Sleeping Beauty (DVD)

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For most of my adult life I've always gotten "Sleeping Beauty" and "Cinderella" mixed up. I saw them in my youth when they first came out, "Cinderella" in 1950 and "Sleeping Beauty" in 1959, but then they began to merge in memory, not helped by the fact that both of them seemed to borrow a good deal from "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." In any case, now that "Sleeping Beauty" is here in a beautifully restored new digital transfer, it's good to have, even if it doesn't measure up in my mind to some of the Disney studio's better animated work before and since.

The movie has several things going for it that are probably more important than its plot or characters. To start, it was the last film personally supervised by Uncle Walt himself. Next, it was the costliest animated feature Disney had produced up until that time. Third, its artwork is based on illustrations from medieval literature. Fourth, it features the music of Peter Tchaikovsky. And fifth, like most of Disney's animated classics, women play the leading roles, both as the heroines and as the villainess. This nod to feminism and women's rights long before it became fashionable in Hollywood is no small matter.

Disney's version of the fable is loosely adapted from the fairy tale "Sleeping Beauty on the Woods," collected by Charles Perrault and published in his "Tales of Mother Goose" (1697). However, it's sometimes hard to tell that there was another story under all of Disney's cutesy trappings and climactic good-vs-evil confrontation. Even the three good fairies are made to look and act more affected than necessary. But it's Disney, so understand the license taken.

The tale begins with the birth of the Princess Aurora. Three good fairies, Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather, and one very bad lady, Maleficent, provide the baby with gifts. Maleficent's gift is a curse on the child; she tells everyone the Princess will prick her finger on a spinning wheel before her sixteenth birthday and die! Fortunately, the third good fairy hadn't provided her gift yet and casts a counter spell that says if the Princess does prick her finger, she will only sleep, not die, until awakened by love's first kiss.

To protect her from malicious spinning wheels, the fairies take Aurora into the woods to a secret place, where they raise her themselves until her sixteen years of danger have passed. Needless to say, sixteen years later while in the woods Aurora meets a handsome prince, Phillip by name, who falls in love with her, thinking her a mere commoner. But before anything more can come of the romance, the evil Maleficent finds the girl, tricks her into pricking her finger, and she falls into a fast sleep. The Prince must find her, battle Maleficent (as a dragon) to get to her, and then awaken her with a kiss. I kept picturing Shrek, so the whole business lost some of its charm.

After all these years, I didn't care too much for any part of the movie. I didn't care for the art work, first of all. Although it represents the one-dimensional illuminations and drawings of the Middle Ages to a certain degree (Disney himself called them moving illustrations), I thought the art looked too consciously flat, too blocky, and too simplistic to make much of an impression; in fact, it looks too much like the rest of the cartoon vogue of the fifties in its modern, stylized vertical and horizontal lines. There are some fine background paintings that remind one fleetingly of vintage Disney in their exquisite detail, true, but most of the art in "Sleeping Beauty" is plain and direct to a fault. Except for a couple of surrealistic forest scenes, there's not a lot that's terribly magical about any of it.

I also didn't care much for Princess Aurora (Mary Costa) or Prince Philip (Bill Shirley). Even though she is most beautiful in appearance and he most masculine, their voice characterizations are rather bland and uninspired, and their attitudes are quite pedestrian, especially Aurora, who is really too Disney sweet for my taste. Now that I think about it, even the Prince seemed drippy. I didn't care for Maleficent (Eleanor Audley), either, because she reminded me too much of Snow White's evil stepmother, the Queen; besides which I couldn't figure out what Maleficent's motivations were for cursing the baby princess. She just shows up and casts her wicked spell on the kid, no questions asked. I guess she is evil incarnate and doesn't care who knows it. Heck, I didn't even find the narrator (the usually dependable Marvin Miller, uncredited) very effective, his voice sounding too much like the ordinary guy next door. Finally, I didn't care for the three old biddies (voiced by Verna Felton, Barbara Jo Allen, and Barbara Luddy). They seemed annoying busybodies, "Arsenic and Old Lace" types, for all their goodness and virtue. And I say this loving "Arsenic and Old Lace."

Moreover, I didn't care for the mundane lyrics the Disney people put to Tchaikovsky's sublime orchestral music. I would have been content if Disney had merely presented the composer's music in its purely balletic form. Nor did I care for the overly precious little forest animals that Disney seemed determined to put into all of his productions. And I didn't care for most of the film's prosaic action--the old ladies baking cakes, the lovers frolicking in the meadow, the two fathers quarreling. It's only in the last fifteen minutes that the movie shows any signs of life, and by then it's almost over.

I know all of this sounds blasphemous because "Sleeping Beauty" is considered one of Disney's masterpieces. Maybe it was. Once upon a time. Maybe it still is entertaining for the youngest of children, I don't know. But the Wife-O-Meter walked out on the picture at the halfway point, bored. I concur. Adults will find "Sleeping Beauty" a chore at best. One trivia note, though: One can see at a glance where George Lucas got his inspiration for Jabba the Hut's guards in "The Return of the Jedi" once you see Maleficent's minions. It may not bring much joy, but I thought I'd mention it.