How many of those attending The Australian Ballet’s performances of Stanton Welch’s The Sleeping Beauty saw it through flitting childhood afterimages of Disney’s animated fairytale?
Walt Disney earned himself an eternal place in certain girlish hearts with his so-called ‘Princess Trilogy’: Snow White (1937), Cinderella (1950), and Sleeping Beauty (1959). In fact, any online search for ‘Disney’ and ‘Ballet’ produces a torrential downpour of merchandise including costumes, toys, and pointe shoes emblazoned with Tinkerbell. It suggests that all young girls want to be princesses, ballerinas, or – preferably – both at once.
Disney’s Sleeping Beauty is now considered a watershed moment in the history of animation, but at the time it was a high-stakes gamble. Throughout the 1950s, animated features were losing money for the studio and, according to one animator , Disney had gone so far as to suggest that the feature animation department may be closed down. Disney decided to throw all of his resources – creative and financial – behind the production of Sleeping Beauty. In doing so, he created something hailed almost universally as a masterpiece.
Disney’s Sleeping Beauty cleverly adapts the Tchaikovsky ballet from 1890, mixing in a more modern sense of adolescent romance. The fact that it is the last Disney film to use individually hand-inked cells give the visuals an idiosyncratic texture that hasn’t been captured since. Sleeping Beauty cost more than six million dollars in 1959, and was the last film that Walt Disney personally supervised.
The connection between Disney and the world of dance is more profound than just a shared love of the same fairytales. Back in 1940, he released the musical Fantasia in an attempt to bring music usually considered ‘high art’ to mainstream America. It took classical music and let animators run riot with images to accompany it – perhaps most famously, Mickey’s war with brooms to Paul Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
Many critics at the time, however, were far from charmed. According to Steven Watt’s The Magic Kingdom, Walt Disney and the American Way of Life , the New York premiere of Fantasia was condemned by some as “a travesty of classical music standards”. Disney responded that these critics had just appointed themselves “little tin gods” of culture.
The most interesting response may have come from John Martin of the New York Times. Writing on 24 November, 1940, he pointed out that this cultural “warfare” is old news to the world of dance, and mentions some of the scandals that have been generated by adding movement to music. Mikhail Fokine, for example, who was once threatened with legal action for crafting a story at odds with a musician’s program; or Isadora Duncan, who angry musicians called “impertinent” for daring to dance to Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. (Apparently, she “agreed with them”.)
John Martin waggishly asks: “Does all this have to be lived through again now that Hollywood has discovered the problem?” He explains that ballet – just like Disney’s films – isn’t simply adding movement to music. It’s creating an entirely new artistic work through the synthesis of the two. Both in Walt Disney’s familiar fairytales and his more abstract experiments, he combined his music with unforgettable images to fashion what can only be described as animated ballets – even when eschewing the use of the human body to dance them.
The Sleeping Beauty runs in Sydney 4 – 23 December
