Sleeping Beauty

**Sleeping Beauty** is a 1959 American animated film and the first instalment in the Sleeping Beauty Franchise. The film was released on January 29, 1959.

## Plot

After many childless years, King Stefan and Queen Leah welcome the birth of their daughter, the Princess Aurora. They proclaim a holiday for their subjects to pay homage to the princess, and at her christening she is betrothed to Prince Phillip, the son of King Stefan's best 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 arrival of the evil fairy Maleficent. Told that she was not invited, Maleficent turns to leave, but when Queen Leah asks if she is offended, the evil fairy curses the princess, proclaiming that 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 blessing to weaken the curse so that instead of dying, Aurora will fall into a deep sleep, 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 bring Aurora to a cottage in the forest to live with the fairies in safety much to Maleficent's frustration for sixteen years since her goons couldn't find her when they searched everywhere in the kingdom, so she sent her raven to find her instead.

Aurora, renamed Briar Rose, grows into a beautiful young woman. On her sixteenth birthday, the fairies ask her to gather berries while they 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. She is initially frightened, as she is not allowed to talk to strangers, but she and Phillip fall in love, and she invites him to meet her family at the cottage that evening.

Meanwhile, Flora and Merryweather argue over the colour of Aurora's gown, 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 she met again. Heartbroken, Aurora cries in her room. Phillip tells his father of the peasant girl he met and wishes to marry, in spite of his prearranged marriage. King Hubert fails to convince his son otherwise, leaving him equally devastated.

The fairies take Aurora to the castle to await her birthday celebrations, where she will finally see her parents. Maleficent appears and lures Aurora into a dark tower away from the fairies, and tricks her into touching the spindle of a cursed spinning wheel. Aurora pricks her finger, fulfilling the curse. The three fairies place the sleeping Aurora on a bed in the highest tower and place a powerful spell on all the people in the kingdom, causing them to sleep until the spell on their princess is broken. They overhear a sleepy conversation between the two kings, and realize that Phillip is the man with whom Aurora has fallen in love. They rush to find him, but he is abducted by Maleficent at the cottage. She reveals to Phillip the enchanted princess and her plan to lock him away for a century until he is on the verge of death, then 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 the Shield of Virtue. An enraged Maleficent surrounds the castle with thorns but fails to stop Phillip. She teleports in front of him and transforms into a gigantic dragon. They battle, and Phillip throws the sword, blessed by the fairies, directly into Maleficent's heart, causing her to fall to her death.

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 argument over Aurora's gown while the happy couple dances, living happily ever after.

## Cast and Characters

* Mary Costa as Aurora
* Bill Shirley as Prince Phillip
* Eleanor Audley as Maleficent
* Verna Felton, Barbara Jo Allen and Barbara Luddy as Flora, Fauna and Merryweather
* Taylor Holmes as King Stefan
* Verna Felton as Queen Leah
* Bill Thompson as King Hubert
* Bobby Amsberry, Candy Candido and Pinto Colvig as Maleficent's Goons
* Hans Conried as Herald
* Dallas McKennon as Owl/Diablo
* Marvin Miller as Narrator

## 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 Graunke Symphony Orchestra from September 8 through November 25, 1958.

The Classic Disney: 60 Years of Musical Magic album includes "Once Upon a Dream" on the green disc, and "I Wonder" on the purple disc. Additionally, Disney'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" labelled 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 Disney Channel 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 Disney 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 Disney 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.

## Production

### Story Development

In November 1950, Walt Disney announced that he was developing Sleeping Beauty as a feature animated film. Writing on the film began in early 1951, in which partial story elements originated from discarded ideas for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs including Maleficent's capture of Prince Phillip and his dramatic escape from her fortress, and Cinderella, where a fantasy sequence featured the leading protagonists dancing on a cloud which was developed but eventually dropped from the film. By the middle of 1953, director Wilfred Jackson had recorded the dialogue and assembled a story reel, and was to commence preliminary animation work where Princess Aurora and Prince Phillip were to meet in the forest and dance; Disney, however, decided to throw out the sequence, delaying the film from its initial 1955 release date.

For a number of months, Jackson, Ted Sears and two story writers underwent a rewrite of the story, which received a lukewarm response from Disney. During the story rewriting process, the story writers felt the original fairy tale's second act felt bizarre and, with the wake-up kiss serving as a climactic moment, they decided to concentrate on the first half, finding strength in the romance. However, they felt that little romance was developed between the strange prince and the princess, so the storyboard artists worked out an elaborate sequence in which the king organized a treasure hunt. The idea was eventually dropped when it became too drawn out and drifted from the central storyline. Instead, it was written that Prince Phillip and Princess Aurora would meet in the forest by random chance while Princess Aurora (who was renamed Briar Rose) was conversing with the forest animals. Additionally, because the original Perrault tale had the curse last one hundred years, the writers decided to shorten it to a few hours with the time spent for Prince Phillip to battle the goons, overcome several obstacles and fight off against Maleficent transformed into a dragon.

The name given to the princess by her royal birth parents is "Aurora" (Latin for "dawn"), as it was in the original Tchaikovsky ballet. This name occurred in Charles Perrault's version as well, not as the princess's name, but as her daughter's. In hiding, she is called Briar Rose, the name of the princess in the Brothers Grimm's version variant. The prince was given the princely name most familiar to Americans in the 1950s: Prince Phillip. Named after Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, the character has the distinction of being the first Disney prince to have a name as the two princes in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (The Prince) and Cinderella (Prince Charming) are never named.

In December 1953, Jackson suffered a heart attack, as a result of which directing animator Eric Larson of Disney's Nine Old Men took over as director. By April 1954, Sleeping Beauty was scheduled for a February 1957 release. With Larson as director, whose unit would animate the forest sequence, Disney instructed him that the picture was to be a "moving illustration, the ultimate in animation" and added that he did not care how long it would take. Because of the delays, the release date was again pushed back from Christmas 1957 to Christmas 1958. Fellow Nine Old Men member Milt Kahl would blame Walt for the numerous release delays because "he wouldn't have story meetings. He wouldn't get the damn thing moving".

Relatively late in production, Disney removed Larson as supervising director and replaced him with Clyde Geronimi. Directing animator Wolfgang Reitherman would join Geronimi as sequence director over the climactic dragon battle sequence, commenting, "We took the approach that we were going to kill that damned prince!" Les Clark, another member of the Nine Old Men, would serve as the sequence director of the elaborate opening scene where crowds of the citizens in the kingdom arrive at the palace for the presentation of Princess Aurora.

### Art Direction

The film's animation style moved away from the Rococo of Cinderella; rather than drawing on fashion and female beauty standards of the time, it was inspired by distinctive visual combination of Medieval art imagery and Art Deco design.

Kay Nielsen, whose sketches were the basis for Night on Bald Mountain in Fantasia – was the first to produce styling sketches for the film in 1952. The artistic style originated when John Hench observed the famed unicorn tapestries at the Cloisters located at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. When Hench returned to the Disney studios, he brought reproductions of the tapestries and showed them to Walt Disney, who replied, "Yeah, we could use that style for Sleeping Beauty."

Eyvind Earle joined Walt Disney Productions in 1951, first employed as an assistant background painter for Peter Pan before being promoted to a full-fledged background painter in the Goofy cartoon "For Whom the Bulls Toil" and the color stylist of the Academy Award-winning short Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom. For Sleeping Beauty, Earle said that he "felt totally free to put my own style" into the paintings he based on Hench's drawings, stating, "Where his trees might have curved, I straightened them out ... I took a Hench and took the same subject, and the composition he had, and just turned in into my style." Furthermore, Earle found inspiration in the French Renaissance, utilizing works from Albrecht Dürer, Limbourg Brothers, Pieter Bruegel, Nicolaas van Eyck and Sandro Botticelli, as well as Persian art and Japanese prints. When Geronimi became the supervising director, Earle and Geronimi entered furious creative differences. Geronimi commented that he felt Earle's paintings "lacked the mood in a lot of things. All that beautiful detail in the trees, the bark, and all that, that's all well and good, but who the hell's going to look at that? The backgrounds became more important than the animation. He'd made them more like Christmas cards". Earle left the Disney studios in March 1958, before Sleeping Beauty was completed, to take a job at John Sutherland Productions. As a result, Geronimi had Earle's background paintings softened and diluted from their distinctive medieval texture.

### Animation

Before the animation process began, a live-action reference version was filmed with live actors in costume serving as models for the animators, which Walt Disney insisted on because he wanted the characters to appear "as real as possible, near flesh-and-blood". However, Milt Kahl objected to this method, calling it "a crutch, a stifling of the creative effort. Anyone worth his salt in this business ought to know how people move". 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. Stanley previously provided live-action references for Cinderella and later for Anita from 101 Dalmatians, and portrayed Polly Crockett for the TV series Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier.

The role of Prince Phillip was modelled 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. The live-action model for Maleficent was Eleanor Audley, who also voiced the character. Dancer Jane Fowler was also a live-action reference for Maleficent. Among the actresses who performed in reference footage for this film were Spring Byington and Frances Bavier. The role of King Stefan was modelled by Hans Conried, who had previously modelled Captain Hook and George Darling in Peter Pan (1953).

Because of the artistic depth of Earle's backgrounds, it was decided for the characters to be stylized so that they could appropriately match the backgrounds. While the layout artists and animators were impressed with Earle's paintings, they eventually grew depressed at working with a style that many of them regarded as too cold, too flat, and too modernist for a fairy tale. Nevertheless, Walt insisted on the visual design, claiming that the inspirational art he had commissioned in the past had homogenized the animators. Frank Thomas would complain to Ken Peterson, head of the animation department, of Earle's "very rigid design" and its inhibiting effect on the animators, which was more problematic than working with Mary Blair's designs, to which Peterson would respond that the design style was Walt's decision and, like it or not, they had to use it. Because of this, Thomas developed a red blotch on his face and had to visit the doctor each week to have it attended to. Production designer Ken Anderson also complained: "I had to fight myself to make myself draw that way." Another character animator on Aurora claimed that their unit was so cautious about the drawings that the clean-up animators produced one drawing a day, which translated into one second of screen time per month.

Meanwhile, Tom Oreb was tasked as character stylist that would not only inhabit the style of the backgrounds, but also fit with the contemporary UPA style. Likewise with Earle's background styling, the animators complained that the character designs were too rigid to animate. Oreb had originally designed Aurora to resemble actress Audrey Hepburn but, according to animator Ron Dias, "Eyvind redesigned her. She became very angular, moving with more fluidity and elegance, but her design had a harder line. The edges of her dress became squarer, pointed even, and the back of her head came almost to a point rather than round and cuddly like the other Disney girls. It had to be done to complement the background." For Maleficent, animator Marc Davis drew from Czechoslovakian religious paintings and used "the red and black drapery in the back that looked like flames that I thought would be great to use. I took the idea of the collar partly from a bat, and the horns looked like a devil". However, in an act of artistic compromise, Earle, with final approval on the character designs, requested the change to lavender as red would come off too strong, in which Davis agreed to.

Veteran animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston were assigned as directing animators over the three good fairies – Flora, Fauna and Merryweather. Walt Disney urged for the fairies to be more homogeneous, which Thomas and Johnston objected to, with Thomas stating that they "thought 'that's not going to be any fun'. So we started figuring the other way and worked on how we could develop them into special personalities". John Lounsbery animated the "Skumps" sequence between Kings Hubert and Stefan. Chuck Jones, known for his work as an animation director with Warner Bros. Cartoons, was employed on the film for four months during its early conceptual stages when Warner Bros. Cartoons was closed when it was anticipated that 3-D film would replace animation as a box office draw. Following the failure of 3-D, and the reversal of Warner's decision, Jones returned to the other studio. His work on Sleeping Beauty, which he spent four months on, remained uncredited. Ironically, during his early years at Warner Bros., Jones was a heavy user of Disney-style animation until Tex Avery got Warner out of the Disney style. Another notable animator who worked on the film for part of its production was Don Bluth, who worked as an assistant animator to Lounsbery. Bluth would leave after two years but eventually came back in the 1970s.

### Casting

In 1952, Mary Costa was invited to a dinner party where she sang "When I Fall in Love" at the then-named Los Angeles Conservatory of Music. Following the performance, she was approached by Walter Schumann, who told her, "I don't want to shock you, but I've been looking [for Aurora] for three years and I want to set up an audition. Would you do it?" Costa accepted the offer and, at her audition in the recording booth with George Bruns, she was asked to sing and do a bird call, which she did initially in her Southern accent until she was advised to do an English accent. The next day, she was informed by Walt Disney that she had landed the role. Eleanor Audley initially turned down the choice role of Maleficent as she was battling tuberculosis at the time, but reconsidered.

## Release

### Original Theatrical Run

Disney's distribution arm, Buena Vista Distribution, originally released Sleeping Beauty to theatres in both standard 35 mm prints and large-format 70 mm prints. The Super Technirama 70 prints were equipped with six-track stereophonic sound; some CinemaScope-compatible 35 mm 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 January 1959, Sleeping Beauty grossed approximately $5.3 million in theatre rentals (the distributor's share of the box office gross) from the United States and Canada. Sleeping Beauty's production costs, which totalled $6 million, made it the most expensive Disney film up to that point, and over twice as expensive as each of the preceding three Disney animated features: Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and Lady and the Tramp. The high production costs of Sleeping Beauty, coupled with the underperformance of much of the rest of Disney'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 Alice in Wonderland (1951), which was not initially successful either, Sleeping Beauty was never re-released theatrically in Walt Disney's lifetime. However, it had many re-releases in theatres 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 70 mm 6 channel stereo and went into wider release later the same year in both 70 mm and 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 1993 (as was advertised on the 1992 VHS release of Beauty and the Beast) but it was cancelled and pushed back two years later to 1995. Sleeping Beauty's 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 nearly $691 million, placing it within the top 40 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 70 mm 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 70 mm, 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 70 mm format. A screening of the final remaining 70mm print of this film was included in the 70 mm & Widescreen Film Festival at the Somerville Theatre, September 18, 2016.

### Home Media

Sleeping Beauty was released on VHS, Betamax, and LaserDisc on October 14, 1986, in the Classics collection, becoming the first Disney Classics video to be digitally processed in Hi-Fi stereo. During its 1986 VHS release, it sold over one million copies. The release went into moratorium on March 31, 1988. The VHS was first released on November 6, 1989 in the United Kingdom. The VHS was first released on around 1988-1990 in over 20 countries worldwide.

The film underwent a digital restoration in 1997, and that version was released to both VHS and LaserDisc in widescreen as part of the Masterpiece Collection. The 1997 VHS edition also came with a special commemorative booklet included, with brief facts on the making of the movie. The VHS was re-released on around 1994-1997 in over 30 countries worldwide.

In 2003, the restored Sleeping Beauty was released to 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 Walt Disney 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. The Special Edition DVD was released on around 2002-2004 in over 40 countries worldwide.

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 Disney Classic "Once Upon A Dream" sung by Emily Osment; and featuring Daniel Romer as Prince Philip. The Platinum Edition DVD was released on October 27, 2008 in the UK. The Platinum Edition DVD and Blu-ray were released on October 2008-2009 in over 60 countries worldwide. The Blu-ray format of any Disney feature produced by Walt Disney himself.

The film was released on a Diamond Edition Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital HD on October 7, 2014, after six years since its first time on Blu-ray. The Diamond Edition Blu-ray and DVD were released on around 2014 in over 80 countries worldwide. Sleeping Beauty was re-released on HD digital download and Blu-ray on September 24, 2019, as part of the Walt Disney Signature Collection in honour of the film's 60th anniversary.

## Reception

### Critical Response

Bosley Crowther, writing in his review for The New York Times, complimented that "the colours are rich, the sounds are luscious and magic sparkles spurt charmingly from wands", but criticized its similarity with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. He further wrote that "the princess looks so much like Snow White they could be a couple of Miss Rheingolds separated by three or four years. And she has the same magical rapport with the little creatures of the woods. The witch is the same slant-eyed Circe who worked her evil on Snow White. And the three good fairies could be maiden sisters of the misogynistic seven dwarfs." Time harshly wrote that "Even the drawing in Sleeping Beauty is crude: a compromise between sentimental, crayon-book childishness and the sort of cute, commercial cubism that tries to seem daring but is really just square. The hero and heroine are sugar sculpture, and the witch looks like a clumsy tracing from a Charles Addams cartoon. The plot often seems to owe less to the tradition of the fairy tale than to the formula of the monster movie. In the final reel it is not a mere old-fashioned witch the hero has to kill, but the very latest model of The Thing from 40,000 Fathoms." Harrison's Reports noted that "It is doubtful, however, if adults will find as much satisfaction in Sleeping Beauty as they did in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, with which this latest effort will be assuredly compared because both stories are in many respects similar. While Beauty is unquestionably superior from the viewpoint of the art of animation, it lacks comedy characters that can be compared favourably with the unforgettable Seven Dwarfs."

Among more favourable reviews, Variety praised the singing voices of Mary Costa and Bill Shirley and noted that "some of the best parts of the picture are those dealing with the three good fairies, spoken and sung by Verna Felton, Barbara Jo Allen and Barbara Luddy." Kate Cameron, reviewing for The New York Daily News, described the film as "enchanting" and as a "picture that will charm the young and tickle adults, since the old fairy tale has been transferred to the screen by a Disney who kept his tongue in his cheek throughout the film's animation."

In a retrospective review, Carrie R. Wheadon of Common Sense Media gave the film five out of five stars, writing, "Disney classic is delightful but sometimes scary". The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reported that the film received a 90% approval rating with an average rating of 8.2/10 based on 40 reviews. Its consensus states that "This Disney dreamscape contains moments of grandeur, with its lush colours, magical air, one of the most menacing villains in the Disney canon."

## Awards and Nominations

The film is recognised by American Film Institute on these lists:

* 2003: AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes & Villains:
	+ Maleficent – Nominated Villain
* 2006: AFI's Greatest Movie Musicals – Nominated
* 2008: AFI's 10 Top 10:
	+ Nominated Animation Film