Disney's Sleeping Beauty
is a film that needs no introduction, but here's one anyway. This
timeless animated epic was released in 1959, and actually was a
financial failure at the time. Boasting a budget of over six million
dollars, it failed to even make that back upon release and resulted
in Disney posting a LOSS for the fiscal year. Keep in mind this was
the 1950s, if you adjusted that number for inflation it'd be
like 90 trillion dollars or something. People were fired right and
left to the point where Disney didn't attempt another fairy tale
based animated film until thirty years later with the insanely
successful Little Mermaid.
Critics were fairly harsh on virtually
every aspect of the movie, which certainly hurt its box office
receipts. It also didn't help the film is incredibly similar to
Disney's 1937 film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, both
featuring an evil witch whose jealousy of a younger woman causes her
to curse her into a deathlike state that is only curable by the kiss
of true love. Hell, Snow White and Aurora both even hide out in a
cabin with a gang of goofy little people. But, like many great films
that missed their mark upon release, Sleeping Beauty
eventually carved out its own legacy and now is regarded as one of
the greatest animated films of all time. Time to see why this is
with the first half of the latest Original Vs. Remake showdown, as
it's time for A Ghoul Versus Disney's Sleeping Beauty!
We open in the traditional far away
land, as its rulers, King Stefan and Queen
It's-The-1950s-So-I-Don't-Get-A-Name, are holding a celebration to
honour their newborn daughter Aurora. Their longtime friend from
another kingdom, King Hubert, is first to pay his respects along with
his young son Phillip. Stefan and Hubert have long wished for their
kingdoms to be united, so they decide Phillip and Aurora will wed
when they come of age. They don't tell Phillip any of this because
he's still in the “girls are gross and have cooties” stage, which
is confirmed by the look on his face when he sees the baby in the
crib. Come on kid, she's going to be LOADED once the merchandise
checks start rolling in. Just imagine all the kick ass toys you'll
be able to buy once you two get hitched!
The next guests to arrive are the three
good fairies: Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather. They fly down and coo
over the baby Aurora, blessing her with the gifts of beauty, song,
and- whoa, hold that thought. The doors burst open and lightning
starts crackling everywhere as the next person shows up in a burst of
flames: the ebony clad sorceress Maleficent, she of cheekbones TO DIE
FOR. Despite her all black attire, ominous theme music, and mocking
voice, I'm sure she's not evil.
Maleficent presents her gift to Aurora:
a curse that on her sixteen birthday she'll prick her finger on a
spinning wheel... and die. Okay, Maleficent is evil. Stefan orders
his guards to seize her, but she vanishes as dramatically as she
entered. Wow, she sure sucked the air out of that party.
Merryweather gives her gift to counter Maleficent's curse as best she
can, casting a spell that Aurora won't die but rather will fall into
a deep sleep until she's awoken by a kiss from her true love.
Stefan, just to be on the safe side,
orders every spinning wheel in the kingdom destroyed. The fairies
still don't think this is good enough though, especially since
Merryweather doesn't exactly seem to be the brain trust of the three.
Flora cooks up a plan that they'll transform themselves into
peasants and raise Aurora themselves in a cottage out in the woods,
figuring this will hide her true identity from the evil sorceress.
Since this is a fairy tale I'm going to cut this movie WAY more slack
than the usual movies I review on here, but this has always raised so
many questions for me.
Why don't they just lock Aurora in an
empty room until her Sweet Sixteen is over? For that matter, why
didn't Maleficent just blast her into oblivion at the celebration?
Okay, maybe she wants to cause the royal family as much misery as
possible by letting them know their child has a death certificate
hanging over her head as they watch her grow up, but if that's the
case why not just strike when she's like nine years old? Or, if
Aurora somehow manages to beat the curse, why wouldn't she just
recurse her the next day? And why does Maleficent hate the crown so
much? What's their history? This is likely a case of being careful
what one wishes for, as I'm sure the remake will address a few of
these questions since it's going to be from Maleficent's point of
view. Although I am curious as to what the pro-side of sentencing a
newborn girl to death is going to be...
We jump ahead sixteen years, where
Maleficent is PISSED. She's never been able to find what happened to
Aurora since the fairies hid her, despite having her army of heavily
armed mutant animals called the Goons scour the land for her. When
one of the Goons reveals they've been looking for a baby the entire
time, she blasts them with lightning and sends her pet crow, Diablo,
to find a sixteen year old girl. We finally get to meet said girl,
whom the fairies have named Briar Rose, as it is now the fateful day
Maleficent cursed all those years ago.
The fairies want to make her a dress
and a cake for her birthday, sending her out on a mission to pick
berries while they do so. Basket in hand, she heads out to the
forest... WITHOUT WEARING SHOES. Screw getting pricked by a wheel,
what about tetanus?! The good fairies are the worst caretakers EVER.
Nah, that's too harsh. At least they didn't respond “maybe”
when Aurora asked them if it was okay to let a bus full of kids die.
She sings as she makes her trip, which
attracts the attention of a nearby dashing young man on horseback. He
tries to find her but ends up falling in a river, hanging up his hat
and cloak to dry. Meanwhile Aurora regales her woodland pals about a
dream she had where she met a prince, the animals noticing the man's
clothes not too far away so they steal them. With each of the
animals manning a part of the clothes, they begin to “dance” with
Aurora. The man walks in on this scene and makes it INCREDIBLY more
awkward when he cuts in on the animals and dances with Aurora himself
when her back is turned. She doesn't introduce his crotch to her
filthy foot like she probably should, but instead continues to dance
with him. They also sing the movie's theme song, “Once Upon A
Dream”, which applies perfectly to their relationship and they both
somehow know the words for.
When he asks her name, Aurora gets
panicked and runs off. The man asks when he can see her again so she
blurts out where she lives. Hmm, that's the textbook definition of
sending out mixed signals there, Princess. Back at the cottage, we
see the fairies don't have a promising career in either clothing
design or baking as both their projects have turned out disastrously.
Merryweather convinces them to break out the wands and use magic to
make everything right, which OF COURSE just happens to grab the
attention of a passing by Diablo. Way to go fairies, you had one
job, ONE JOB!
The fairies hide when they hear Aurora
returning, surprising her with her gifts while Diablo spies on them.
When she brings up the stranger that she's... now in love with after
knowing him for THREE MINUTES, the fairies inform her she can't be
with him because she's betrothed to Prince Phillip. Aurora questions
how she could ever marry a prince when she's just a peasant, so the
fairies reveal the rest of her back story. She doesn't care about
any of this though as she wants to be with the man of her dreams, so
she runs off to her room crying. Frozen this most definitely ain't if you're
looking for strong and progressive heroines.
After a very pointless scene of Stefan
and Hubert getting hammered off wine, Hubert runs out to greet his
son Phillip, who- and you might want to sit down for this shocker- is
the man from the forest! DOUBLE GASP! Phillip tells his father all
about the stranger that he's going to MARRY... DAMN DUDE, slow the
hell down! Yes, I know: fairy tale logic. But geez, in these kind
of worlds it seems you couldn't even go down to the store to buy some
bread without getting married. It really makes you wonder how anyone
ever got anything done when every waking second they were falling in
love and making lavish wedding plans.
Hubert goes into full “HELL NO!”
mode, so Phillip storms off to his room crying. Hahah, just kidding.
He totally ignores his father and rides off to marry Aurora. Ain't
no man gonna tell him what to do, amirite fellas? But he's not going
to find her at the cottage, as we see the fairies are sneaking Aurora
into the castle at that very moment. They give her the royal crown,
but she's still in tears over being separated from a man whose name
she doesn't even know. They leave her alone in her room to collect
herself, which is handy because this is the moment Maleficent chooses
to materialize in her fireplace. She transforms into a will-o-wisp,
hypnotizing Aurora and leading her up a staircase to a room where she
makes a spinning wheel appear. The fairies figure out what's going
on pretty quickly, but they're too late, finding a comatose Aurora
lying on the floor.
That night Stefan holds a majestic
party for Aurora's homecoming, the fairies unable to bring themselves
to break the bad news to him so they PUT THE ENTIRE KINGDOM INTO
COMAS! Wow, now THAT'S how you cover up a colossal fuck up! Are we
sure Maleficent is the villain of this thing? She only put on person
into an enchanted sleep, the “good” fairies just iced at least a
hundred people! As Hubert falls asleep he mutters something about
his son meeting a peasant girl, which makes Flora realize the
identity of the mystery man.
They fly off to find him as naturally
he wasn't in the kingdom when they cast their spells, so he's still
awake. We see him knock on the cottage door, being told to enter by
a voice that's totally not evil. Oh, hi there Maleficent! She has
the Goons bound and gag Phillip, taking him back to her castle at
Forbidden Mountain. She locks him in his dungeon, taunting him with
the truth about Aurora and the sleep she is now trapped in. After
telling him she plans to release him when he's an old man while
Aurora won't have aged a day, she leaves to get some sleep. Being a
complete bitch can be quite draining, I imagine. The fairies, who
found Phillip's hat in their cottage and figured out what happened,
sneak into the castle and free him.
They give him the badass Sword of Truth
and the Shield of Virtue because he's going to have to face all the
upcoming dangers alone... for some reason. We know the fairies have
some amazingly potent magic, they can't lend some of that to Phillip
in the name of kicking some Goon ass? They had no problem putting an
entire kingdom to sleep, what's a few mutant animal men between
friends? Phillip escapes with TONS of help from the fairies which
sure seems like help to me, so I'm starting to think they're just
making this up as they're going along.
Maleficent is woken up by all of this
noise, and if you're keeping score this is the part where the movie
gets AMAZING. Up til now it has featured some gorgeous animation,
character design, and backgrounds, in addition to some great voice
acting and music, but here it gets legendary. Maleficent casts a
spell that summons a massive forest of thorny vines around Stefan's
castle to block Phillip's path, but he's able to get through them
with his sword and continued help of the fairies to her shock. No
longer messing around, she materializes right in front of the young
prince and she means business.
She transforms into THE MOST AWESOME
DRAGON ever seen in movie history, and I do mean EVER. Even the
fairies know to back off for this one. Phillip bravely charges at
her, deflecting her fire with his shield. They battle, Maleficent
igniting the vines on fire all around them because she decided this
just wasn't quite epic enough yet. Phillip climbs up a cliff to save
himself from getting roasted alive, Maleficent backing him down to
the very edge of it. Before he falls to his doom, the fairies summon
their courage and enchant his sword, which he then hurls directly
into Maleficent's heart. BOOM! She dies, along with her magically
summoned flames and vines.
They way now clear, Phillip makes his
way to Sleepytown and Aurora's side. He delivers the kiss sixteen
years in the making, which wakes everyone up. The happily reunited
couple present themselves to their parents and begin dancing to Once
Upon a Dream.
Cue the credits.
Now THAT'S how you do an ending! It's
barely three minutes long, but is by far one of the most memorable
and visually striking battles to ever throw down. This movie was
seven years in the making, production designer Eyvind Earle throwing
himself into the art style day and night to create something that was
unlike anything that had ever been seen before in an animated film.
He even used a brand new widescreen format that allowed the film to
be more detailed than any other that had been released to date. The
amount of power Walt Disney gave him over the film was unprecedented
at the time, but completely justified given the end result we were
graced with.
Story wise this is about as generic as
possible, but complex plots have never been a fairy tale's main
strength. Handsome prince meets girl, falls in love with girl,
rescues girl from the villain, marries girl. It's kind of
interesting that for ostensibly being the hero of the movie, Phillip
is barely in it. Aurora certainly isn't the hero either, as she
spends most of it in a coma and almost never speaks. In fact, when
you take out her singing, she only has eighteen lines of distinct
dialogue in the film and doesn't say a word after Phillip awakens
her.
I would say the fairies are the true
stars of this movie, as they carry the majority of the plot and are
the most interesting characters by miles. Maleficent is a
spectacular villain, foregoing the cartoonish evil usually seen at
the time to be straight up menacing. When she's in frame you are
spellbound, every line she says just dripping with power. They're
enough to balance out what are ostensibly the main characters, and
are more than enough to carry this thing. All in all my favourite
classic Disney movie and a must see, especially the mind blowing art
showcase at the end.
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