Sleeping Beauty (1959)
(Les Clark, Clyde Geronimi, Eric Larson, US 1959, 75 min., 35mm)
After the beautiful Princess Aurora is born into royalty, everyone gathers to celebrate, including three good fairies, and an evil one, Maleficent, who curses the young princess and announces that she will prick her finger on a spinning wheel's spindle and die before sunset on her sixteenth birthday. Fortunately, one of the good fairies, Merryweather, weakens the spell so Aurora will only sleep instead, and the only way to wake her from her sleep is true love's kiss. Sleeping Beauty was, for quite some time, the most expensive animated film ever made, with animators providing stunning attention to movement and detail, multi-level layers of action filling the frame, and the highlight of the film: the terrifying, exciting fight with the dragon. It was produced in Technirama, Technicolor’s answer to VistaVision, and was the only animated film to be produced in this process until The Black Cauldron in 1983.