Welcome TO Beauty
Production
Overview and
art direction
Sleeping
Beauty spent nearly the entire decade of the 1950s in
production: the story work began in 1951, voices were recorded
in 1952, animation production took from 1953 until 1958, and the
stereophonic musical score, partially based on Tchaikovsky's
ballet of the same name, was recorded in 1957. The film holds a
notable position in Disney animation as the last Disney feature
to use hand - inked cels.
Beginning with the next feature, One Hundred and One Dalmatians,
Disney would move to the use of xerography to transfer
animators' drawings from paper to celluloid. Its art, which Walt
Disney wanted to look like a living illustration and which was
inspired by medieval art, was not in the typical Disney style.
Because the Disney studio had already made two features based on
fairy tales, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Cinderella,
Walt Disney wanted this film to stand out from its predecessors
by choosing a different visual style. The movie eschewed the
soft, rounded look of earlier Disney features for a more
stylized one. Since Super Technirama 70 was used, it also meant
the backgrounds could contain more detailed and complex artwork
than ever used in an animated movie before.
Disney artist Eyvind Earle was the film's production designer,
and Disney gave him a significant amount of freedom in designing
the settings and selecting colors for the film. Earle also
painted the majority of the backgrounds himself. The elaborate
paintings usually took seven to ten days to paint; by contrast,
a typical animation background took only one workday to
complete. Disney's decision to give Earle so much artistic
freedom was not popular among the Disney animators, who had
until Sleeping Beauty exercised some influence over the style of
their characters and settings.
Characters and story development
The name
of the beautiful Sleeping Beauty is "Princess Aurora" (Latin for
"dawn"), in this film, as it was in the original Tchaikovsky
ballet; this name occurred in Perrault's version, not as the
princess's name, but as her daughter's. In hiding, she is called
Briar Rose, the name of the princess in the Brothers Grimm
variant. The prince was given the only princely name familiar to
Americans in the 1950s: "Prince Phillip," named after Prince
Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. He is also the first Disney prince to
be given a name. Snow White's prince was nameless, and
Cinderella's is merely referred to as "Prince Charming." The
dark fairy was aptly named Maleficent (which means "Evil-doer").
Walt Disney had suggested that all three good fairies should
look alike, but veteran animators Frank Thomas and Ollie
Johnston objected, saying that three identical fairies would not
be exciting. Additionally, the idea originally included seven
fairies instead of three, as there are seven fairies in the
story's main reference, Perrault's version. In determining
Maleficent's design, standard depictions of witches and hags
were dismissed as animator Marc Davis opted for a more elegant
look centered around the appearance of flames, ultimately
crowning the villain with "the horns of the devil."
Several story points for this film came from discarded ideas for
Disney's previous fairy tale involving a sleeping heroine: Snow
White and the Seven Dwarfs. They include Maleficent's capture of
the Prince, as well as her mocking him and the Prince's daring
escape from her castle. Disney discarded these ideas from Snow
White because his artists were not able to draw a human male
believably enough at the time. Also discarded from Snow White
but used in this film were the ideas of the dance with the
makeshift prince, and the fantasy sequence of the prince and
princess dancing in the clouds, which was also considered but
dropped from Cinderella.
Live-action reference footage
Before animation production began, every shot in the film was
done in a live-action reference version, with live actors in
costume serving as models for the animators. The role of Prince
Phillip was modeled by Ed Kemmer, who had played Commander Buzz
Corry on television's Space Patrol five years before Sleeping
Beauty was released. For the final battle sequence, Kemmer was
photographed on a wooden buck. Among the actresses who performed
in reference footage for this film were Spring Byington, Frances
Bavier, and Helene Stanley.
Helene Stanley was the live action reference for Princess
Aurora. The only known surviving footage of Stanley as Aurora's
live-action reference is a clip from the television program
Disneyland, which consists of the artists sketching her dancing
with the woodland animals. It was not the first or last time
Stanley worked for Disney; she also provided live-action
references for Cinderella and Anita from One Hundred and One
Dalmatians, and she also portrayed Polly Crockett for the TV
series Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier. An episode of
The Mickey Mouse Club television series features Stanley
re-enacting scenes from the Sleeping Beauty for the Mousketeers
to watch (a clip from this episode is included as a special
feature on the Cinderella Platinum Edition DVD). |
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