![]() ![]() Thus, riding on its success, Sleeping Beauty’ s production began. Desperate for a postwar comeback, the studio produced Cinderella in 1950, the first critical and financial feature film hit the studio had seen since Snow White over a decade before. ![]() During WWII however, already facing narrow margins coming into the 1940s, Disney Animation faced tightened budgets, smaller teams, smaller markets and a period of near-bankruptcy. While many of these films were actually financially disastrous at the time, the unprecedented success of Snow White meant that the outlook for the studio was positive overall. The highly successful period between 19, retroactively known as Disney’s “Golden Age,” produced classics such as Fantasia (1940), Dumbo (1941), and Snow White. Naturally, such a tortured production schedule led to an identity crisis for the film’s creative team and the direction the film should take. Unsurprisingly, the finished product refuses simple characterizations.Īs filmmaker, author, and animation historian John Canemaker explained during his introduction for MOMI’s screening of Sleeping Beauty, the film was in production for a full ten years, conceived in 1949 during a period of intense strife for the studio. But the film was mired in serious production problems for years and the animation team found themselves wrestling with such fundamental questions as whether doing another princess movie was even a worthy endeavor. At first glance, Sleeping Beauty is no different. Structurally and thematically, they’re almost all virtually interchangeable: a young woman, disliked by people more powerful than herself, faces adversity and misunderstanding in her quest for love, and gets married to her Prince Charming. Though Beauty and the Beast was part of the later, more postmodern “Disney Renaissance” of the 1990s, it was originally conceived as a Disney film in the 1930s, putting it in conversation with the others on this list. The films that most centrally define our understanding of classic Disney princess movies are: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) (a.k.a the red-and-blue one), Cinderella (1950) (the blue one), Sleeping Beauty (1959) (the “pink” one) and even Beauty and the Beast (1991) (the yellow one). From subtly proto-psychedelic sequences to dialogue and narrative elements that seem to presage the postmodern princess films of the 21st century, it’s no wonder that Sleeping Beauty serves as the touchstone for anti-fairytales like Enchanted. Aurora quite literally isn’t the “pink” princess at all, and the film certainly isn’t just another Cinderella story: It’s a complex and unfixed work borne from a deeply troubled production at a moment of profound transition for Disney’s Animation Studios. Neither of my vague notions about the film proved true. In a similar vein, my understanding of Sleeping Beauty as a film, drawn by osmosis from the cultural landscape, was that it was just another Disney classic where princes fight dragons and princesses get married off at the end. When you go shopping for Halloween costumes hoping to be a pirate or a wizard for your entire childhood, the princess section of the Spirit Halloween can be divided more comprehensibly by dress color than by any discernible differences between Disney princesses’ personalities – mainly because there aren’t any–– a fact that became emblematic of the entire princess film genre for me. In my head, Aurora from Sleeping Beauty was the “pink” princess. Sleeping Beauty (1959) – source: Buena Vista Productions In light of that, seeing Sleeping Beauty (1959) at the Museum of the Moving Image in Super Technirama 70mm as a part of their fantastic monthly “World of Animation” series was a shocking and wonderful experience. Unless the film had some element of the revisionist anti-fairytale to it, i.e., Shrek (2001), Enchanted (2007), and Tangled (2010), where the princess stands up for herself and only winkingly engages in the sexist and patronizing tropes of the genre proper, I probably didn’t watch it until I was in my twenties. My mother, a hot headed feminist and all-around badass, hated the sexist, disempowering formula of princess films so intensely that she turned off our DVD copy of Mulan right after Mulan helped defeat the huns every time I watched it (she’s not even a princess at this point) I only learned she married Li Shang years later, and boy, was I upset. Princess movies were staunchly banned in my house growing up.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |