Sleeping Beauty
Year: 1959
Rating: G
Length: 75 minutes / 1.25 hours
Even though the whole Disney Princess franchise has a target demographic (that’s more aligned with my daughter), I do have a favorite Princess movie. It’s Sleeping Beauty (1959), but not for the reasons you might think. Sure, Sleeping Beauty is one of the few Princess films where the Prince plays a major role—even going so far as to have to fight a dragon to save the kingdom. However, the technical prowess on display here is perhaps forgotten by modern standards. And the fact they use Tchaikovsky for the soundtrack is a huge plus.
As a Princess film, Sleeping Beauty has a few tropes it shares with its sister films. There’s the bumbling father figures, the fantasy creatures added for comic relief, and the (by now) standard house style for all characters. It certainly spends a lot of time in its middle with almost meaningless filler, which doesn’t even pad it out past 75 minutes. I can forgive all of this because I know they created these movies with children in mind. It might be scary at a few key scenes for younger kids, but my 4-year-old didn’t seem to mind.
What Sleeping Beauty really has going for it is the technical beauty that lies beneath the surface. Technicolor made the colors pop, and they took full advantage of it by making the three fairies red, green, and blue. On my wide-screen television, nothing is cropped. In fact, there are actually black bars on the top and bottom to maintain the original aspect ratio. That so many of these technical achievements are now an industry standard (or were the inspiration for them) speaks volumes about this film’s legacy.
A technical achievement while still abiding by the Princess formula, I give Sleeping Beauty 4.5 stars out of 5.
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