Sleeping Beauty

This week's film is Sleeping Beauty. Released in 1959, it not a much older work than Cinderella, but is the Disney studio's last animated "princess" movie until 1989, when The Little Mermaid was released.
Watching Sleeping Beauty again alongside the other princess films, I'm struck by the really beautiful, jewel-toned animation and the slightly more angular way the characters are drawn.
According to the AFI catalog, the animators who worked on Sleeping Beauty spent time researching medieval artwork to get the illustrations just right. Steven Watts writes in The Magic Kingdom that Sleeping Beauty was, in its time the most expensive animated film ever made, and the attention to artistic detail was used as a draw to lure in adult viewership. It's hard for twenty-first century Americans to fathom an innocent Disney animated romance being marketed towards adults, but this was the case in all of these early films. In today's film industry, animated films are only directed towards adults if they in include overt adult themes and humor (South Park and The Simpsons come to mind) or more covert humor, meant to go over kids' heads and provide a little enjoyment for their adult chaperones, like in the movie Shrek (which of course is not a Disney film).
Though it's hard to imagine adults enjoying Disney animated films without children now, there are major efforts made to produce merchandise seemingly too sophisticated (and definitely too expensive) for kids. One of the home health clients I worked with pointed me to the new Disney paintings by Thomas Kinkade, his "Disney Dreams" series. These paintings sell for a minimum price (and this is for the paper, not canvas, copy) of $175, unframed. Kinkade has yet to paint Princess Aurora, but Cinderella is available to view from this link...

http://www.thomaskinkade.com/magi/servlet/com.asucon.ebiz.catalog.web.tk.CatalogServlet?catalogAction=Product&productId=206563&menuNdx=0

I'll talk more about what draws adults to Disney merchandise in the coming weeks, but getting back to Sleeping Beauty...

I wrote last week about the interesting discovery that the stepmother from Cinderella and Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty were voiced by the same actress, but as soon as we started watching the latter film this week I noticed another voice was the same. Flora the fairy was voiced by Verna Felton, who also played Cinderella's fairy godmother! In looking at these voice actor's film credits, it seems as though using the same voices for multiple roles was common for Disney in this era.

These two actresses as well as the rest of the cast and crew for Sleeping Beauty were certainly not wanting for work in the 1950's, as the film took nearly that long to create. The opening of Disneyland and its related projects delayed production of this film several times, so that it took almost ten years to finish. As such, I like to view this film as a Disney-fied version of American values throughout the 1950's. I don't think that this viewpoint is too far off of the mark. Like Cinderella's character, Aurora is a very sweet, pure, fair woman who does not have many goals or aspirations for herself other than marriage and family life. She is the consummate victim--things happen to her rather than resulting from her own action, and she doesn't seem to have nearly as many lines as some of the other characters in the film. Prince Phillip, on the other hand, is a crew cut fifties jock with a cape and horse rather than a letter jacket and hot rod, free spirited and handsome.

Maybe I've read too much into the fifties influence on this film, but I did just finish reading Bill Bryson's childhood memoir of 1950's Des Moines, titled "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir". On that note, one small, funny similarity I noticed between Bryson's take on the fifties (he does not mention any animated Disney films by name in his book) and Princess Aurora in the film is...her breasts. I was studying Aurora's features versus the other princesses to see if the medieval influence in the animation differentiated her from the pack, and noticed just that one idiosyncrasy.
In Bryson's book, he talks of he and his equally perverted young male friends' relentless pursuit of any female nudity in this very modest and wholesome period in American history. They had to placate themselves by looking at the Maidenform bra ads of the period, about which Bryson writes...
"There was something deeply--and I expect unhealthily--erotic in these pictures. Unfortunately, Maidenform had an unerring instinct for choosing models of slightly advanced years who were not terribly attractive to begin with and in any case the bras of that period were more like surgical appliances than enticements to fantasy. One despaired at the waste of such a promising erogenous concept."

Bryson's accompanying illustration of these bra ads popped to mind when I noticed Aurora's very fifties bosom. Think I'm crazy? I'll let you decide.

Maidenform...



Aurora...

Cinderella 1950

This week's princess is Cinderella. Last night I watched the film with a few of the girls I lived with. After viewing Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs last weekend, Cinderella was a breath of fresh air. Something about the later movie is just a lot less dark and forbidding.

First off, after screening the movie at the Delta Zeta house, all of us watching the film agreed that we felt Cinderella was a more independent and autonomous character than Snow White. There's no distinct reason that this would be true, though I at least give Cinderella credit for having the good sense to marry up (versus Snow White, who was already a princess when she obsesses over the prince). The Magic Kingdom by Steven Watts describes the Disney studios intent with this movie to portray the "ideal woman" of fifties America--buxom, sweet, compelled to marry soon and marry well, ready and able for life in the domestic sphere, etc. The Cinderella character fit this mold completely, which makes me curious as to why she seems more independent than Snow White. These ideals of mid-century femininity were sharply contrasted with Disney's villainous characters' traits, who were completely selfish, vain, unhappy, bitter women (pg 330).

Speaking of villains, another aspect of the film that one of my friends noticed while we viewed it is the similarity in the evil stepmother's voice to Maleficent of Sleeping Beauty. This would not be so notable except that I did a little digging today out of curiosity, and they are played by the same woman. Nice catch, Courtney!

Cinderella was Disney's first full-length animated feature post WWII and post animator's strike. The film had been in production since even before the war, but due to limited credit during wartime and Disney's other debts, the project was halted until the later forties. The film was Walt Disney's big hope to get his studio back on track after a tumultuous decade. Luckily, Cinderella proved to be a smash hit, and made enough money to put Disney Studios back on its feet.

After re-watching the movie last night, I wonder if Cinderella's idyllic womanhood is a product of this time period (1950), the years when women were settling back into homemaking after time spent working in "men's jobs" while many were away at war. It seems as though, based on my reading of Watts and the AFI catalog entry, that the Cinderella movie set the tone, in many ways, for postwar America, so maybe Cinderella herself set the tone for postwar womanhood? Also interesting in Watts is his reference to the writers and animators who'd felt they'd put an unusual amount of "spunk" into her character, and who felt that her appearance was, while attractive, fairly typical. Was this emphasis (which I as a 2010 viewer had a hard time distinguishing) important to make the film more entertaining or to make Cinderella more the picture of the perfect woman? Again we're back to the damsel vs. villain dichotomy. As Cinderella is to the perfect woman, the villains seem to be to the antithesis of this "acceptable" womanhood. Watts writes, "Throughout the 1950's the studio populated its movies with vivid countertypes to illustrate persistent threats to the feminine ideal" (pg 330). In doing this, was the studio telling American women (and, not to be forgotten, American girls) that there was no middle ground? No excuse to ever think of oneself first or overtly stand up for oneself? I did find it slightly problematic in the story that Cinderella never takes a stand directly to her attackers, though admittedly she gets to snub her nose at them in the end (which of course she would never do as the perfect lady she is).

All sexist conspiracy theories aside, Cinderella is at least an important part of the American myth, especially American sports stories. The "Cinderella Story" has in recent history been thrown around much like Horation Alger-esque terminology of the past to describe incredible athletic feats and turnarounds. ESPN Classic even features a show called "Cinderella Stories", where athletes who've come out of nowhere to achieve success are featured. Of course this is a lovely opportunity for Disney to double dip, since the company owns ESPN, but the sentiment remains.

More to come later this week. Next week's movie is Sleeping Beauty.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs 1938

In order to achieve my goal of viewing the films in chronological order, I started at the very beginning, with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, released in 1938. I have to admit that I was not very excited about watching Snow White again; as a child I found the movie extremely frightening, especially when I went to see it in theaters, during the film's last release in 1993. I was intrigued after learning more about the history of animation, however, to view the film from a more technical perspective.
Snow White plays a large role in American film history, as the first full-length animated feature in Technicolor. The film also utilized a so-called "multiplane" camera, which allowed for the illustrations to be layered on each other so that the viewer could sense a distinct fore, middle, and background. This technology also allowed for the sets to be drawn separately from the characters. The camera was a major investment for Disney studios, and prior to Snow White had only been used in the Disney short The Old Mill. This promotional clip shows the Disney Studios eagerly producing Snow White.


The production of Snow White went WAY over Disney's original budget, with the final negative cost (which, I just learned, is the cost of film production, not including distribution or promotional costs)close to $1.5 million, almost ten times the original proposal, which the American Film Institute catalog says was between $150,000 and $250,000. The film was a major success, however, both in the box office and in merchandising revenue, a fairly new concept for this time. Books, toys, sheet music, even...



...valentines (very appropriate for today) were part of Disney's merchandizing effort. The film grossed a whopping $8.5 million in it's first year of release.

This week I interviewed a couple that I work for about their experience viewing Snow White when it first came out in 1938. The husband, who was a teenager when the movie premiered, said that this was his first color film, and was an incredible thing to behold. He recalled that even his parents were excited to view the film, it was not viewed as something only for children's entertainment (and, interestingly, for awhile in the U.K. Snow White carried a high rating so that children could not view the film unchaperoned). The wife had viewed a color film prior to Snow White, The Trail of the Lonesome Pine starring Henry Fonda, the first outdoor film to be shot in Technicolor. In spite of this, she too said that viewing Snow White was an amazing experience.
Of course it's been seventy years since either of my friends saw Snow White for the first time, but both says that they do not remember either seeing promotional material pre-release or consuming any licensed merchandise. However, they do remember having heard a lot of hype about the film prior to viewing it at their local theaters (for ten cents a ticket).
After my interview with this couple, I felt almost choked up watching Snow White. I couldn't even begin to imagine how incredible seeing a color movie for the first time must've been in a world without color cell phone displays, computer screens, televisions, etc. Soon, though, I'd settled back into my old disdain for this movie. I was embarrassed to find that, at twenty-one, I STILL found the movie disturbing and dark. Snow White is doomed throughout, and the fact that the queen requests her heart in a box (and that the dwarfs later build her a glass coffin...gross) is rather "Law and Order" for a fairy tale adaptation. Further, not to read to much into a thirties-era animated film, but could Snow White get any more helpless? Seriously, she has ZERO ambitions other than falling in love with the prince. ZERO. The Princesses I grew up with at least had some dreams--Ariel had her collection of human things, Belle loved to read, etc, but Snow White is content to wait for a man to come fulfill her entire life purpose. If you think I'm being a fascist feminist about this, I think you need to re-watch the film.

In spite of my jaded 2010 reading of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, it is an important film in the history of Disney and of the animated film genre. And, of course, it is the first Disney Princess film! More to come later this week. Next film is Cinderella.

Post #1, About this Project

Hello, blogosphere! Welcome to my Disney Princess movie project. This blog is a chronological viewing of all of the Disney movies featuring "princesses" as main characters. The purpose of the project is to 1)examine the place each of these films occupies in both film history and American history, 2)look at the different marketing techniques used by Disney to promote these films, both in the time of their release and today as the "Disney Princesses" and 3) using ethnographic research, to determine the importance of these films in the lives of Americans and (for the more recent films) the emotional development of young women.

The first film I will be viewing and analyzing is "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs". Look for the post on the film tomorrow after the screening at my house tonight. I found this movie frightening as a child...let's see if I'm still afraid at twenty-one.