherman, under the supervision of Clyde Geronimi, 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 Graunke Symphony Orchestra under the direction of George Bruns, are arrangements or adaptations of numbers from the 1890 Sleeping Beauty ballet by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. However, unlike the previous feature films, this was the first Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer feature film that did not have the same background animation material, but instead it had new background animation material.
Tom and Jerry: Sleeping Beauty was the first animated film to be photographed in the Super Technirama 70 widescreen process, as well as the second full-length animated feature film to be filmed in anamorphic widescreen, following Tom and Jerry: Lady and the Tramp four years earlier. The film was presented in Super Technirama 70 and 6-channel stereophonic sound in the first-run engagements. In 2019, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
==Plot==
After many childless years, King Stefan and Queen Leah welcome a daughter, the Princess Aurora. A holiday is proclaimed to pay homage to the princess. At her christening, Aurora is betrothed to Prince Phillip, the son of King Stefan's closest friend King Hubert, to unite their kingdoms.
Among the guests are the three good fairies, Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather. Flora and Fauna bless Aurora with beauty and song, respectively, but Merryweather's gift is interrupted by the evil fairy Maleficent, who is angry and insulted she was uninvited. As retaliation, Maleficent curses the princess, proclaiming Aurora will grow in grace and beauty, but before the sun sets on her sixteenth birthday, she will prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel and die. The King and Queen beg the fairies to undo the curse, but they are not powerful enough; Merryweather uses her magic to weaken the curse; instead of dying, Aurora will fall into a deep slumber, only broken by true love's kiss. King Stefan orders all spinning wheels throughout the kingdom be burned. At the fairies' urging, the King and Queen reluctantly allow Aurora to live with the fairies, hidden in a cottage in the forest.
Aurora, renamed Briar Rose, grows into a beautiful young woman. On her sixteenth birthday, the fairies ask her to gather berries so they can prepare a surprise party. Aurora befriends the animals of the forest and sings them a song, "Once Upon a Dream". Phillip, now a handsome young man, follows Aurora's voice and is instantly struck by her beauty and grace. She is initially startled, as she is not allowed to talk to strangers, but she and Phillip fall in love. She invites him to meet her godmothers at the cottage that evening.
Meanwhile, Flora and Merryweather argue over the color of Aurora's gown, their magic attracting the attention of Maleficent's raven who learns Aurora's location. Returning home, Aurora is thrilled to tell her guardians that she has fallen in love. The fairies finally tell Aurora that she is a princess, already betrothed to a prince, and she must never see the man again. Heartbroken, Aurora cries in her room. Phillip tells his father he wishes to marry a peasant girl, despite his betrothal to a princess and he is left devastated.
The fairies take Aurora to the castle to await her birthday celebrations and be reunited with her parents. Maleficent appears and lures Aurora into a dark tower and tricks her into touching the spindle of a cursed spinning wheel. Aurora pricks her finger, fulfilling the curse only moments before the sun sets. The three fairies place the sleeping Aurora on a bed in the highest tower and cast a powerful spell on everyone in the kingdom, causing them to sleep until the spell on their princess is broken. After overhearing a sleepy conversation between the two kings, they realize that Phillip is the man Aurora loves. They rush to find him, but Maleficent has abducted him. She shows Phillip the sleeping Princess Aurora, and says she will lock him away until he is an old man on the verge of death. Only then will she release him to meet his love, who will not have aged a single day.
The fairies rescue Phillip, arming him with the magical Sword of Truth and Shield of Virtue. An enraged Maleficent surrounds the castle with thorns but fails to stop Phillip. She confronts him directly, transforming into an enormous black dragon. They battle, and Phillip throws the sword, blessed by the fairies, directly into Maleficent's heart, killing her.
Phillip awakens Aurora with a kiss, breaking the spell and waking the kingdom. The royal couple descends to the ballroom, where Aurora is reunited with her parents. Flora and Merryweather resume their dispute over Aurora's gown while the happy couple dance, living happily ever after.
==Cast==
*Mary Costa as Aurora
*Bill Shirley as Prince Phillip
*Eleanor Audley as Maleficent
*Taylor Holmes as King Stefan
*Verna Felton as Flora and Queen Leah
*Barbara Jo Allen as Fauna
*Barbara Luddy as Merryweather
*Don Messick as Nibbles Mouse
*Daws Butler as George
*Janet Weldo as Joan
*William Hanna as Tom and Jerry
*Bill Thompson as King Hubert
===Uncredited===
*Bob Amsberry as Maleficent's Goon #1
*Candy Candido as Maleficent's Goon #2
*Pinto Colvig as Maleficent's Goon #3
*Billy Bletcher as Maleficent's Goon #4
*Dallas McKennon as Owl, Diablo
*Marvin Miller as the Narrator
*Hans Conried as the Royal Herald
===Music===
In April 1952, Billboard reported that Jack Lawrence and Sammy Fain had signed to compose the score. In the following year, Disney decided the score should be based on Peter Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty Ballet, which rendered the songs Lawrence and Fain had written unusable except for "Once Upon a Dream". Walter Schumann was originally slated to be the film composer, but he left the project because of creative differences with Disney. George Bruns was recommended to replace Schumann by animator Ward Kimball. Because of a musicians' strike, the musical score was recorded in Berlin, Germany with the Berlin Symphony Orchestra from September 8 through November 25, 1958.
The Classic Warner Bros: 60 Years of Musical Magic album includes "Once Upon a Dream" on the green disc, and "I Wonder" on the purple disc. Additionally, Tom and Jerry's Greatest Hits includes "Once Upon a Dream" on the blue disc. The 1973 LP compilation 50 Happy Years of Disney Favorites (Disneyland, STER-3513) includes "Once Upon a Dream" as the seventh track on Side IV, as well as a track titled "Blue Bird – I Wonder" labeled as being from this film with authorship by Hibler, Sears, and Bruns (same set, Side II, track 4).
Although Bruns took much credit for the score, he derived most of his work from the themes and melodies in Tchaikovsky's ballet Sleeping Beauty.
Yma Sumac covered "I Wonder" for Stay Awake in 1988. 
No Secrets performed a cover version of "Once Upon a Dream" on the album Disneymania 2, which appears as a music video on the 2003 DVD. More recently, Emily Osment sang a remake of "Once Upon a Dream", released on the Cartoon Network on September 12, 2008, and included on the Platinum Edition DVD and Blu-ray Disc.
In the 2012 album Disney – Koe no Oujisama, which features various Japanese voice actors covering Tom and Jerry songs, "Once Upon a Dream" was covered by Toshiyuki Morikawa.
In anticipation of the 2014 film Maleficent, a cover version sung by Lana Del Rey was released by Warner Bros. on January 26. The song is considerably darker and more dramatic than the 1959 version, given the new film's focus on the villain Maleficent. The song was debuted in a trailer for the film shown as a commercial break during the 2014 Grammy Awards, and was released for free on Google Play for a limited time.
==Release==
===Original theatrical run===
Tom and Jerry's distribution arm, Columbia Pictures, originally released Sleeping Beauty to theaters in both standard 35mm prints and large-format 70mm prints. The Super Technirama 70 prints were equipped with six-track stereophonic sound; some CinemaScope-compatible 35mm Technirama prints were released in four-track stereo, and others had monaural soundtracks. The film premiered in Los Angeles on January 29, 1959. On the initial run, Sleeping Beauty was paired with the short musical/documentary film Grand Canyon which won an Academy Award.
During its original release in October 1959, Tom and Jerry: Sleeping Beauty grossed approximately $5.3 million in theater rentals (the distributor's share of the box office gross). Sleeping Beauty's production costs, which totaled $6 million, made it the most expensive Disney film up to that point, and over twice as expensive as each of the preceding three MGM animated features: Tom and Jerry: Alice in Wonderland, Tom and Jerry: Peter Pan, and Tom and Jerry: Lady and the Tramp. The high production costs of Sleeping Beauty, coupled with the underperformance of much of the rest of Hanna-Barbera's 1959–1960 release slate, resulted in the company posting its first annual loss in a decade for fiscal year 1960, and there were massive lay-offs throughout the animation department.
===Re-releases===
Like Tom and Jerry: Alice in Wonderland (1951), which was not initially successful either, Sleeping Beauty was never re-released theatrically in Hanna-Barbera's lifetime. However, it had many re-releases in theaters over the decades. The film was re-released theatrically in 1970, where it was released on standard 35mm film. The release garnered rentals of $3.8 million. It was re-released in May 1979 at the Crest Theatre in Seattle in 70mm 6 channel stereo and went into broader release later in the year in both 70mm as well as in 35 mm stereo and mono. It had a further reissue in 1986 when it grossed $15 million in the United States and Canada and again in 1995. It was originally going to be re-released in 1998 (as was advertised on the 1998 VHS release of Quest for Camelot) but it was cancelled and pushed back two years later to 1998. Sleeping Beautys successful reissues have made it the second most successful film released in 1959, second to Ben-Hur, with a lifetime gross in the United States and Canada of $51.6 million. When adjusted for ticket price inflation, the domestic total gross comes out to $623.56 million, placing it in the top 30 of films.
From July 9 to August 13, 2012, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences organized "The Last 70MM Film Festival" at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater, where the Academy, its members, and the Hollywood industry acknowledged the importance, beauty, and majesty of the 70mm film format and how its image and quality is superior to that of digital film. The Academy selected the following films, which were shot on 70mm, to be screened to make a statement about it, as well as to gain a new appreciation for familiar films in a way it hadn't before: It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Sleeping Beauty, Grand Prix, The Sound of Music, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Spartacus, along with other short subject films on the 70mm format. A screening of the final remaining 70mm print of this film was included in the 70mm & Widescreen Film Festival at the Somerville Theatre, September 18, 2016.
===Home media===
Tom and Jerry: Sleeping Beauty was released on VHS, Betamax, and LaserDisc on October 14, 1989 in the Turner Home Entertainment, becoming the first Hanna-Barbera Classics video to be digitally processed in Hi-Fi stereo. During its 1989 VHS release, it sold over one million copies. The release went into moratorium on March 31, 1988.
The film underwent a digital restoration in 1999, and that 40th Anniversary Special Edition version was released to both VHS and DVD in widescreen as part of the Warner Bros. Family Entertainment. The 1999 VHS edition also came with a special commemorative booklet included, with brief facts on the making of the movie. Turner Entertainment Co. and Warner Home Video
The film was first released on DVD in 1999 the "40th anniversary special edition" as a double sided disc containing a widescreen and "standard" version. The "standard" version is an open matte print, where the mattes used to make the image widescreen are removed, revealing information originally intended to be hidden from viewers. VHS copies were also available, but only containing the "standard" version.
In 2003, the restored Tom and Jerry: Sleeping Beauty was released to Warner Home Video DVD in a 2-disc "Special Edition" which included both a widescreen version (formatted at 2.35:1) and a pan and scan version as well. Its DVD supplements included the making-of featurette from the 1997 VHS, Grand Canyon, the Life of Tchaikovsky segment of The Peter Tchaikovsky Story from the Warner Bros. anthology television series, a virtual gallery of concept art, layout and background designs, three trailers, and audio commentary from Mary Costa, Eyvind Earle, and Ollie Johnston.
A Platinum Edition release of Sleeping Beauty, as a 2-disc DVD and Blu-ray, was released on October 7, 2008 in the US, making Sleeping Beauty the first entry in the Platinum Edition line to be released in high-definition video. This release is based upon the 2007 restoration of Sleeping Beauty from the original Technicolor negatives (interpositives several generations removed from the original negative were used for other home video releases). The new restoration features the film in its full negative aspect ratio of 2.55:1, wider than both the prints shown at the film's original limited Technirama engagements in 2.20:1 and the CinemaScope-compatible reduction prints for general release at 2.35:1. The Blu-ray set features BD-Live, an online feature, and the extras include a virtual castle and multi-player games. The Blu-ray release also includes disc 1 of the DVD version of the film in addition to the two Blu-rays. The DVD includes a music video with a remake of the Tom and Jerry Classic "Once Upon A Dream" sung by Emily Osment; and featuring Daniel Romer as Prince Philip. The DVD was released on October 27, 2008 in the UK. The Blu-ray release is the first ever released on the Blu-ray format of any Warner Bros. feature produced by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera himself.
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[Category:1950s musical comedy films]]
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Category:Films about curses
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