In just a few short days (11/04), the alternate version of Sleeping Beauty, Maleficent, will be released on home video. It has been a long time since a movie has been so polarizing with an audience as Maleficent is to Sleeping Beauty. If you have not seen this new telling, then I urge you to go ahead and get ready by picking up a copy of the original Disney classic first.
In fact, just recently, Disney released for the first time on Diamond Edition Blu-ray, Sleeping Beauty from the vault. Sleeping Beauty tells the wondrous tale of a princess cursed by an evil fairy, protected by three loving fairies and, ultimately, saved by true love’s kiss. Featuring the voice talents of renowned opera singer Mary Costa as Sleeping Beauty and Eleanor Audley as the evil fairy, Maleficent, the film’s vibrant visuals were created by a team that included Milt Kahl and Ollie Johnston, two of Disney’s legendary Nine Old Men and an Academy Award-nominated score, 1959, adapted from the incandescent music of Peter Tchaikovsky. Sleeping Beauty is the sixteenth animated feature in the Disney animated features canon and was the last animated feature produced by Walt Disney to be based upon a fairy tale. It is the tenth film released as part of Disney’s prestigious Blu-ray Diamond Collection.
The 2-Disc Blu-ray Superset with Digital Copy (Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy) includes several bonus featurettes about the work at the Disney Parks to include fairy tale lore, the work that went into restoring the classic and the Generations of Disney Villains. It also contains never before seen deleted scenes and a sing along video. One of the most interesting alternate scenes is the Arrival Of Maleficent. This alternate scene obviously had an impact on the film, Maleficent, and is very similar to the live action movie.
I highly recommend adding Disney’s 2-Disc Diamond Edition Blu-ray Superset of Sleeping Beauty to your collection and picking up Maleficent to complete the set on November 4th.
I always loved Sleeping Beauty when I was little, and still do. It has always been my favorite of the Disney princess movies. I really don’t think Maleficent fits perfectly as a ‘Sleeping Beauty from another point of view’, which does answer my first question when I heard about Maleficent being made, which was ‘how can you make a children’s film where the main character tries to kill a 16 year old girl, turns into a dragon at the end, and dies’. But that’s okay. They’re both good and enjoyable movies. They’re basically different stories using the same characters. And that’s original and creative in it’s own right.
It does feel like in recent years I’ve heard a lot of negative comments about Sleeping Beauty…that Aurora doesn’t do anything…that she isn’t much of a character….that’s she’s bland, etc…but she’s not really the main character. The main characters are three middle aged to older women….which if anything is even more different and empowering…in an time when a lot of people are objecting to the fact that there are so few stories told with older women in the lead roles, Sleeping Beauty has three of them. Three women who unconditionally love a daughter they’ve adopted, who willing give her up when she turns 16 because they want her to have this life they consider fantastic and wonderful…who sneak into this awful castle full of monsters run by a powerful evil fairy, who really are the ones who kill the dragon (Philip never could have done it without them)…really it’s all them. Every bit of it.
Sleeping Beauty made the decision not to focus on the young pretty girl. So yes we don’t know that much about Aurora, but she’s not actually the main character. It’s three older fairies who are brave, resourceful and definitely people little girls could look up to.