Disney Review: Sleeping Beauty, One Hundred and One Dalmatians, The Sword in the Stone

I'm blogging through all the feature films released theatrically by Walt Disney Animation Studios! For more information on the project, you can visit my introductory post here. You can see an overview of all the posts in the series here.

Here we go again!

You can read the previous post in this series here.

UPDATE: You can read the next post in this series here.

16. Sleeping Beauty (1959)

I've lamented before that Disney never really aspired to be High Art again after the financial failure of Fantasia, and I mostly stand by that. There are little bits of that same ambition—pieces of Bambi, for example, and some of the shorts in the package films—but the studio never really tried again to make a sustained, feature-length leap toward Serious Cinema. And Sleeping Beauty is not exactly a repudiation of that either. However, one of the things that makes this movie so fascinating (and, it must be added, one of the very best Disney movies of all time) is the extent to which it manages to Trojan Horse some of those lofty, Fantasia-esque objectives into what basically amounts to an archetypal Disney film. There is a thin layer of Disneyness in the foreground here: a love-sick, reductively feminine heroine, a thinly characterized prince, a wicked villainess, cutesy animals, slapsticky comic relief who help the heroine (the fairies)—I mean, this is almost exactly Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

But if you peel back that foregrounded layer, it becomes clear what the majority of Sleeping Beauty actually is: a feature-length experiment in making medieval tapestries dance to a Tchaikovsky ballet. And as that, it's stunning. There's a warm, Currier and Ives quality to most Disney animation, but Sleeping Beauty's aesthetic is every bit this strange Gothic recreation that makes the European neverwhere of Disney's fairy tale films feel primal and mythic, as if this film is clawing its way directly out of the collective unconscious of the past. Those towering ceilings in the castle, the knotty, ghostly tree trunks, the geometric foliage with leaf patterns painted over them, the impossible, cruel architecture of Maleficent's mountaintop lair—aahh, I could go on for ages and ages. It's all so staggeringly beautiful, each image blocked and choreographed with such immaculate precision (including what is probably the single most perfect shot in the entire Disney canon), and Tchaikovsky's rich, sweeping orchestral ballet is the perfect accompaniment. This is jaw-dropping, ambitious stuff, stately and magnificent, a cathedral of sound and vision, slipped into the sweet formula of Disney archetypes. It's not abstracted and non-narrative like Fantasia, but it's not far off from its aesthetic reach.

But even those archetypes are notable here. Rendered in this angular style that's heavy on evocative outlines and light on the cherub roundness typical of Disney, the film's characters feel of a piece with the film's broadly medieval aesthetic, looking like nothing so much as figures stepping out of the pages of an illuminated manuscript—stark and gorgeous. And the story itself, while (as I said) firmly within the realm of Disney fairy tales, is a strikingly serious-minded execution of those tropes. Things like Maleficent summoning the power of Hell in the movie's climax or the fairies bestowing their gifts on Aurora in the movie's opening scene seem to reject American cinema's dichotomy between entertainment for children and entertainment for adults and instead arrive at something that has the audience-swallowing grandiosity of the sweeping silent epics of the 1920s.

Some have called this film chilly; I'd say it just isn't pandering. It doesn't invite you; it merely exists, and you either get swept up in its worship of archetype and architecture or you don't. I do, and so I'd call it one of Disney's greatest artistic successes.

17. One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961)

It's a stark juxtaposition that One Hundred and One Dalmatians was the movie Disney released next after Sleeping Beauty. With Sleeping Beauty, you have the studio's lushest, most ancient-feeling film in its history; with One Hundred and One Dalmatians, you have a movie resolutely modern, from its jazzy score right down to its Saul-Bass-esque artwork. Sleeping Beauty is a movie about a time so bygone that it's myth, and Disney could conceivably have released it any time between 1937 and 2000, whereas One Hundred and One Dalmatians is a movie that only could have been released in the 1960s, so specific is its mid-century-modern milieu. We have characters writing pop standards; we have television (a lot of it, in fact—I'd forgotten how much of this movie amounts to basically just watching characters sit around in front of the boob tube [complete with great little pieces of made-up television programming like What's My Crime?]); we have a post-automobile London. In some ways, it's jarring to see stuff this contemporary in a Disney movie after decades of purposefully vague "olden days" settings (I suppose Lady and the Tramp has a similar setting, though it's less self-consciously modern). But in other ways, it's charming, and its approach to modern life is certainly less patronizing than, say, The Aristocats.

Another stark shift from Sleeping Beauty: the animation. Whereas Sleeping Beauty was one of the most expensive and expensive-looking Disney films to date, One Hundred and One Dalmatians is the first feature in another era of cost-cutting that, really, would last the studio until the very end of the 1980s. This is Disney's first feature film done entirely in xerography, which (as I understand it) uses photocopy technology to rapidly reproduce the drawn outlines of characters without the artists having to hand-paint the cels themselves, thus saving a ton of time (and money) in production. The effect is not exactly cheap-looking (though subsequent Disney features using the technology definitely would look pretty cut-rate), but the process's distinctly sketchy, drawn style is a huge difference from the painted animation of all previous Disney features (especially Sleeping Beauty). As a style, it works well for a movie so heavy on blacks and whites as One Hundred and One Dalmatians; the film looks very cool, and the sketchiness fits perfectly with the movie's mid-mod design. But it's hard to look at this film and not think about all the crappy Disney animation on the horizon, too.

But oh well; we aren't to those movies yet. Right now, what I have is One Hundred and One Dalmatians, and it's a good one to have. The movie looks good and plays well, and its cheeky hipness is a breath of fresh air after the 1950s, where even the best Disney films feel like they're wearing stiffly starched collars. This movie is jaunty and light on its feet; the dogs are cute; the adventure is fun. And then of course we have Cruella De Vil, one of the unqualified triumphs of Disney character design (the contrast between her skeletal frame and the voluminous furs she wears is stunning) and one of a long line of female villains with perfect voice acting performances from Tennessee actresses (Betty Lou Gerson, from Chattanooga). And for as much as we've had our Queen Grimhildes and Maleficents plotting black-magic murder and our Strombolis and Captain Hooks attempting kidnapping, slavery, and child trafficking, there's just something incalculably more evil about Cruella De Vil's plan to turn a litter of puppies into a fur coat. It's just so loathsome, and I love her.

18. The Sword in the Stone (1963)

At least we can thank the transition from Sleeping Beauty to One Hundred and One Dalmatians for letting us down easy before The Sword in the Stone, because I can't imagine the awful fall it would have been to have jumped right from the majesty of Sleeping Beauty's towering vision to a movie that, while set in almost exactly the same world as that former movie—a vaguely timeless, mythologized feudal Europe—is quite possibly the least-ambitious feature crafted under the oversight of Walt Disney himself (it was in fact the second-to-last feature produced before the man's death, so who knows how much oversight this actually got). That's not to say that I don't enjoy The Sword in the Stone; it's a perfectly fun, breezy little feature, and I like it quite a bit more than several of the studio's more prestigious classics (sorry, Cinderella). But I don't think it would be controversial to say that there is exactly nothing going on in this movie, neither on a story level (the movie's plotting is resolutely small-scale and episodic—even when Wart becomes king, it's treated as a minor Sunday-afternoon nuisance rather than some world-shaking event) nor on a technical level.

Animated with the same xerographic technology of One Hundred and One Dalmatians but none of its cool style, The Sword in the Stone's world is a flat and an empty one, especially after the thundering Gothic spaces of Sleeping Beauty and the sketch-pad charm of Dalmatians's bustling frames; the environment that Wart and Merlin occupy seem more like a stage than a living universe (or even a living painting, as has often been the Disney aim), with a different set for each scene: here's the set for the fish sequence, here's the set for the jousting tournament, here's the set for the "let's use magic to make the kitchen clean itself" sequence (a strange and persistent Disney trope)—as if the studio has these things in a closet and can just roll them out when needed without any particular attention to craft (and in fact, there are quite a few animations re-used from previous Disney features, something One Hundred and One Dalmatians did as well but not nearly so noticeably nor extensively as Sword does). The movie doesn't look bad per se, but it does have the slap-dash feel of something that you might doodle on a scrap piece of paper during a boring meeting—which is to say, plain and quickly developed.

But as I said, I do like this movie, and for all its technical and narrative ambivalence, The Sword in the Stone skates by on pure winsome charm. As flat as the animation is, the character designs themselves are all either pleasingly gangly—Wart in particular is an adorable pileup of twiggy arms and knobby knees—or amusingly doughy. And as episodic as the story is, each of those episodes themselves are a lot of fun; the setpieces are gently comedic, infused with just enough (to break out some MPAA language) light peril to keep them moving quickly, and even if nothing really contributes too much to actual character development or progressive drama, the personalities of Merlin and Wart and the owl Archimedes are defined well enough that it's engaging to see them bounce off each other within these mini adventures.

It's basically the perfect example of a movie that does nothing exceptional but also nothing bad. Good enough for a mid-morning distraction, I suppose, or a just-a-tad-forgettable staple of your childhood. But a big-budget live-action remake? Errrrm...

Anyway, see y'all next time!