Just Gonna Take a Little Nap

It’s interesting going backwards through the Disney PrincessesReleased in 1937, Disney's Snow White was a gamble for the company: the first fully-animated, feature-length film ever created. It's success lead to the eventual creation of the Disney Princess franchise, which has spawned 13 main-line films and multiple spin-off movies and shows. line because we have all the modern Princesses – Ariel, Belle, Merida, Moana, Anna, Elsa – and they generally feel of a piece. Disney had their branding down by then and they knew what kind adventures they wanted their princesses to be in. If a new Disney Princess is going to get introduced, we can pretty well know what their adventure will be. They’ll have some kind of gift, which is also a bit of a curse. They’ll be a bit of an outcast, but with a heart of gold. They’ll fight for what they believe in, especially when there’s some kind of injustice they can see. And they’ll take their own agency to win their battle their way. It’s not a formula, but it’s certainly found a certain groove.

But then you go back far enough and you hit Disney’s classics era, back when they weren’t really thinking about modernizing or updating classic fairy tales. They weren’t trying to make heroines for modern girls (even modern by the standards of the eras these films came out in), and they certainly weren’t worried about the message their films were sending. It was about pretty art, with a fairy tale princess, and nothing else. So while Rapunzel will find a way to pick up her pan and fight against her step-mother (over in Tangled), being the heroine of her own story, Aurora needs her Prince Charming, Phillip, to save her in Sleeping Beauty because she has to duck out of her story after, frankly, not really doing much the whole time anyway.

It really feels like a stark contrast in storytelling styles, even going from The Little Mermaid to Sleeping Beauty. Ariel is the titular character and also an active agent in her story, while Aurora feels so passive in her tale. She doesn’t do anything; things are done to her, for her, and around her to keep her story going. You could really summarize her story as: she’s born, she turns 16, she sings a song and attracts a boy, she pricks her fingers, she falls asleep, she’s woken with a kiss, happily ever after. Even taking into account she has to sleep for part of her story, she’s the most passive princess in this whole run, and it’s actually kind of annoying.

When she is born, Aurora’s parents, King Stefan (Taylor Holmes) and his (unnamed, unvoiced) Queen, have a big, kingdom-wide party to celebrate their new daughter. Everyone in the kingdom is invited, including the ruler of the neighboring kingdom, King Hubert (Bill Thompson), along with Hubert’s son, the young Phillip, who will be Aurora’s betrothed. Three fairies – Flora (Verna Felton), Fauna (Barbara Jo Allen), and Merryweather (Barbara Luddy) – also show up to bless Aurora with three gifts. The only person not invited was the dark fairy, Maleficent (Eleanor Audley), the Mistress of All Evil, and she doesn’t take the slight lightly. She curses Aurora, saying the girl will die on her sixteenth birthday from the prick of her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel.

Fearing for their daughter, the King and Queen have all the spinning wheels in the kingdom burned. But the three good fairies decide to take her protection one step further, ferrying the baby away to live out in the middle of the wilderness, not knowing that her three “aunties” are magical fairies or that she is to be a princess. Sixteen years go by, with Maleficent desperately searching for the girl, before Aurora (Mary Costa) finally emerges as a beautiful, melodious girl. She catches the eye of the now grown up Phillip (Bill Shirley), and the two, through one small interaction, instantly fall in love. But will the girl reach the end of her birthday alive, or will Maleficent’s spell send her into a slumber from which she will never escape… not without true love’s first kiss?

Naturally we know how things play out, because the film is called Sleeping Beauty, but it’s still surprising just how passive Aurora is throughout her own movie. The entire first act, with the party, the fairies, and Maleficent’s curse, all takes place while she’s a baby and we don’t even see the girl. Aurora doesn’t appear on screen until fifteen minutes into her movie and, even then, the story isn’t really from her perspective. She gets one song to define her, which is her singing about the man she dreams of when she sleeps, and the rest of the time the movie is really about the fairies and Phillip. Aurora effectively gets to sleep (and sleepwalk) her way through her film.

If this were a modern version of the story (discounting Disney’s live-action take on the material, Maleficent), we’d likely get a greater emphasis on Aurora, with her living in the cottage and slowly realizing that something was off about her upbringing. Maybe she’d sneak out into the woods and study the kingdom she’s never allowed to visit. She’d go on adventures, tell stories to her animal friends out in the woods, and grow up to be something of a wild child, akin to Merida with a bit of Rapunzel in her as well. Then, when she meets Phillip, he’s shocked but intrigued by this wild, dryad girl he meets, so different from this stodgy princess he’s been told he’ll have to marry at some point. Only when Maleficent’s curse takes over does Phillip realize the wild girl he’s fallen for is the princess he’s meant to marry. And even then, we’d need to figure out a way for Aurora to be more active in her own rescue despite getting trapped in an endless sleep.

That certainly feels like a better story than this version from Disney. I’ll admit I’ve not ever been a big fan of this film. It is certainly pretty, a well animated Disney production made at a time where the height of animation technology was hand-painting the animation cells directly. It creates a lovely look, and there’s no denying that the visual artists worked their butt off for this film, but it’s all in service of a pretty boring story all about a princess without much agency of her own.

Sure, we can blame the original fairy tale, to a certain extent. For the most part, Sleeping Beauty (whether going by the name Talia or Briar Rose or some variation of Aurora) is a passive participant in her own story. It’s always the fairies, and the prince, who have agency. Aurora is more like a treasure to be saved, a prize to be awoken, and in that regard the Disney version is accurate. The creators had no interest in updating the story, instead making a very traditional version of the tale (leaving out the bits from some versions where the princess is awoken not by a kiss but by more… adult means).

It leaves this film in a weird place, then. Artistically it is an achievement, there can be no mistake about this. This is a very pretty, very well made, animated film. It’s a testament to the artistic skill of the animators and designers that were working in Disney’s shop at that time. But when it comes to the story, Sleeping Beauty kind of sucks. It’s very much an “and then” story, where something happens, “and then” the next thing happens, but it’s all very loose, held together only by Maleficent’s inevitable curse. And even then, the film randomly shunts about, forcing Phillip forward to save his passive bride (who he’s only known for two minutes, bear in mind) all so we can reach our happy ending.

Sleeping Beauty needs a rewrite. Maybe not anything quite as extensive as Maleficent, which turned the villainess of the story into the heroine, but a version where Aurora gets to be the heroine of her own story. Sleeping Beauty spends so much time building up the fairy characters and making them the magical stars of the show that it forgets to invest at all in its titular character, and it makes for a very passive, kind of tedious, viewing experience. Aurora deserves better than that.