Sleeping Beauty

Clyde Geronimi is the credited supervising director of this 1959 Disney feature about Aurora, cursed at birth; Eric Larson, Wolfgang Reitherman and Les Clark directed sequences. The look belongs to Eyvind Earle. Walt Disney gave him the key backgrounds plus character design and colour; Earle drew on pre-Renaissance Northern European painting, on Dürer, Van Eyck and Bruegel. An ordinary Disney background took a day; an Earle background could take ten. The directing animators felt the styling swallowed their characters and appealed to Walt, who kept Earle. Super Technirama 70 enlarged the artwork and the workload. Begun in 1950 and planned for 1955, it arrived in 1959; a six million dollar production returned about five million on first run. Walt then imposed a daily drawing quota and moved to the Xerox process on One Hundred and One Dalmatians, ending its hand-inked cels. Its one Academy Award nomination was Music (Scoring of a Musical Picture) for George Bruns; Porgy and Bess won. Aurora holds a small share of the seventy-five minutes and speaks no line after waking; the three fairies and Marc Davis’s Maleficent carry the film. A good fit if you are content with frames built to be looked at, backgrounds competing against figures. Not for you if you expect the title character to drive her own story.