Disney's 100th anniversary is this year, and to celebrate, I'm going to tell the story of this legendary animation company over a yearlong period.
Walt Disney envisioned his third fairy tale adaptation, Sleeping Beauty, to be a great epic…
Disney's 100th anniversary is this year, and to celebrate, I'm going to tell the story of this legendary animation company over a yearlong period.
Walt Disney envisioned his third fairy tale adaptation, Sleeping Beauty, to be a great epic, so much so that he started developing the film in 1953 and even incorporated Sleeping Beauty's castle into Disneyland when it first opened in 1955, which to me is Disney's version of the Statue of Liberty, in that it is the ideal symbol for all things Disney and what Disney represents. A true monument if there ever was one. However, it took a long time for Sleeping Beauty to finally get going because there were production delays. Once they did get going, all the tricks they learned in pushing the envelope of animation were rolled into this one production. And it was going one step above Lady and the Tramp, in filming in Super Technirama 70, or just a fancy large format name. Simply put, Walt Disney made Sleeping Beauty in IMAX.
Technirama was a technology licensed out by Walt Disney's longtime supplier of color film processing, Technicolor. The technology operated very similarly to Paramount's VistaVision process, but had a wider aspect ratio. Both processes used 35mm film, yet instead of having the film run vertically through the camera like normal, they run the film horizontally through the camera, exposing more of the image onto the film, giving you a sharper image and more detail, which allows for large format photography.
Sleeping Beauty would adapt both from Charles Perrault's fairy tale as well as Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty ballet, which the film's music would be based on, so the usual composer, Frank Churchill, was dumped for another composer who would be with the studio for at least two decades, one that would conduct the adaptation of Tchaikovsky's music. Many ideas that were scraped for Snow White would be resurrected in Sleeping Beauty, such as the prince being captured by the evil villainess, the prince's hors..
