Sleeping Beauty UNEDITED REACTION (all access)

I absolutely LOVE this movie. I watched it over and over when I was a kid! It does have its own style, and Maleficient makes this movie for me!

Jenny MacRunnel

I have four all-time top Disney animated movies, and this is one of them, largely because of its special visual character. This is the farthest the studio ever went in the direction of giving one artist control over the whole look, and it took them most of the 50s to complete it. The man in charge, the visual stylist, was the painter Eyvind Earle, and things like the squared-off trees in the forest and the frankly medieval-tapestry look of some scenes is all him, and like nothing seen in any other Disney movie. They didn't do rotoscoping, but they did shoot live-action reference footage for all the scenes with human characters. The visual model who enacted Aurora was Helene Stanley -- the same as for Cinderella a decade earlier; but her singing/speaking voice was provided by the opera soprano Mary Costa. Eleanor Audley did both the voice and the visual reference for Maleficent; wasn't she awesome? If you're really interested in this movie, as I am, the DVDs have a commentary track, a 3-way conversation by a current Disney animator, the film historian Leonard Maltin, and John Lasseter of Pixar fame, and it's a lot of fun. Lasseter especially is clearly a longtime admirer of Sleeping Beauty, and in the final fight when Maleficent turns into a dragon, he absolutely geeks out. Maleficent definitely remains my favorite Disney villain (with maybe one rival), because she is so clearly identified with the supernatural powers of evil. When she shouts "Now you must deal with me and all the powers of HELL!"... well, that was a scary thing to hear in a kids' movie in 1959.

DelGuy03

So happy you guys got to this one! It's my favorite of the old Disney classics, simple yet stunning. You could pause the movie at any moment and have a frame-worthy picture. And you nailed it with comparisons to the medieval tapestries - that's exactly the effect they were going for! Fun fact: the score for this movie was largely adapted from the original Tchaikovsky ballet :-)

Of course Minnie! You and Mickie are total icons!! We had to

I love this movie so much, I didn't expect to see this reaction this soon. And I enjoyed the video very much, thank you. :) <3

Minnie Mouse

Voting for The Road to El Dorado to watch next!

Just Lily