D52 Week 16: Sleeping Beauty!

Yes, in its later years, Disney would produce some thoroughly charming animated fairy tales that are hard not to love unless you're a soulless husk of a human being. And yet, these earliest attempts at princessy romance for movie theaters present the same sort of conundrum that watching, say, the first series of the British Whose Line does - I like what came of this later on, but seriously, how did anyone give it the chance to get to that point when it started out SO BAD? Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Cinderella each had the excuse of their respective places in history as an excuse for just being mediocre; coming directly in the middle of a string of successful full-length features, Sleeping Beauty has no such excuse to save it. This one will have to stand on its own merits. And, um, seeing as how its merits are pretty much "like Snow White, but less whimsical", that.............might be a problem.

Does anyone actually remember Aurora? She's definitely one of the lesser members of the Disney Princess Mafia, that's for sure. It's the third time in four months that I've seen a Disney animated princess-type woman sing a song to adorable forest critters, and apparently that's something that gets old and loses its charm really fast! She ends up living out the Snow White lifestyle, hiding out in a backwoods cottage, albeit for her entire life. She's yet another entry in the streak of female Disney main characters from the 1950s who don't do a whole lot. Sure, she sings to the animals, and spends plenty of time whining, in fairly proper fashion, about how she doesn't want to be a princess and she's fallen in love with the first man she's ever met. Teenage girls were even more bland and boring back then, I guess! Is she the worst of the Disney Princesses? She very well might be. When she falls asleep indefinitely, it's not much of a difference. Ba-zing!

Weirdly enough, Prince Phillip is actually several times more interesting than previous Disney Princes, though that's really not saying much, since he's several times more interesting than.....almost nothing. You can, of course, understand why there's no Disney Prince franchise featuring Phillip and Charming and Charming gaily embarking on whimsical adventures! Though, if they had to, Phillip is clearly the only one among them capable of adventuring in the first place. In addition to kissing, he's also capable of magical dragon slaying! It's probably the most exciting sequence in this unexciting film, so thank you, Phil! Other than that, though, he gets to go through the same obnoxious retro angsty teen drama that Aurora makes us endure, and it's no less boring coming from him. Or maybe I'm just too old-fashioned to possibly understand him - it is, after all, the fourteenth century! I really need to get with the times.

But it's pretty well-known that Maleficent is the real star of the show! She's creepy, in the way that Lady Tremaine would be creepy if she had high Magic stats, which makes sense given that they had the same voice actress. That Eleanor Audley must've been a real pleasure to be around! You can understand why they made her such an important figure in the impenetrable world of Kingdom Hearts, because she's a thoroughly intimidating villain....until you stop for a second and realise that her entire scheme is, essentially, throwing a fit because she wasn't invited to a baby shower! And instead of reacting, like, just taking a dump in the punch like your normal social malcontent, she decides instead to take revenge on everyone by....casting a bizarrely long-term spell that may or may not succeed sixteen years from now? That's just petty. And, again, all because she wasn't invited to a party! Her motives make Queen Grimhilde's motives look like..................well, actual motives, I guess.

Um. Let's see, who else was in this movie? It's already hard to remember! Ummmm....oh, right, the Fairy Godmothers Three! Which, together, pretty much comprise a less amusing version of Cinderella's Fairy Godmothers One, but with a ton more screen time. But less amusing than that fairy godmother is still more amusing than most of this movie, so why not? I admit that I actually liked Flora and Merryweather's insane pink vs. blue battles, coupled with the fact that Fauna takes the high ground and doesn't ever feel compelled to force her greenity on anyone. And I suppose I'm also amused by the logistics of the them having lived without magic for SIXTEEN YEARS and Aurora's birthday being the very first time they've actually encountered the concept of a recipe. It's ridiculous and stupid and it made me smile, conceptually, even if the jokes didn't! But, um, Maleficent places a death curse on cute li'l Baby Aurora, and the best you guys can manage is to change that into, I guess, a conditional coma? Magic is lame. For that matter, why are they so insistent on trying to keep Aurora from meeting any boys whatsoever, if waking from that conditional coma pretty much requires true love? True love, of course, being something that is very much dependent on having met someone before, at least to normal humans! I can understand not wanting Maleficent to know where she is, but still, you've gotta have an insurance policy. If she hadn't met Prince Phillip McCharming by pure random chance, would she have remained in her coma forever, thus causing a kingdom-wide media fervour over the medieval plug-pulling debate? Ugh, the characters in this movie. Just...ugh. Idiots and morons, every one.

But, in this case, I think people were actually catching onto the fact that these earlier princess-themed movies maybe weren't the best thing that Disney was doing after all. Whereas Snow White and Cinderella were huge smash hits, Sleeping Beauty was a pretty big failure when it was first released. After nearly a decade of effort, too! (The background art alone is said to have taken, like, four years I think? Yes, it's nice and detailed and that's fine and dandy, but I can't get over the straight, personality-free trees.) As a result, it was the last fairy tale proper approved during Walt Disney's lifetime; they wouldn't resume until a few decades later, actually! And those, I seem to recall, were actually good! Because, in the end, all successes can be failures; it just takes time. (And, if it wasn't already perfectly clear: your time can definitely be spent in many better ways than watching Sleeping Beauty. Like maybe actually sleeping, regardless of your own personal physical appearance?)

TERRIBLE AND UNNECESSARY AND TERRIBLE DIRECT-TO-DVD DISNEY SEQUEL CONCEPT O' THE WEEK: Sleeping Tootie tells the sad, lamentable tale of Phillip and Aurora's daughter Tootie (voice of Tiffany Thornton). As it turns out, some part of her mother's curse was passed on to her offspring; on her sixteenth birthday, she accidentally jabs her finger on a gel pen and falls asleep.....DURING CLASS! Obviously this is a severe offence, and Tootie is sent to a hellish perpetual detention by order of none other than....PRINCIPAL MALEFICENT II! King Phillip realises that brute force alone will not be adequate this time; instead, he must embark on an epic quest to become Superintendent of Schools, which is the only possibly way to save his daughter from the nefarious clutches of Maleficent the Second! (Meanwhile, obvious to all of this, the three fairies try to publish a board game based on Phillip and Aurora's adventures from the first movie, but find themselves unable to determine which ratio of differently coloured spaces will result in the most fairly balanced gameplay. Much squabbling ensues. Comedy!)