Sleeping Beauty

It’s interesting to note that, on a couple of occasions, this work borrows from the studio's back catalogue, specifically Fantasia: the cleaning scene, with its dancing broom, recalls "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," while Maleficent's final appearance is straight out of "A Night on Bald Mountain." Well, I guess if you’re going to steal, you may as well steal from the best. Apart from that observation...you have to work a bit to get past the cloying character of many of this film's elements, including its opening sequence and several bits that run continuously throughout, but if you give it a chance, this flick ultimately comes through with an entertaining retelling of the ancient tale. On the visual side, the animation here is not as pure and realistic as we saw in, say, Snow White, but that seems to be not mere cutting corners but an artistic decision meant to echo the look of a fairy tale book's illustrations (presumably one penned by Charles Perrault, the source for this take on the tale). All in all, there was more ambition poured into this flick than several of its immediate predecessors in the canon, and the final result shows that. It's not a great work of magic, but it turns its trick well enough to be enjoyable.