Walter Elias Disney was born in Chicago on December 5, 1901,
to an Irish-Canadian father and a German-American mother. The family
raised Walt, his sister, and his three other brothers on a farm
near Marceline, Missouri. An unusually energetic boy, Walt developed
a passion for drawing at an early age, along with an equally intense passion
for salesmanship. He sketched relentlessly, then sold his sketches
to neighbors, friends, and family. Moving back to Chicago for high
school, Disney continued to draw but also took photographs, wrote
for the school paper, and attended the Academy of Fine Arts in the
evenings. A thirst for adventure led him to attempt military service
in 1918, but he was too young to enlist.
Instead, he joined the Red Cross as an ambulance driver and official
chauffeur. In 1923, Walt followed his older
brother, Roy, to Hollywood, carrying with him only a few drawing
implements, one completed short animated film subject, and almost
no money. Securing borrowed funds, he and his brother began an animated
production company in their uncle’s garage. Disney’s entrepreneurial
spirit and inspired imagination led quickly to the development of
the Disney empire.
While Walt Disney’s success as a businessman is legendary,
his artistic accomplishments should not be overlooked. Over the
course of his career, he stretched the limits of animated film by
constantly innovating and perfecting new methods of animation. Before
he was twenty, Disney became the first animator to seamlessly combine live-action
footage with drawn animation. In releasing the world’s first fully
synchronized sound cartoon, “Steamboat Willie,” in 1928,
Disney also introduced the public to the character of Mickey Mouse.
He introduced Technicolor to his productions in the early 1930s
and used a revolutionary multiplane camera technique as early as
the mid-1930s. Throughout his career, Disney
and his teams innovated in the realms of effects animation, special
processes, multiple exposures, props, and camera tricks.
The amazing success of Disney’s early films gave him unusual freedom
to expand and experiment further, despite the Great Depression and
World War II. In the thirties, when the nation’s economy was at
its lowest ebb, the budgets for his films seemed staggering—Snow
White and the Seven Dwarfs, for example, cost an astonishing
$1.4 million. Still,
the studio (constructed in Burbank in 1940)
tightened its belt a bit during wartime, devoting much of its money
and energy to the production of government-commissioned propagandist
and military training films. In the 1950s,
Disney created the Disneyland theme park in California and debuted
the wildly successful “Disneyland” anthology series, later renamed “Walt
Disney’s Wonderful World of Color.” By the time the workaholic Walt
Disney died on December 15, 1966,
his studio had released eighty-one feature films and won forty-eight
Academy Awards. Today, the corporation which bears his name continues
to expand and forge ahead in the fields of computer animation and
restoration.
Sleeping Beauty was Walt Disney Pictures’
sixteenth animated feature and, at the time, the most expensive
of his films to produce. Making the film took more than six years
at an estimated cost of $6 million, a figure
that was totally unheard of for an animated feature in Disney’s
day. The lengthy production period resulted in part from the fact
that Disney was preoccupied with the creation of Disneyland and
the development of future projects. He rarely visited the studio,
yet much of the creative process depended on his explicit approval.
The film process for Sleeping Beauty employed
a new film size—Super Technirama 70. The 70-millimeter
filmstrip was twice as wide as the 35-millimeter
usually used both then and now and captures backgrounds with stunning
clarity. It also employs a 2.35:1 aspect
ratio, meaning that the width of the screen runs 2.35 times
as wide as its height. Even today, 1.33:1 and 1.85:1 aspect
ratios are more commonly used. The super-widescreen format allowed
for the radical content and design of the film to be presented in
a noticeably new way, with crystal clear focus and ultra-sharp backgrounds spread
over more frame area. In contrast, other famous Disney films like Cinderella, Peter
Pan, and Alice in Wonderland employ softer geometries
and softer focuses.
Background painter Eyvind Earle based his radically detailed backgrounds
on medieval, pre-Renaissance, and Gothic art. Artists who influenced
his designs include Pieter Breughel and Jan van Eyck, as well as
other Dutch, Italian, and Greek masters. The incredible detail of
the art parallels the more adult content of this film as compared
with Disney’s earlier animated features. Sleeping Beauty, unlike
the Mickey Mouse films or even Snow White, emphasizes
human characters and renders death, sadness, and longing with realistic
displays of emotion. The epic widescreen style also lends to the
importance of spaces in conveying the emotional temperature of a
scene. Earle answered directly to Walt Disney but supervised the
visual design of the film by using an assembly line to divide up
the labor. For example, Frank Armitage, an acquaintance of the Mexican
muralist Diego Rivera, focused on the wide, sweeping backgrounds.
Marc Davis supervised Princess Aurora’s and Maleficent’s characters.
Beginning in 1956, widescreen blockbusters
rose in popularity, a trend that Disney attempted to capitalize
on with Sleeping Beauty. Mammoth epic films shot
in widescreen format changed the film world as they appeared one
after another, including War and Peace (directed
by King Vidor, 1956), The Ten Commandments (Cecil
B. DeMille, 1956), Ben-Hur (William
Wyler, 1959), and Lawrence of Arabia (David
Lean, 1962). These epic films are longer
than Sleeping Beauty—all of them are over three
and a half hours long—but given its artistic scope and ambition, Sleeping
Beauty deserves the title of epic as well.
Sleeping Beauty also stands out among
other animated films because of its score. The music of the instrumentalists
and singers plays for the duration of the movie. Only in rare moments
does all instrumentation or song drop out. In most cases, a moving
score sweeps the film along as an undercurrent. Disney chose to
adapt Tchaikovsky’s music for “The Sleeping Beauty” ballet, and
in choosing to draw from such a grand composer for his seemingly simple
family film, Disney declared the timelessness and artistic merits
of Sleeping Beauty and brashly placed it in a canonical
tradition. Disney spared no expense for its technical production,
either. George Bruns, who is also noted for composing original tunes
for Pirates of the Caribbean, The Jungle
Book, and the 1950s hit The Ballad
of Davy Crockett, recorded the score in Germany with state-of-the-art
equipment.
Sleeping Beauty has the distinction of
being the last film that Disney personally produced. Recently, Sleeping
Beauty became the second film to receive a thorough computer
restoration, in which a team of forty computer technicians pored
over all 108,000 frames of
the film to clean and refurbish the colors. The print that the crew succeeded
in creating, with its rich hues and subtle saturations, actually
surpasses the print of the film’s initial 1959 release.
