Sleeping Beauty: CE

Disney’s third full-length feature film (following Snow White and Pinocchio) finally makes its transition to DVD and what a transition! Visually astounding and fully restored, Sleeping Beauty has made full use of being a two-disc set with a magnificent feature and a super complement of extras.

Hardly a secret by now, the story follows the life of Princess Aurora. Upon her birth in her happy kingdom, the self-professed Mistress of All Evil, Maleficent, drops a nasty spell on her. This ensures a spindle of a spinning wheel will stick her on her 16th birthday and she’ll drop stone cold dead on the tiles. Her three fairy godmothers (or something) change the spell to ‘asleep’ rather than ‘dead’ and take her into hiding until after she turns 16. However, they’ve underestimated Maleficent and her minions, and she lures Aurora to the last spinning wheel in the country. Once Aurora’s safely in dreamland, those crazy fairies then make everyone but Prince Phillip (not that Prince Phillip) go to sleep (so as not to miss their princess while she is sleeping) until he can save the day.

"They say if you dream a thing more than once, it’s sure to come true"

By no means a complex story, Sleeping Beauty nevertheless took six years and the enormous sum (back then) of six million dollars to complete. This is more than evident in the fact that the backgrounds alone have been lovingly rendered in full colour and designed for 70mm, rather than the regular 35mm of all animated film back then. This is the first animated film to have ever done that, and it looks simply astounding.

The most unfortunate part of this film, however, is in the under use of the excellent character Maleficent. Being the baddie, she is just superb and disappears for most of the feature. She’s certainly the most interesting character visually, with a wide variety of emotions contorting and stretching her face and she is sadly underrated and wasted. For shame!

As just mentioned, this is delivered in the full cinema aspect of 2.35:1 and is 16:9 enhanced. This is the way animation should always be seen – large, vibrant and clear with sharp edges and a clean picture. The picture is absolutely perfect and that’s the only word qualified to describe it. In fact, the film is so clear, you can even see the relative thicknesses of paint on the cels! This occurs only occasionally and if you didn’t know it was there, you probably wouldn’t notice it, but I marvelled at the clarity of a picture that would allow such insight. Astounding, but certainly not unusual for Buena Vista. They’ve truly outdone themselves this time and no mistake.

A couple of brief negatives I should mention though; there are some moments where we see reflection from the cels. This has always been a problem when shooting cel work, particularly when a background is black or very dark, because a clear cel over the top suddenly creates a black mirror. These moments are fleeting, happily, and don’t really detract from the film itself, particularly as they usually occur during action/night shots.

The only other minor error is in Maleficent’s staff. At 17:09 and again at 59:59 the globe on top of her staff changes colour in the painting stage. This doesn’t have anything to do with plot; I made sure of that, it’s just an old problem with the original cels. Oh well. All of us cel painters have cheated at some time or another.

Being an earlier Disney work, there are naturally the moments of singing in a style to which we are wholly unaccustomed in this early 21st century. Whilst it’s entirely competent, it really sucks overall and is in that high pitched warbling strangle so popular at the time. Too bad it sounds so damn good.

As to dialogue, this is all nice and clear but for some of Maleficent’s demonic minions. These guys all tend to be uneducated demon spawn types who can’t string sentences together, so it’s not entirely the fault of the voices, but the script’s. Either way, the story hardly hinges on their parts. As to sound effects, these are just fine with a nice resonance and the music goes the same way. With the magnificent choice of DTS Sound or Dolby Digital 5.1 surround, it’s kinda like being a kid in a liquor store (much like the comedic lute player during an important meeting between the two kings). Dynamic sound whatever your choice. What else is interesting, is the THX Optimizer Audio Test you can use to put your machine through its paces and get it set up correctly. A very thoughtful inclusion here, which in light of the massive list of extras to follow, I’ll keep here in the audio bit.

Better get yerself a cuppa before beginning on this bit because it goes on forever.

For a start, I’ll just discuss the extras on disc one. The Making of Sleeping Beauty is a recent 16 minute 4:3 program that interviews original artists on the film, which is quite relevant and interesting.

Rescue Aurora – The Game follows and this is in the form of multiple choice to which you must attach the significance of the spoken clue to the correlating image to move ahead. Usual fare here, and not even a congratulations - you rule, when you get to the end. No video reward treat either.

Next up comes the Ink and Paint Studio where we can colour in the characters ‘just like a Disney Artist’ (I guess they don’t want us to know the cel painters aren’t considered ‘artists’ per se, nor are they paid the same). There is only one way to paint them with no variation and you get a little stern lecture when you attempt it wrong. Bah!

Finally for this disc, there’s the almost commonplace Art Attack Featurette in which we get to build a magic castle. Again, usual fare but it is funny watching this English git stumble over the term ‘loo rolls’ like it’s some sort of vulgar blasphemy. Idiot.

Disc two features some great stuff that seriously makes use of being the bonus disc. First of all, I’ll make note of the fact there are four major chapters on this one, entitled Story, Production and Still Galleries plus additional Featurettes.

Story features firstly an indepth analysis of the history of the origins of Sleeping Beauty, and its various incarnations before this version. The most unfortunate part of this is the interview with Leonard Maltin, the noted film historian, who appears to be wearing lipstick. Then the 1951 Outline which is basically the entire treatment for the film (those of you who don’t know, the ‘treatment’ is a kind of written synopsis of the entire production and story). It reads a lot like a kid’s book, which is obviously in keeping with the theme.

Finally, two storyboard to screen sequences. These are Sequence 15 and Sequence 17 and run under the original musical score, the first running for 2:45 and the second for 1:30. Not bad, considering someone spent some time on a storyboard for once and not the hasty scribbles we usually get.

Production is next and features six major chapters. The Music of Sleeping Beauty runs for 2:45 and again features our red-lipped hero Leonard Maltin and the singing voice of Aurora, Mary Kosta.

The Design features Leonard again, goes for 3:20 and features discussion on the unique style Sleeping Beauty employs.

Creating the Backgrounds is only a sad minute ten and doesn’t divulge a great deal, unfortunately.

Live Action Reference is interesting, featuring two very short vignettes in black and white 4:3 of people in costume pretending to be the characters in the film for the benefit of the artists. This also includes a still gallery with 23 reference shots.

The Restoration speaks at length about the salvage of Sleeping Beauty from decay and relates its title of only the second ever film to be fully restored frame by frame.

Widescreen to Pan And Scan comparison speaks for itself and truly allows us to appreciate the film in its full majesty. Thank God they restored this movie and delivered it whole. The comparison runs a split screen for six minutes or so.

Still Galleries are quite immense and have all been delivered as pictures hanging in a computer rendered 3D castle. It’s a bit cheesy and poorly rendered, but anyway, we’re not here to look at the walls. Again, there are six separate galleries which all have various rooms. The titles run thus: Layouts and Backgrounds, Sleeping Beauty Storybook, Posters, Disneyland Walkthrough, Concept Art and finally Character Design. Phew. getting tired yet?

Layouts and Backgrounds takes us through the process from layouts to final rendered backgrounds and has four rooms.

The Sleeping Beauty Storybook is an actual look at the prop built for the original movie. It’s entirely like a children’s book and even has a heavily gilt cover that we see open and close the film.

Posters features the myriad designs used around the world to promote the film and looks sensational. I’ve always been a fan of poster art and these are a great look at some things very hard to find these days.

Disneyland Walkthrough is a series of images from Disneyland, of course, all related to the film.

Concept Art is another treat with six rooms featuring all manner of designs and ideas thrown around in pre-production. Fascinating stuff.

Character Design is our final gallery, but it contains six sub-galleries. These are all mostly finished model sheet designs of the characters Princess Aurora (three rooms), Maleficent (three rooms), the Three Good Fairies (two rooms), Royal Householders (two rooms) and Miscellaneous Characters which gets another two rooms. I might add that each of these rooms, and the other galleries, all have at least three used walls with an average of nine works per wall. That’s a lot of artwork!

Featurettes is the final chapter here and thank God because I’m beat. The first is the Sleeping Beauty Scrapbook containing behind the scenes pics (27), Publicity pics (21), Merchandise pics (18 and droolworthy for collectors) and ten concept works and photos of that famous theme park.

The next featurette is my highlight of the entire set. Entitled Four Artists Paint One Tree, this is a documentary made around the time of the film and features four guys in a field somewhere painting a decrepit tree from different angles. Each has a different approach and medium, and whilst the piece is only 4:3 and of atrocious pictorial quality, it is fascinating to watch a pile of crappy, messy lines become a finished work. Absolutely fascinating stuff.

The filler material starts to drift in now with our final two. A thinly linked 29 minute feature entitled The Peter Tchaikovsky Story features animation and live action and is what it says it is, whilst still being fairly crappo.

Last of all, we have a pretty amazing Short Film called Grand Canyon, which won the 1959 Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Subject. Again, 29 minutes long and a visual interpretation of Ferde Grofe’s Grand Canyon Suite, it’s presented in 2.35:1 widescreen without enhancement, unfortunately, but still looks okay. If you can sit through the full thing, good luck to you.

Is that it? Yes, thankfully. I’m ready to pass out. A spectacular collection for such an old film (45 this year) and one well worthy of being the second disc.

The art alone makes this film worth watching or even owning, but add the extras, the sound packages and the overall quality and we have a genuine steal. Hours of stuff to wade through at our leisure and a dynamically restored film that has immense re-viewing potential for years to come, make this one a must have for the discerning animation fan or parents looking for a film that’ll keep the kids entertained for a long time. Having such a short film (at only 72 minutes) they have perhaps over-compensated with the extras package, and who could complain about that? Sensational stuff. Go get it.