SLEEPING BEAUTY - DVD review

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.

Video:
The image quality is nothing short of gorgeous. Originally presented in Super Technirama 70 and Technicolor, the entire movie has painstakingly been restored frame by frame to its former glory, much as the studio did earlier with "Snow White." Disney claims that over 118,000 individual cells were cleaned and polished to give us the product we now have. It shows. Remastered to THX standards and presented in both a 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen (2.13:1 across my own television, given a degree of overscan) and a standard pan-and-scan fullscreen, the picture is glorious. The colors and definition are outstanding, and the transfer is clean and clear, with practically no grain, haloes, or moiré effects.

Audio:
Disney has remastered the early stereo sound, too, this time in Dolby Digital 5.1 surround, although, truth be told, there isn't a lot of surround to go around except in minor musical ambience reinforcement. The sonics are very smooth, but there is not much to hear at the frequency extremes, the lowest bass and highest treble, nor is there much in the way of dynamics. It's pleasant enough sound, mind you, just not special in any significant way as measured by today's audio standards.

Extras:
The set is beautifully packaged in a slim-line, two-disc box enclosed in a lovely cardboard slipcase. However, once you inserted disc one the player, it's as frustrating as always to make your way to the movie. First off, you have to click through the various FBI warnings and such; then you have to know to click "Menu" or you wind up watching twenty minutes of advertisements and trailers; then you have to wait for the Main Menu to eventually fade into view; and, lastly, you have to click "Next" several more times to get by the Disney logos that precede the film. Whew! It makes a guy wish there were just the movie involved.

Disc one contains a choice of the standard or widescreen versions of the film, the DD 5.1 soundtrack, and spoken English in both widescreen and fullscreen presentations. French and Spanish are available in the fullscreen rendering only, which may be a problem for some listeners. There are also English captions for the hearing impaired. The main bonus item on the first disc is an audio commentary with a whole flock of the production's surviving filmmakers, including Eyvind Earle, the art director; Mary Costa, the voice of Aurora; Ollie Johnston and Marc Davis, two supervising animators; Frank Armitage, a background painter; Mike Gabriel and Michael Giaimo, two Disney artists; and hosted by Jeff Kurtti, a Disney historian. However, this commentary is only available in the widescreen version. To conclude the disc, there are Sneak Peeks at other Disney titles and a THX Optimizer set of audiovisual tests.

Disc two contains the bulk of the extras, and like so many bonus discs these days it's divided into a myriad of different categories, requiring dozens of separate clicks and a literal road map in the enclosed booklet insert to navigate. Why, oh, why can't we get something like a forthright, matter-of-fact documentary for a change, perhaps divided into chapters, that correlates all these little items? Maybe it wouldn't seem like there was so much material available, but it would be a whole lot easier to get around.

Anyway, disc two is divided into two main categories, "History and Behind the Scenes" and "Games, Music & Fun." Among the many extras in the first group are "Once Upon a Dream: The Making of Sleeping Beauty," sixteen minutes; "The Peter Tchaikovsky Story," part of a Disneyland television broadcast of 1959, thirty minutes; and "Grand Canyon," the 1959 Academy Award winner for Best Live-Action Short Film, twenty-eight minutes, which features the famous music of Ferde Grofe. Why "Grand Canyon"? It was paired with "Sleeping Beauty" when it premiered. In addition, there are a whole lot of other bits and pieces like "The Music," with Mary Costa reminiscing about Walt Disney and the making of the film; "The Design," with Leonard Maltin and others discussing the unique look of the film; a "Restoration" segment; a "Widescreen to Pan-and-Scan Comparison"; and a multitude of photo galleries, bonus shorts, 3-D virtual galleries, and theatrical trailers too numerous to mention.

Among the extras in the second group are a "Rescue Aurora" interactive game; a "Princess Personality Game"; a "Sleeping Beauty Ink and Paint Game"; a "Disney's Art Project"; a "Once Upon (Another) Dream" music video; and a "Once Upon a Dream" sing-along song. In all, there are some thirty-eight different items on disc two that a person can click on and experience. I found it all a tad overwhelming, and probably too much of a good thing considering the brevity and simplicity of the movie itself.

Parting Shots:
As I say, maybe "Sleeping Beauty" still works for children, if it doesn't put them to sleep, but I know I was far more disappointed than I thought I would be when I saw it again after a forty-year lapse. The story is so modest and straightforward, the action so commonplace and derivative, and the art work so rigid and direct, the movie made little impression on me beyond its excellent restoration.