Okay, I am back from my trip and as you can imagine, I didn't have a lot of time to really pick a movie. In situations like that, I like to do a review of one of my comfort movies, unfortunately I've kind of already reviewed all of them, The Emperor's New Groove, The Nightmare Before Christmas, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, so I figured I would do the next best thing and review a movie that I was still familiar with. I have made comments about Sleeping Beauty in the past, and I already reviewed that Maleficent movie a while back, so I figured it was about time to really put my full opinions out there. I have described it as "Classic Disney's equivalent of Frozen" or something to that extent. What do I mean by that, and is that really a bad thing?
The famous story of Sleeping Beauty is a classic Fairy Tale, we all know it, and Disney does a pretty fair retelling of the story. At a celebration of the birth of the Princess Aurora, the evil Fairy Maleficent curses the princess to prick her finger on a spinning wheel's spindle and die. To protect the Princess, the three good fairies, Flora, Fauna and Merryweather, take Aurora into the woods and disguise her as a peasant girl. On her sixteenth birthday, the Fairies intend to return Aurora to her father, so she can be wed to the Prince Philip. However, Maleficent manages to find out and thwarts their entire plan. I think a lot of people may view this as a particularly weak story, and I won't really disagree, but at the core of this movie is a fairy tale, and most of those are not particularly strong or deep stories. As a fairy tale, Sleeping Beauty does do a decent job of telling the tale. I don't think it's as strong as Cinderella, but I can imagine a worse telling of this story.
Another thing people might, and have, criticized this movie for are the characters, particularly the leads... sort of. Aurora and Philip are not the most interesting characters in Disney history, and honestly I don't really know if I can truly call them "The leads". It really does feel like the real "leads" of this movie are the three good fairies, they're the ones that have the biggest discussions, the big dilemmas, even arguably something of an arc. Even then, I wouldn't say they're the best characters in the movie, and you know exactly who I think that honour goes to. Maleficent is easily one of Disney's best villains, and she really has the best of everything in the movie, she has the best design and the best performance. Not that the rest of the performances are bad, but Eleanor Audley absolutely steals the show with this performance, in fact I think this is better than her performance as Lady Tremaine. I feel I should also talk about the two kings, King Stefan and King Hubert, but I feel they could have mostly been cut from the movie.
On the topic of "The best of the movie", I think we can all agree that Sleeping Beauty is one of Disney's most beautiful movies. I've heard it described as "Disney's Living Tapestry" before in a 2019 Article headline by Jen Seggio for moviebabble, and I got to be frank, I absolutely agree. The artstyle and design work is genuinely some of the most gorgeous work of the Disney Crew in this era, if I had to rank all the pre-Death era movies by how beautiful they looked, I think this would top the list, or it would tie with Fantasia. Speaking of, the music in this movie is alright, the backing score is fantastic, but I think the songs are not the best. Actually, that is not entirely accurate, because their is really only one real song throughout the entire movie, and it's repeated like five times. Even the best Disney songs I don't really want to listen to at five points in the same movie. It's a shame because Once Upon a Dream is genuinely a decent song, like I probably should have given it an honourable mention on my list of favourite Disney songs, and there are two other songs in the movie, but they aren't very memorable.
I think I kind of laid out why I view Sleeping Beauty as the Pre-Death equivalent of Frozen, it's an okay at best movie with a weak story and mostly weak characters, but the animation is really great, and it has that one song that overshadows the rest. The only real difference is that Sleeping Beauty has a fantastic villain, while Frozen does not. Still, I don't think that makes this movie "bad" per se, just not one I think I'd actively choose to watch very often. I can imagine this being someone's comfort movie, like the movie you put on when you're having a bad day or are just really sad. Honestly, I get that, I wouldn't argue that Muppet Treasure Island is the best Muppet movie, but it is still one of my biggest comfort movies. It's kind of hard for me to recommend as a movie, but at the same time I can't really not recommend it, I do think it's one of those movies you need to see at least once, so for that, I'll give it a Slight Recommendation. Not a great movie, but I'm glad I had the opportunity to see it.
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