Review of Sleeping Beauty (1959) by Jordanlayton — 04 May 2020

Sleeping Beauty is an animated film that Disney released in 1959. I'm happy to say that I found more than expected to enjoy about this movie. Most of what I held on to throughout the short run time were little aspects of the film that seem to have been lost to time, for better or worse.

One example of this is the delicate application of short choral flares that punctuate key moments in Aurora'a life. I haven't seem many films from this era, but this one was my first exposure to this style and I was charmed.

The animation surprised me as well at points in this film. Techniques used to show the magic of Maleficent and the fairies all worked, even when the effects seemed to be drawn on top of existing animation in a different art style.

On a similar note, I actually didn't mind the backgrounds being drawn in a different style than the characters. That choice (likely made out of necessity) combined with the multi-plane camera technique makes the characters pop and provides a feeling of depth that I don't think you get out of other animated films that followed this one.

Speaking of depth, the characters and plot of this movie lack it. This is an archetypal story and in terms of characters, on all accounts, what you see is what you get. Not a huge complaint - I didn't exactly go in expecting fully formed characters.

But still worth mentioning as slight shortcoming.