Movie Thoughts: Sleeping Beauty (1959)

• Released: 25 December 1959
• Directed by: Clyde Geronimi, Les Clark, Hamilton Luske, Wolfgang Reitherman
  
• Running time: 1 h 15 min
• Rating 3.5/5

Synopsis

A newborn baby grows up while being unknowingly cursed to fall asleep on her seventeenth birthday, with the only escape from this fate being true love’s kiss.

My Thoughts

I promised last year I’d watch every theatrically released Disney animated movie in order and after taking a hiatus from this project for over 6 months I believe it’s time to continue where I left off.

Sleeping Beauty is not the strongest writing or character-wise. The main characters are very bland and don’t even have that many lines. The story is just okay and while I liked the freedom they took from the original fairy tale, it’s still pretty by the books. Prince rescues princess. That’s it, that’s the story.

However, it makes up for the blander mains and writing by having beautiful visuals. The animation is obviously top-notch, but I also really love the art style of this movie and just how things like the architecture and forests look. It looks almost like it were to come out of a medieval painting or a storybook, not quite as realistic but still beautiful nonetheless. I think this is visually my favorite older Disney movie aside from Bambi.

Maleficent was a pretty cool villain, though she didn’t get that much screen-time. I also really liked the three fairies, they really carried the movie and honestly had more going on for them than the main characters. If they movie had just been about them, I honestly don’t think I’d have minded it. I expected them to get on my nerves going in, but they were quite funny actually.

If you want a strongly-told story with great main characters I don’t recommend this one, but if you just want to sit down and have a classic experience this is definitely one I’d say you could check out.