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.
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Date: 2020-02-14 07:11 pm (UTC)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.