Sleeping Beauty (1959) [Special Edition – 2-Disc Set] – DVD

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
story adaptation Erdman Penner, from the Charles Perrault version
directing animators Milt Kahl, Frank Thomas, Marc Davis, Ollie Johnston, John Lounsbery; supervising director Clyde Geronimi; sequence directors Eric Larson, Wolfgang Reitherman, Les Clark

by Bill Chambers

"Heralded by audiences and critics alike, Sleeping Beauty was the final fairy tale to be produced by Walt Disney himself. Now fully restored with revolutionary digital technology, its dazzling colors, rich backgrounds, and Academy Award-nominated orchestrations shine brighter than ever. When an enchanted kingdom and the most fair princess in the land falls prey to the ultimate mistress of evil, the fate of the empire rests in the hands of three small fairies and a courageous prince's magic kiss. Their quest is fraught with peril as the spirited group must battle the evil witch and a fire breathing dragon if they are to set the Beauty free. From spectacular action to the breathtaking pageantry of the princess and her kingdom, Sleeping Beauty has something to charm every member of your family." — Sleeping Beauty DVD liner summary

The second animated feature shot in CinemaScope after Disney's own Lady and the Tramp, Sleeping Beauty looks on the widescreen frame as a vast frame for the spread of darkness. This is Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs with twenty years' worth of successes and failures factored in, Disney's most fatalistic vision and one of their most gratifying when all's said and done. The picture is so doomy that its happy ending feels more coma-dream than fairy-tale resolution, something like the conclusion to Taxi Driver; in its world of medieval tapestries come to life, joy looks out of place. Joy, in fact, becomes nothing less than a magnet for evil, with villain Maleficent dooming Princess Aurora on the festive occasion of her birth to an untimely grave (by a poisonous prick from a spinning wheel on her sixteenth birthday–a menstrual nightmare from which the animators do not flinch) and later stumbling upon the secreted-away Aurora by scouting the kingdom for excess merriment.

The last gasp of the traditional Disney technique (even as Eyvind Earle's moody, French Renaissance-inspired backdrops, dismissed by supervising director Clyde Geronimi as "Christmas cards," radically departed from the house style), Sleeping Beauty is a Disney movie in which you hear the phrase "to Hell," in which magic is no match for destiny. The good-fairy troika of Flora, Fauna, and Merriweather cannot lift Maleficent's curse, only swap Aurora's death for Aurora's slumber. Nor can they preserve her virgin purity, once she's under the spell of that twinkling needle. Disney alters the Charles Perrault fable in the usual ways, adding anthropomorphized objects (like the dancing mop, recycled from Fantasia) and self-reflexive humour (the prince objects to an arranged marriage, protesting "It's the fourteenth century!"), and they elide the story's ingenious but unsatisfying–read: uncinematic–solution to Sleeping Beauty being unwakable for a century, i.e., putting the entire castle to sleep along with her. (There is also a bizarre epilogue about her offspring that most retellings wisely drop.) Yet this retelling has a damn-the-torpedoes quality that seems to reflect the misery of its making, and gives it a subversive edge.

THE DVD
A trailer for it glimpsed on DVD as early as spring 2002, the Sleeping Beauty 2-Disc Special Edition finally hit store shelves last week; it was worth the wait. The digitally-refurbished version of the film is presented in anamorphic widescreen and unwatchable pan-and-scan transfers (the former measuring 2.30:1) on the same side of the first, dual-layer platter, and the THX-certified image will come as a revelation even to owners of the LaserDisc from a few years back, which was a touch soft and plagued by the usual artifacts of that format, like dot crawl and video noise. The film's supple verdancy translates well to the small screen, the green palette a multi-tiered symbolic gesture (in Maleficent's sickly skin is mirrored Aurora's youthful naiveté; in the lush forest, Aurora's youthful abundance) that had for many years lost its potency to celluloid degradation. While individual brush strokes may have been overzealously smoothed-over, charming shadows cast by the layering of cels remain.

The Dolby Digital 5.1 remix that goes with this Sleeping Beauty is tasteful all-around, with mild deployment of the subwoofer at best. Sound effects are not nearly as brittle as one perhaps expects. Supplementing the film is a feature-length commentary hosted by Disney historian Jeff Kurtti, who does a commendable job of bridging excerpted quotes from the participants–Eyvind Earle (art director), Mary Costa (voice of Aurora), Ollie Johnston (supervising animator), Marc Davis (supervising animator), Frank Armitage (background painter), and contemporary Disney artists Mike Gabriel and Michael Giaimo–with pre-scripted trivia. Much of the talk revolves around Earle's challenging blueprint for the film, a visual scheme (described as "pre-Renaissance") united by his desire to stick to geometric shapes and maintain deep focus. The successful result is singular among Disney movies, but it clearly wasn't always bonhomie at the studio during Earle's tenure. (Earle left before the film was completed.) Trailers for The Lion King, Brother Bear, Finding Nemo, The Santa Clause 2, Kim Possible: The Secret Files, Disney Princess, and Disney Electronics Princess Style round out Disc One.

There are two menu options at the front of Disc Two: "Games, Music & Fun" and "History & Behind the Scenes". In the interest of time, I skipped the former, with the exception of breezing through the "Princess Personality Profile Game"–I just had to know. (It turns out that of all the Disney heroines, Aladdin's Princess Jasmine matches my disposition.) At any rate, here's a brief rundown of what to expect from the latter section:

The Making of Sleeping Beauty (16 mins.)
Leonard Maltin should ease up on the lipstick. This is basically an abridgement of the yak-track that leaves out crucial bits of business, although it does show dancer Elaine Stanley as the working model for Aurora, while the commentators more vociferously credit Audrey Hepburn as the character's physical inspiration.

Story
-"The History of the Story" summarizes previous tellings of the tale of Sleeping Beauty. Perrault's sounds positively, er, grim: the prince has a cannibalistic mother who attempts to feed his and Aurora's children to hungry vipers!
-"The 1951 Outline" is read aloud for no good reason, like the remainder of the text-based features on this disc. Indeed, many changes were implemented between this treatment and the 1959 realization of Disney's Sleeping Beauty–for the better.
-Current Disney artist Andreas Deja non-optionally introduces "Storyboard Sequences"; thumbnail sketches and finished animation for sequences 15 ("The fairies put the castle to sleep") and 17 ("The Capture of the Prince") are compared in a split-screen layout. 

Production
A feeble featurette ("The Music" (3 mins.)) joins an interesting one ("The Design" (3 mins.), wherein Earle shows his step-by-step instructions for reproducing Sleeping Beauty's scenery techniques), snippets and photos of the "Live Action Reference"s for the Briar Rose (a.k.a. Aurora) dance, Prince Phillip's battle against the Maleficent dragon, and Maleficent herself (Eleanor Audley, also used as the voice and guide for Cinderella's wicked stepmother), a 3-minute piece on the computer-restoration process, and a "Widescreen-to-Pan-and-Scan Comparison" (4 mins.). Deja returns to explain the aspect ratio dilemma for newbies, but his tone curiously suggests that he's more in favour of pan-and-scan–let's hope that faint clicking sound was not the corporate gun being cocked behind his head. 

Sleeping Beauty Galleries
-Layout and Backgrounds
–Sleeping Beauty Storybook
-Disneyland
-Concept Art
-Character Design
-Posters
-Storyboards

Publicity
The film's teaser, 1959 theatrical, and 1995 re-release trailers, the latter of which sells Sleeping Beauty as a breathless action film–rather compellingly. 

Sleeping Beauty Scrapbook
"Behind the Scenes" stills, additional publicity materials, a gallery of merchandise, and theme park designs by Earle.

Last but not least, find three fascinating specials that initially aired on the "Disneyland" TV series. Premised on a quote from Robert Henri, author of The Art Spirit, 4 Artists, 1 Tree contrasts the diverse drawing styles of then-Disney staffers Earle, Davis, Joshua Meador, and Bob Carlson by assigning each of them the same tree to paint. The results are striking and, one hopes, on display somewhere. Peter Tchaikovsky (30 mins.) is a sanitized docudrama of the composer's life up until his scoring of the "Sleeping Beauty" ballet, while James Algar's Oscar-winning, 29-minute Grand Canyon (not to be confused with the Donald Duck cartoon Grand Canyonscope) is a CinemaScope tour of the landmark that was attached to prints of Sleeping Beauty in 1959. All three of these peculiar shorts are so obscure that their inclusion makes the Sleeping Beauty package doubly collectible.

75 minutes; G; 2.30:1 (16×9-enhanced), 1.33:1; English DD 5.1; CC; 2 DVD-9s; Region One; Disney