Sleeping Beauty Goes Blu-ray 2008
Classic Disney Film Joins Finding Nemo and National Treasure
1959's Sleeping Beauty will be the first Platinum Edition title to go on Blu-ray, announces Walt Disney Company.
The Walt Disney Company is jumping into the Blu-ray waters, releasing four of its top movies on the format in 2008.
The first film to get the Blu-ray treatment is the live-action The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which comes out in the spring of 2008. This movie will also get the Picture-within-Picture feature that's a part of upcoming Blu-ray players.
The summer will see the release of another live-action flick on Blu-ray, the inexplicable hit National Treasure. This movie will also have Internet connectivity, the first Disney title to have this feature, called BD-Live. The program allows viewers to connect to the Internet via their Blu-ray player to download additional content, as well as play games with other viewers.
This fall will see the re-issue of Pixar Animation Studio's biggest hit to date, Finding Nemo, on Blu-ray. The flick will also have the Picture-in-Picture feature.
However, the big news is that Disney will also release its first Platinum Edition movie, the 1959 animation classic Sleeping Beauty, on Blu-ray.
"The Platinum titles are the crown jewels of the Disney Studios and we do not take releasing them lightly on any format," said Bob Chapek, president of Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment. "The proven Blu-ray technology has allowed us to take our films to new heights, fully utilizing the larger capacity and interactive capabilities for an incredible all-new consumer experience."
Those "interactive capabilities" for Sleeping Beauty include the same BD-Live programming as National Treasure, as well as a virtual castle tour and multi-player games.
Sleeping Beauty is now considered one of Walt Disney's "sleeper classics." It was the last Disney movie to use hand-painted cels; with 101 Dalmations, Disney would switch to xerography to transfer drawings on paper to celluloid. It was also one of two Disney animated movies to be shot on Technirama 70 (the other was 1985's The Black Cauldron).
Disney also broke with tradition by giving animator Eyvind Earle a stunning amount of freedom to develop his ideas for the movie. This decision caused resentment among the other animators towards Earle, since Disney had previously been iron-fisted in his control over his animators.
Sleeping Beauty's initial release nearly bankrupted the studio, since the movie made back only half of its $6 million studio costs. The flick was heavily criticized for being slow-paced and having little character development. Despite this, the movie was re-released in theatres in 1970, 1979, 1986 and 1992. The latter was the same year Sleeping Beauty was released on home video.
It has since become one of the most popular of Disney's animated films, with kudos given to Eyvind Earle's artwork and the lush score, adapted from Tchaikovsky's 1890 ballet by George Bruns and the Berlin Symphony Orchestra.
Fun Fact: Sleeping Beauty was one of two stories Disney adapted from Charles Perrault's 1697 compendium Tales of Mother Goose. Perrault adapted popular peasant tales for aristocratic consumption, removing the earthier elements, and virtually invented the fairy tale in the process.
The other Perrault tale Disney adapted was, of course, Cinderella.
