Facts > Films > Sleeping Beauty
Sleeping Beauty (1959) Facts
| Director(s) | Clyde Geronimi |
| Producer(s) | No producer listed for this movie |
| Featured Cast | Verna Felton, Barbara Luddy, Barbara Jo Allen, Taylor Holmes, Pinto Colvig |
| Total Facts | 49 |
Madge Blake and Spring Byington were among the actresses who did some live action doubling as the fairy godmothers for the help of the animators. The voice artistes were not chosen because they weren't pudgy enough!
Eleanor Audley - one of Walt Disney's favorite voice artistes, most memorably as the Wicked Stepmother in Cinderella - initially turned the part of Maleficent down, much to Disney's surprise. As it later transpired, Audley was in the midst of battling a bout of tuberculosis and didn't want to tax her voice too much. Fortunately, she changed her mind.
Walt Disney had toyed with the idea of his royal couple dancing in the clouds as a finale for both Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Cinderella. The concept finally got used in Sleeping Beauty. However, the idea was used in the Bongo segment in Fun & Fancy Free.
Walt Disney suggested that all three fairies should look alike, but veteran animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston disagreed with this idea, saying that having them be alike wouldn't be exciting. Also, the idea originally included seven fairies instead of three.
Walt Disney's constant mantra to his animators was that the film could not be like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Bill Shirley and Mary Costa auditioned together to ensure that their voices complemented each other.
George Bruns initially started scoring the film in Los Angeles in 4 track stereo, until he got wind of a new studio in Berlin that used 6 track stereo, so he decamped for Germany. Bruns' efforts were rewarded with an Oscar nomination..
A flame thrower was used to create the dragon breath sound effect for the climax of the movie. Castanets were used for the sound of its snapping jaws.
Although she is the title character, Princess Aurora (as an adult) only appears in the film for 18 minutes.
Among the actresses who performed in reference footage for this film included Spring Byington and Frances Bavier.
Animator Eric Cleworth based the dragon's head movements on those of a rattlesnake about to strike.
Art direction for this movie was inspired by European medieval painting and architecture.
At the time, the most expensive Disney animation. Although it was a hit on its initial release, it still didn't gross enough to recoup its $6 million outlay.
Even though it is not mentioned in the film, Maleficent's pet (the raven) is named Diablo.
Famed Warner Bros. animation director Chuck Jones worked on the film briefly when Termite Terrace closed temporarily during the late 1950s. He found the atmosphere at Walt Disney Productions oppressive because everything anyone did there had to be approved by Walt Disney before, during, and after the process of production. He was more than happy when Warner's animation department reopened, where he stayed until it closed again in 1964.
For the first time on a Disney animated feature, one man, Eyvind Earle, was in charge of the color styling, background design, and the overall look of the film, even painting the great majority of the production backgrounds for this film. Earle's modernistic approach to design and painting resulted provided this film a bold, unique art style, even though his colleagues did not care for his production methods and art style while the film was in production.
HIDDEN MICKEY: When the fairies discuss how to help the king and queen, Merryweather makes cookies in the shape of Mickey Mouse.
In active production from 1951 until the end of 1958, setting a record (for which it is tied with another 70mm Disney film, The Black Cauldron) for being the Disney animated film with the longest production schedule.
In its original release, preceded by the featurette Grand Canyon.
In the original fable, Princess Aurora is the result of a spell cast on the Queen by a magical fish that she had thrown back into a pond after it wound up lying on the bank.
In the original fable, the princess sleeps for 100 years, and the Prince finds her and wakes her up after the aforementioned century has passed. This idea was dropped for the Disney film so that the Prince could be introduced much earlier in the story.
In the original German fairy tale, the Sleeping Beauty is named Briar Rose; she is Princess Aurora in Italian translation.
Live actors in costume served as models for the animators. The role of Prince Phillip was modeled by Ed Kemmer, who had played Commander Buzz Corry on television's Space Patrol five years before Sleeping Beauty was released. For the final battle sequence Kemmer was photographed on a wooden buck. All the live actors' performances were later screened for the animators' reference.
Much of the musical score is based on Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's ballet "Sleeping Beauty". The musical score throughout the film was recorded by the Berlin Symphony Orchestra.
One of the film's iconic scenes - when Briar Rose meets Prince Phillip for the first time to the tune of "Once Upon a Dream" - was called Sequence 8 when it was being produced. It was a particularly hard sequence to get right (Walt Disney rejected it several times) and ultimately had to be done 4 times, almost bankrupting the studio in the process.
One of the first instances when the movie soundtrack album featured the orchestral score instead of just songs from the film. This set the precedent for soundtrack albums that followed.
Only one other Disney animated film was shot in the same format of Technirama and that was The Black Cauldron.
Princess Aurora's long, thin, willowy body shape was inspired by that of Audrey Hepburn.
Princess Aurora's mother does not have a name in the movie, but in promotional materials she is named Queen Leah. Disney Studios have no record of who provided her voice.
Second only to Dumbo (who didn't speak at all), this Disney title character has very few lines of actual dialogue throughout the entire film, which is actually about the three fairies who protect her, not about the Sleeping Beauty herself. Rose/Aurora is only featured in the film in very few scenes and hardly says anything. Her first line is spoken 19 minutes into the film, and her last is delivered after she learns of her betrothal 39 minutes into the film. However, she does sing two songs during this time frame.
Several story points for this film came from discarded ideas from Walt Disney's previous fairy tale involving another sleeping heroine: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. They include Maleficent's capture of the Prince and the Prince's daring escape from her castle. Disney discarded these ideas from Snow White because he believed that his artists were not able to draw a human male believably enough.
Shot on a 35mm Technirama double-frame negative (which is as big as two regular Academy frames joined together) running horizontally through the animation camera, with each frame photographed three times (once with a red filter, once with a blue filter, and once with a green filter). This negative was then printed on both CinemaScope-compatible anamorphic film and Super Technirama 70mm film, the first film released in Super Technirama 70.
Such was the attention to detail brought about by the widescreen process was that some of the character animators were only capable of producing one drawing of their characters a day. 24 drawn images are needed to make up one second of movement on film.
The Disneyland castle was named for this film, even though the park opened four years prior to the film's release.
The elaborate background paintings usually took seven to ten days to paint. By contrast, a typical animation background takes one workday to complete.
The first Disney animated feature to be created for the 70mm format.
The first Disney animated film on which Walt Disney personally worked to be released in high definition.
The last fairy tale produced by the studio up until The Little Mermaid.
The little-known second half of the original Sleeping Beauty fable involves the Prince's attempts to protect Sleeping Beauty and their children from his mother who is an ogress. In the end, of course, she is thwarted and jumps into a pot of live serpents to avoid being killed by her own son.
The ominous piece of music to which Maleficent hypnotizes Aurora into pricking her finger is called "Puss-in-Boots and the White Cat." In Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's ballet, it is used for a comic number in which two cats snarl at and try to scratch each other.
The part of King Stefan was Taylor Holmes' s final role.
The prince is named after Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh.
The restoration process involved four painstaking steps. The first step was to scan the original negative into a computer and subject the entire print to a deflickering procedure, evening out all the worn images and creating a cohesive canvas upon which the restoration artists could work. This was then followed by roto-scoping to extract the principal characters, dust-busting to remove all traces of dust and scuffing, and then re-inserting the characters into their cleaned-up backgrounds. Then all 180,000 frames would be completely repainted by up to 40 people in a process that clocked up nearly 48,000 hours. Once complete, the final product is then scanned onto a new negative.
The second biggest grossing film of 1959, just behind Ben-Hur.
The third Disney film to undergo a painstaking computer restoration, after Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1987 and 1993, and Pinocchio in 1992.
This was in production at the Disney Studios for nearly a decade. Story work began in 1951, voices were recorded in 1952, the actual animation took place between 1953 and 1958 and the stereophonic score was recorded in 1957.
This was the last Disney feature to have cels inked by hand. From One Hundred and One Dalmatians onward, the cleaned-up pencil drawings were xeroxed onto the cels. However, some of the scenes in this movie did use the xerography process.
To help promote the film, the imagineers working on the new Disneyland project modeled the castle on the one in the film.
Various movements from The Sleeping Beauty ballet underwent some reworking for the Disney film. The opening song (Hail to the Princess Aurora) is actually the ballet's final, grandiose movement. Also, the three fairies' theme is based on "The Silver Fairy movement," which, in its original form, is barely a minute long.