Some might say that Walt Disney abandoned all pretense to high art after Fantasia. Those people are wrong. Sleeping Beauty, recently restored and released in a beautiful video edition, contains ample evidence that Uncle Walt was still exploring many of the same themes that he did with Fantasia. Sleeping Beauty's score, for example, is an adaptation of Tchiakovsky's ballet, and Briar Rose's dialogue is often sung in a lightly operatic manner. The film's visual style is indebted not only to medieval painting and tapestry, but also to Persian miniatures and other similarly stylized landscapes. There are also a few quasi-abstract sequences near the beginning of the movie.
In other ways, Sleeping Beauty is not targeted directly towards the kiddie crowd. Much of the bantering between the two kings and the three fairies recalls the good-natured joshing of clowns in Shakespearean plays. Instead of sticking closely to a fairytale milieu, the screenplay instead aims more toward a medieval romance. The cute forest animals are kept to a minimum, and none of them serve in an anthropomorphic subplot as did the mice in Cinderella. Younger children are likely to find the talkier sequences very tedious, and there are such sequences near the beginning and middle of the film. Older children will probably enjoy the film more.
The animation in all theatrical Disney films is superb, and Sleeping Beauty is no exception. Briar Rose is especially well animated in the dancing sequences, and fans of character animation will be especially pleased by the animation of the virtually identical fairies. Perhaps the film's most famous sequence, the climactic dragon fight presents what is arguably the most convincing and fluid portrayal of a dragon in any feature film. Midnight black, this dragon lunges and flaps its wings not like a sluggish cold blooded beast but as a worthy successor to the Devil in Fantasia. Despite what many contemporary critics charged, the extensive use of rotoscoping in Sleeping Beauty is not readily detectable and (to these eyes) is done very tastefully. None of the film's characters appear to be directly traced from live action.
Like any film, Sleeping Beauty has its flaws. The greatest drawback is The Prince. He is both bland and dashing, like straight man Allan Jones in the Marx Brothers movies, and it is difficult to empathize with him. A more subtle flaw is the screenplay itself. Although written with allusions to Shakespeare (especially with the "star-crossed lovers" theme), few of the characters are sufficiently fleshed out to warrant such pretensions. Maleficient, for example, is perversely evil (she does not want to kill the Prince but keep him a prisoner for a hundred years so that when Briar Rose awakens, she will see her love as an old man) but her evil is never explained. Something besides being slighted at Briar Rose's christening must have angered Maleficient.
Sleeping Beauty is a worthy addition to anyone's collection of Disney movies. If it doesn't have the warmth of Snow White or Pinocchio, it also doesn't have the self-consciousness of Aladdin or Hunchback. Sleeping Beauty remains an impressive achievement and will likely be best appreciated by those adults who have never outgrown the magic and romance of traditional fairytales.
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