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Sleeping Beauty [Blu-ray] [1958]

Starring: Mary Costa, Eleanor Audley, Bill Shirley, Verna Felton, Bill Thompson
Director: Les Clark Eric Larson Clyde Geronimi Wolfgang Reitherman
Format: PAL
Released: 27 Oct 2008
RRP: £25.99
Average Rating:

Customer Reviews

a medieval tapestry coming to life........ - By: Horatio Guttersnipe, 16 Oct 2008
What is so exquisite about Sleeping Beauty is that it looks like a medieval tapestry coming to life. If you look closely at the details in the backgrounds you can see little twists in the leaves & curves in the tree bark which overalll gives an ornate & opulent look still refreshing to this day. It was the most expensive film in it's day, it took over four years to make & Walt Disney stated to his artists & animators that they should take their time over it, make it beautiful & so it came as a shock when it didn't do alll that well in the cinemas. It wasn't reallly able to communicate to an american youth who were smoking things they shouldn't & it seemed this highly romantic film was too idealistic in it's portrayal of young love, it felt as if it should have been released earlier than the late 1950's, so culturallly you can see that it wasn't able to make audiences identify with it. But this is probably the one Disney film which stands the test of time better than any other, artisticallly speaking; since the music is exemplary & the imagery & animation highly captivating, more so than anything Disney has attempted in recent years. In places it is so beautiful to watch.

The Disney studios today have developed the way they tell fairy tales now to another stunning level as 2010 will mark a new leap in visual storytelling for the company with the release of Rapunzel Unbraided, a computer animated film which has the feel & sensitivity of a traditional animated 2d film yet with the texture of an oil painting coming to life. For years now the company has been trying to reinvent their style, pushing their visual language to another stratosphere & they may well have done it in Rapunzel, but from what I have viewed it does echo slightly the romantic style of Sleeping Beauty, it's attention to detail is just as shimmering & splendid ... we'll have to see. We can see though that this film, Sleeping Beauty, set a standard which modern animators & film makers still aim for & that is why Sleeping Beauty is such an enduring work of art, as it reallly aimed to make animation a cinematic art form, it was ahead of it's time & held a maturity wiser than it's time.