Sleeping Beauty

[osprey_archer]

“So is Sleeping Beauty the first Disney movie to pass the Bechdel test?” I asked Julie, as we watched Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather bicker over Aurora’s birthday dress.

After some discussion we decided that Cinderella was probably the first, given all the conversations that Cinderella has with her stepmother about cleaning the grates etc, but Sleeping Beauty is the first one where the female characters conversing actually like each other.

IMO Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather are the real stars of this film: Aurora and Philip are pretty much just along for the ride in this titanic battle between the fairies. (Thought: maybe Maleficent’s curse on Aurora is motivated not just by general petty “you didn’t invite me to the christening” spite, but also “I’m mad at my fellow fairies and want to show them up in public” spite.) It’s all a big fairy chess match, and the humans are mere pawns!

...actually, that’s quite unfair to Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather, who are genuinely goodhearted and truly love Aurora (I’m still mad at the movie Maleficent for butchering Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather’s characters in order to make Maleficent look good), but I would 100% read a retelling that went the “fairy chess match” route.

But nonetheless, Philip could never have gotten out of that dungeon without Flora, Fauna, and Meriweather’s help. Plus, the fairies get all the best lines! Truly a case of the side characters stealing the show.

Comments

[oracne]

A friend of mine loves it best because the three fairies were so very like her grandmother and two of her great-aunts.

[osprey_archer]

Oooh! That sounds delightful.

[kore]

I remember being TERRIFIED by the fight between the prince and the dragon in the theatre. (That's this movie, right?) Most of my memories of seeing Disney in the theatre as a kid involve TERROR and then some nice bits, like "aww, they're dancing."

[sovay]

(That's this movie, right?)

That's it! By the time I rewatched Sleeping Beauty in 2016, I remembered prince vs. dragon and I remembered the final image of the color-changing dress and I had forgotten almost everything else about it. To be fair, it was one of the movies that played after lunch at the summer day camp where my parents sent me for several years in elementary school and I read through almost all of those, looking up only when something really interesting or really upsetting was occurring onscreen: I may not actually have seen the entire thing the first time around. (Cf. why my total memories of E.T. are a bunch of revivified frogs, two psychically drunk ten-year-olds kissing, E.T. saying "Ouch," and a flying bicycle chase. I am confident there was more plot! I may or may not have seen it!) Reencountered in adulthood, it really impressed me. I had forgotten or never known that most of its score was adapted from the Tchaikovsky ballet, and much of the third act plays like Fantasia, with very little dialogue and a beautiful accompaniment of action to music. It opens in a kind of flat, bright, medieval two dimensions that make everyone look like illustrations in a book; only when they begin to speak do they differentiate into a more cartoony style which can shade naturalistically for Aurora, Phillip, and Maleficent, while the fairies and the royal parents and Maleficent's hench-things are an excuse to exaggerate in all sorts of different directions. The backgrounds all look like paintings. There is frequent use of abstracts for spells or reveries. Maleficent's character design occupies this fantastic fine edge between elegant beauty and the uncanny valley. Even the color design of the movie is ridiculously good—Maleficent's green and violet magic, the sunny and shadowy woodlands, the court pageantry in all the reds and blues and golds a herald could ask for. I saw it on 70 mm and do not regret this decision.

[kore]

I saw it on 70 mm and do not regret this decision.

I realized it was gorgeous and vivid as a kid but somehow that made everything worse. I dunno what effect it would have on my psyche seeing it as an adult in high def -- when a friend of mine and I saw the rerelease of Fantasia in the theatre for its 50th anniversary in 1990, we gave up all pretensions at dignity and clutched hands during the Bald Mountain part. (Also, every time I've seen Fantasia in the theatre -- which I think is three or four by now, plus the first one as a kid -- during that part there are always WAILS from the young viewers as that part really gets going.)

[osprey_archer]

Night at Bald Mountain is one of the most horrifying things ever committed to film and I'm amazed that we let children watch it. My fifth grade teacher made a haunted house with just the music from the sequence - you couldn't even see the animation! just hear the music! - and we all had a Pavlovian "OH NO SHIT'S GONNA GO DOWN" reaction when it started playing.

[kore]

My fifth grade teacher made a haunted house with just the music from the sequence - you couldn't even see the animation! just hear the music! - and we all had a Pavlovian "OH NO SHIT'S GONNA GO DOWN" reaction when it started playing.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAACK

AND that wimpy-ass Ave Maria bit afterwards DOES NOT make it better, either.

[osprey_archer]

The music alone was the exact right level of scary for a haunted house... but it would have been way too much if we'd been able to see the animation, too. Why is it so scary? Did no one at Disney ever step back and go "Damn, this is terrifying, maybe we should tone it down"?

[kore]

Why is it so scary? Did no one at Disney ever step back and go "Damn, this is terrifying, maybe we should tone it down"?

I'm convinced someone at Disney had the job of going "No, no, this is GREAT! MORE terror, the kiddies will love it!" Otherwise I am just boggled at the beautiful high quality TRAUMA INDUCING stuff they churned out. I don't think books are the same -- I had a non-censored Grimm's as a kid, with red-hot iron shoes and eyeballs being plucked out and so on, and that never gave me nightmares!

[osprey_archer]

I first saw it at my aunt and uncle's house in Florida and my recollection is that we stopped the film before we even got to the dragon, because the thorn-covered castle was too upsetting, so instead of watching the dragon fight we went to the beach. I didn't watch the whole movie till I was in my twenties.

[kore]

instead of watching the dragon fight we went to the beach

GOOD CHOICE, avuncular family. The f/x in that movie (Maleficent, the finger-prick, the thorns, &c &c) are gorgeous, but SCARY at least for kids.

[sovay]

(I’m still mad at the movie Maleficent for butchering Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather’s characters in order to make Maleficent look good)

I saw Maleficent for the first time about a week and a half after rewatching Sleeping Beauty for the first time since elementary school and the downgrading of the fairies was one of the parts I did not enjoy. I understood that it couldn't retain them as competent parents and run its "hello, beastie" plot, but once it decided to go the route of pure comic relief, I would have strongly preferred something on the order of Tinkerbell—the idea that fairies are so small that they can only hold one thought or emotion at a time, therefore they keep losing track of Aurora because of multitasking issues, not plain dumb nitwittery. Nonhumanness alone could have landed essentially the same jokes. Trying to feed a baby raw carrots, you just look like an idiot, but I can see even a conscientious fairy being puzzled by her human charge's mystifying failure to thrive on the nourishing diet of hearty buttercups and pollen-rich morning dew that perks up even a colicky infant pixie.

Rewatching Sleeping Beauty, I had not remembered and loved the ways in which Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather are spectacular at fairy godmothering but amazingly bad at being human. Aurora just doesn't think so because, like Miranda raised alongside Caliban and Ariel, she has no idea what the human norm looks like and frankly she's not going to get much help from one mildly bemused prince and his sarcastic horse. I love the moment when Merryweather finally stumps upstairs and gets everyone's wands out because she's quite right that Flora knows nothing about dressmaking, Fauna can't bake worth a damn, and personally she hates cleaning and is blowed for a game of soldiers if she's going to do it by hand. Agreed that without them Philip would have been toast.

[osprey_archer]

Given how badly they fail at making Aurora's birthday cake and dress I just can't see how they survived sixteen years without magic. Maybe Aurora does all the actual housework? Maybe when she was young they hired an actual peasant woman to come in and help and Aurora learned everything from her.

Or maybe they were all using their wands on the sly, but for sentimental reasons they wanted to make Aurora's birthday gifts with their actual hands.

[skygiants]

My memory of the climactic dragon fight is is Philip standing there frozen, stressed and confounded, with a magic sword in his hand, while a bunch of fairies are like "LITERALLY ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS POKE THE DRAGON AND IT WILL EXPLODE, WE PROMISE WE'VE GOT THIS"

...admittedly it has been decades so my memories may have, uh, been altered with time ....

[osprey_archer]

I believe there's a little more hack 'n' slash than that, but nonetheless, your main point still stands: the fairies did all the hard work, all Philip has to do is poke the dragon.

[kore]

My parents for some reason got me an illustrated storybook of the film (I think it went along with one of those "while you read" records?) and the back of it was the EXACT scene where the prince loses his shield and looks like he's about to tumble off the edge of the cliff, and I found it so distressing my dad had to tape brown paper over it.

(The dragon was scary, but him poking it was also upsetting!) (We should sue Disney for therapy bills.)