Sleeping Beauty

Director: Clyde Geronimi, Les Clark, Eric Larson

1959 / 75min / 35mm

In the years following the release of Bambi, Walt Disney Studios had been gradually streamlining and simplifying the painstaking process behind each animated feature in order to cut down on costs… and then came Sleeping Beauty, 10 years and six million dollars in the making, its tapestry and illuminated book-inspired images, devised largely by background artist Eyvind Earle and designer John Hench, seen in Super Technirama widescreen, and perhaps the most beautiful film ever released bearing the Disney imprimatur, its box-office failure all but guaranteeing the House of the Mouse would never be so ambitious again. “The masterpiece of the Disney Studios’ postwar style… Though other Disney features were done in the widescreen format, this is the only one that seizes the full dramatic potential of the extended space.” —Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

Distributor: Walt Disney Studios/20th Century