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Disney has announced its first Blu-ray release of an animated classic, with Sleeping Beauty awakened from the Disney Vault by true love’s kiss (yeerg, vomit) for re-release in full high definition on 26 November.
Sleeping Beauty is a good choice technically as the first taste of Disney HD1080. The two-disc Blu-ray set (which in Australia will come with a bonus DVD version for the kiddies to play with) will take advantage of the quality available from the original Super Technirama 70 process, used only twice by Disney. With a screen ratio the same as CinemaScope (2.35:1) but using twice the film area, the low-grain Super Technirama 70 prints should yield superb images, while the Blu-ray edition will be the first time the film has reached the home in its original widescreen format.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs will follow on Blu-ray in Q2 of 2009, Pinocchio late in 2009, and Fantasia in 2010. Also coming is the legendary lost collaboration between Disney and Salvador Dali, Destino, begun in 1946, rediscovered in 2003 and completed by Roy E Disney.
We spoke with Lella Smith, the Creative Director of Disney’s Animation Research Library. One of her recent tasks involved visiting Japan to authenticate a lost trove of Sleeping Beauty art found in a janitor’s closet.
GEARE: How did you hear of the missing Sleeping Beauty art?
LELLA: It was so neat — we got a call from the School of Science and Technology at Chiba University, saying ‘We found this Disney stuff and we think it might be real — and we’d like to give it back to you. I was on the next plane! It was real, and we realised it was the exhibition that Walt Disney had given to the [Tokyo] Museum of Modern Art, but it didn’t meet their collecting criteria so they gave it to Chiba — which was a science and technology museum, they didn’t even have an art department. So they weren’t showing it, and they didn’t have a way to store it.
G: It had originally toured Japan before ending up at Chiba?
LS: The original exhibition went to 17 different department stores. Then after it was rediscovered, we combined it with some art from our library and went to four different cities. At the end they gave it back to us, and we were so appreciative that the Disney Company gave them a scholarship fund of a million dollars to do arts education at the university.
G: And what was there? What did you find?
LS: Mostly it was relating to Sleeping Beauty, and one really exciting focus is with artist Eyvind Earle [the film’s production designer]. Walt became fascinated with his art on Lady & The Tramp backgrounds, so he asked him to be art director of Sleeping Beauty, and he had all these paintings that explained to the artists how to construct a scene, with the dark shadows behind, and then build on it — change your values and everything. There were several different canvasses in that exhibition and we were so thrilled.
G: Didn’t Earle do all his own background work?
LS: Mm-hmm, and if he didn’t do them then the artist working on them had to do it to the same style, so there was a lot of training… And they kind of resented it at first because it was so detailed and took so much time, but the product was exquisite. And let me tell you about the new Blu-ray...
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