IT’S IRONIC: ON initial release, Sleeping Beauty was… well, slept on. Today, Disney’s take on the tale of princess Aurora (aka Briar Rose, and never actually referred to as ‘Sleeping Beauty’ in the film) is more than just a pop-cultural staple — it’s held up as among the highest artistic achievements of the Walt Disney Animation Studio. It’s clear to see why —it’s a breathtaking accomplishment of animation, a moving tapestry rendered in a striking medieval-inspired visual style, a feat of full-on fantasy filmmaking. Every frame of Sleeping Beauty is a work of art in and of itself.
But at the time, audiences didn’t care for it. Like many of Disney’s greatest works, it launched as a colossal flop, resulting in a level of financial failure that —not for the first or last time —nearly bankrupted the studio entirely. Even its critical reception was thorny, crueller than a christening gift from Maleficent. But the scope of its baffling dismissal and eventual reappraisal hews to the inescapable nature of Sleeping Beauty: everything about it is big. Its ambition, its budget —even its Super Technirama 70 widescreen presentation, with a dramatic aspect ratio resulting in astonishingly wide frames. That luxuriously vast canvas was so broad, it effectively demanded twice as much work from its creators to fill, often to their chagrin.
The idea to make Sleeping Beauty big — a landmark achievement from America’s premier animation studio —was there from the start. While much of Disney’s early feature output leaned into the bouncy cartoonal qualities of the studio’s Silly Symphonies shorts, Walt was adamant that its third princess-centric fairy-tale feature (after Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs and Cinderella) should shoot for greater heights. “What we want out of this is a moving illustration,” he told sequence director Eric Larson when production began. “I don’t care how long it takes.” As it turned out, it took a very long time. The studio first registered the title ‘Sleeping Beauty’ with the MPAA in January 1950; the finished film didn’t hit cinemas until