Waking up to Disney’s ‘Beauty’

WHEN “Sleeping Beauty” was released in 1959, the lavish Walt Disney animated fairy tale failed to attract audiences or impress the critics -- even though it featured music from the Tchaikovsky ballet and was shot in a widescreen format called Technirama. But over the last five decades, its reputation has grown considerably.

“It was so built up at the time,” says film historian Leonard Maltin, who is hosting the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ premiere screening of a newly restored digital version Friday evening at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills.

“Walt Disney promoted it as his ultimate animated cartoon,” says Maltin. “He spent an unprecedented $6 million of 1959 money on it. He knew, better than anybody, he was competing against himself.”

Actually, Disney was competing against the memories of his two previous animated fairy-tale classics: 1937’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” which was Hollywood’s first full-length animated production, and 1950’s “Cinderella.”

“That is why he kept reiterating to his staff that it had to be different,” Maltin says. “That turns out to be one of its greatest assets. Looking at it today, the look of the film is so extraordinary.”

And it was more modern and angular than previous Disney animated films. “It was the first time he ever entrusted the look of a movie to one artist, Eyvind Earle who went on to a very notable career in modern art,” he says.

Earle designed the backgrounds, the settings and the characters. Some of Disney’s veteran animators, who were later referred to as the Nine Old Men, fought Earle. “Frank Thomas, for one, disliked the angularity of his character design,” says Maltin. “I think he and Ollie Johnston were working on [the fairies] Flora, Fauna and Merryweather and softened them and rounded them” -- but it wasn’t easy.

Disney was a “pretty canny guy. He specifically knew that there would be some chafing at this new design concept, and he understood that it would be healthy for the film.”

After the screening, Maltin will lead a discussion about the film with a team from the Walt Disney Animation Studios, including Theo Gluck, director of library restoration and preservation, and animator Andreas Deja, who created Scar in “The Lion King.”

Original artwork from the film is also on display in the current “Ink & Paint: The Art of Hand-Drawn Animation” exhibition at the academy’s Grand Lobby Gallery.

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-- Susan.King@latimes.com

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‘SLEEPING BEAUTY’

WHERE: Samuel Goldwyn Theater, 8949 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills

WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Friday

PRICE: $5

INFO: (310) 247-3600, oscars.org