Tonight with the Family: Released more than 60 years ago, this Disney movie is like no other

At the birth of Princess Aurora, the whole kingdom gathers to pay their respects to the future sovereign, and in particular the three fairies Flora, Daisy and Burnett, who all come to give the little girl a present. But in the middle of the ceremony, a fourth, much less desirable person appears. The sorceress Maleficent, angry at not being invited, casts a spell on the princess to die by snapping her finger on her 16th birthday.

To counter the curse of their enemy, the three fairies decide to take Aurora away from the castle and raise her as a peasant named Rose.

• Tonight with the Family: Disney’s Weirdest

For Walt Disney, the 1950s ended as it began: with an adaptation of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale. Like Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty is a project that does not hide its ambition. In order to realize it, the studio artists worked for almost a decade and used a treasure trove of ingenuity, especially turning to the work of Eivind Earle, who turned the feature film into a true medieval tapestry animation style and offered a unique visual style. his face.

Musically, too, Disney is thinking outside the box, re-appropriating Tchaikovsky’s eponymous ballet to grace its film with a sumptuous soundtrack. While the studio’s efforts didn’t immediately pay off—the feature film didn’t achieve the triumph it had hoped for upon its theatrical release—Sleeping Beauty has nonetheless established itself as a timeless and immortal work over the years.

From the Disney studios, which bequeathed its luxurious castle to the French Disneyland park, Sleeping Beauty also offered anthology sequences: the dance meeting of Aurora and Prince Philip in the forest, the touching argument of the three fairies and, of course, the final battle between the prince and the dragon.

What will you like…

• The fun and touching co-starring of the three fairies, as well as their adorable bickering.

• All the little forest animals, which – as in the days of Snow White or Cinderella – necessarily accompany the princess on her walk.

What might bother them…

• Evil, of course. Not since Snow White have we seen a Disney villain this successful and terrifying.

• The entire last part of the film, in which Prince Philip finds himself locked in the gloomy castle of Maleficent and her army of vile creatures.

• The final transformation of the wizard into a giant dragon and the battle that follows, even if the latter ends for the better.

(re)discover an excerpt from the film…