Out of the original Disney Princess movies, Sleeping Beauty is my favorite. The fact that the Disneyland Paris castle is based on the castle from Sleeping Beauty makes his movie so much more appealing to me. I never actually saw this until I was an adult as a kid, I thought it was a dumb princess movie and decided not to watch it!
How to Download Sleeping Beauty (1959)
You can download or stream the film from a digital platform. Click on the Download button at the end of this review and make your choice. Check out also the newer live-action films that tell a similar story – Maleficent (2014) and Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (2019).
The Movie Review
Do I really need to tell you what the story of Sleeping Beauty is? Well, for the one person that does not know, let me give you a quick summary. The king and queen are celebrating the birth of their daughter, Aurora, however, the evil fairy Maleficent is not pleased! She is mad that she was not invited and she places the child under a curse.
She says that on her 16th birthday, Aurora will prick her finger on a spinning wheel and die! Pretty dark stuff, but there is a silver lining. There are three fairies, Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather and while they are not as powerful as Maleficent, they can still help with this curse.
The curse cannot be stopped, but they change the curse so that instead of dying, Aurora will fall into a deep sleep, only being able to be woken by a kiss from her true love. It is the classic Sleeping Beauty that we all know and have heard a million times, but this Disney version is the classic version if you ask me and the one, we all think of when Sleeping Beauty comes to mind.
Sleeping Beauty Joins The Walt Disney Signature Collection
To try and hide Aurora from Maleficent, her parents make the difficult decision for her to live in the woods with the three fairies until she is 16. She grows up with the fairy and then one day in the woods, she meets a brave and handsome prince and the two of them end up falling in love.
Of course, things cannot go smoothly and Maleficent hears about Aurora’s whereabouts and tricks her into pricking her finger on a spinning wheel and thus making her fall asleep. It is a great setup and I think for a “kids” movie from the late 50’s it is actually pretty damn dark.
My favorite part of the movie is when the brave prince tries to fight off Maleficent when she is in dragon form. I must say, I am kind of mad at my young self for not watching this. As a kid, I am sure I would have found the whole prince fighting a dragon thing here very exciting and I would probably hold the movie in much higher regard had I seen it back then.
I think that Sleeping Beauty is an absolute classic and I can see why it is top or near the top of the list for many people when it comes to Disney Classics! However, for me, as I do not have that nostalgia for it, I think it is good and I can certainly appreciate what a big deal it was and is. I have to be honest and say that this would not be on my greatest Disney movies of all time list.
