Lorna wrote: ↑April 7th, 2024, 10:48 am
at the risk of sounding kinda pretentious, I am at present hard at work writing and drawing A short-form ILLUSTRATED STORY and- as such- I've been watching animation.
and as such I rented
SLEEPING BEAUTY (1959) on YOUTUBE- and watched and rewatched it- i've already seen it MANY times- wore the tape out one year when I was about 8 or so...and for a while, it was MY FAVORITE ANIMATED MOVIE...
All these years later, I have to amend that statement to: "it has my favorite LOOK of any animated movie-" and not only is it gorgeous, but the climax is marvelous, the use of TCHAIKOVSKY'S MUSIC PERFECTION (even timed to sound edits like the dragon snapping)- but at the heart of this version is a glaring fault that grows harder to ignore with time- THE TITLE CHARACTER IS BARELY A PRESENCE IN IT (someone did a breakdown on imdb and I don't recall it exactly, but she has something like 18 lines and doesn't appear until 30 minutes in and also has no dialogue and little presence in the last half as well.
also also, I could not help but notice how the animators used a few little work-saving "tricks" this time around- portions of this movie involve very little actual animated cels and instead have a camera move across a background...I guess it's a silly thing to complain about when HAND DRAWN ANIMATION is all but DEAD, but I still couldn't help but notice, and I'm not really complaining- GOD KNOWS it could not possibly by a LOVELIER MORE IDYLLIC FILM.
EDIT- Also also, the scene where the two kings argue over their children while the minstrel who looks like IGGY POP gets drunk behind their backs irritates me. it stops the film DEAD in its TRACKS.
Probably the issue of making the part of the Princess in Sleeping Beauty a mostly marginal one comes from the original fairy tale itself. The first part all happens when she is a baby, and then she's asleep for most of the rest of the tale. That in itself doesn't lead to much of a part. So, fortunately, for the movie they built up those three wonderful fairies, Flora, Fauna, and Meriweather, who do have plenty of personality and are absolutely charming to watch. And then you also have the alarming Maleficent, one of the Disney company's most alarming villainesses. That makes it into a pretty flavorful film, and my second favorite of all the Disney animated films (behind Beauty and the Beast), even though as you said, the scene with the kings and the tipsy servant is very sluggish.
I didn't notice the animated shortcuts in some scenes, but it has been a while since I saw it. I do think it looks beautiful as a film though, with the best-looking animation that the company ever did. But that quality came at a severe cost. Sleeping Beauty was animated for the 70 MM version of Technirama (a short-lived widescreen process from Technicolor) and it required that the animation frames be much larger than the Disney company was used to, which in turn drove up the budget. It cost around $6 million in 1959, very pricy for the time, and did not make back its investment on the first release. I also have the general feeling that they likely went overtime with animation as well, given that (just having got out the DVD copy), the film has a 1958 copyright, but didn't arrive until a month later in January 1959. Most likely, it was planned for a Christmas 1958 release, but couldn't make that date.
The result was that the Disney company cut back on new animated films, and the ones that were released were released with more basic animation styles filled with cost saving techniques (be it using the Xerox method that Walt himself disliked on 101 Dalmatians or the much later Oliver and Company, or by tracing new animation over old sketches from previous films, as in Robin Hood, which reused some underlying movements from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs). This period lasted until they unleashed a computer clean-up service for hand-drawn animation on 1990's The Rescuers Down Under. They did however break the bank for 1985's The Black Cauldron, which was meant to be the debutante coming-out ball for the new generation of animators, and like Sleeping Beauty, it was filmed in 70 MM Technirama. Cauldron cost $44 million in 1985, and it by far the most handsome and best looking animated film of that 30 year period, even though the film found few takers, then or now (Disney even neglected its very existence in a recap of its history that appeared on the Snow White DVD) and also suffered from some last -minute cuts to decrease the film's graphic qualities in certain scenes (you and I might be some of its biggest cheerleaders, although I did have to laugh on ye olde boards when you used some GIFs to explain the general mood of children and parents at a 1985 screening you attended).
By the way, if you are talking about the old IMDb boards, many of the ones for individual films have been archived at a website called filmboards. To get to a film's page, you have to type in the title to the search box and wait for the box of matching titles to descend, click from there, and then click the matching title again on the index that comes up. It's a bit cumbersome, but it is so nice to see the old posts again.
I finished timing the Sleeping Beauty DVD. The princess has more than 11 but less than 12 minutes screentime, and a large portion of that time, she isn't saying or singing a word. She does not appear until 18 minutes in and she's not even allowed to say a word after she wakes up. But then again, even the prince who battles Maleficent doesn't have much more to work with. Despite his heroics, he doesn't have a single line in the last 29 minutes of the film.
(seriously, i read that at 5:00 am this morning and I am STILL laughing.)
