It Was "Beauty" ....

On this date in 1959, "Sleeping Beauty" is released by Walt Disney Productions, the studio's first animated fairy tale in eons.

The picture went into development in 1953 and took forever to reach completion. Walt was off building an amusement park, so newer animated features in the process of becoming didn't get the priority that happened in earlier times. Supervisors groused that Disney didn't hold story meetings often enough, so progress lagged. (Worth noting: Walt Disney had a pattern: he was fully focused on animated shorts until animated features gained his interest; he spent most of his time on animated features until live-action and an elaborate amusement park came along. And Walt would likely have devoted large amounts of his time on Disney World if he had lived longer.)

Another reason for the length of production? "Sleeping Beauty" was big (70 mm!) and complicated (intricate backgrounds, character designs!) Old timers said that doing a handful of cleanup drawings per week was a good result, what with the complexity of the designs. Joe Hale said: "When Iwo [Takamoto] was showing an assistant how to draw Aurora, he'd draw three inches of pencil line, crumple up the paper and start over." (Joe was perhaps being a teensy bit hyperbolic.)

Sleeping Beauty was the first feature on which Woolie Reitherman served as a sequence director. An action specialist during his decades as a supervising animator, Wolfgang oversaw the battle with the dragon that climaxes the film. Walt was well-pleased, and for the next twenty years, Woolie supervised every animated feature produced by WDP, heading up the animation division for a decade and a half.

The story that SB was a flop isn't exactly true. It had theatrical rentals of $5.3 million, but its $6 million cost was caused the pic to be a contributor to the studio's net loss in '59. (Darby O'Gill and the Little People, released the same year and now considered a classic, failed to make its costs back. The BIG Disney picture in 1959, profit-wise, was the black-and-white comedy The Shaggy Dog, which had started life as TV product.)

Beauty turned out to be the last hurrah for big, hand-inked, animated fairy tales during Walt Disney's lifetime. After Sleeping Beauty, the Disney studio laid off lots of animation staff. The next feature 101 Dalmatians was produced for a fraction of the cost and made almost a million dollars more in rental receipts. Today, with all its re-releases, Sleeping Beauty stands as the second highest-grossing film of its year, second only to "Ben-Hur."