Faerie Tale Theatre Reviews: Sleeping Beauty

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Bernadette Peters, beverly d'angelo, brothers grimm, Carol Kane, charles perrault, Christopher Reeve, fire breathing, forest of thorns, giambattista basile, giant, kay nielsen, nutcracker ballet, prince charming, princess, rene auberjonois, russia, russian art, sleep, sleeping, sleeping beauty, sleeping beauty ballet, sleeping beauty waltz, squire, Tchaikovsky, the sleeping beauty, thorns, woodcutter, woodsman

“What is that?” “What does it look like?” “An enchanted castle […] is there a princess inside?” “Of course! You can hardly have an enchanted castle without a princess inside, now can you?”
– The “Squire” and the Woodsman on the topic of today’s story

I feel the need to post a Content Warning before we begin: The opening paragraphs include mentions of rape, traumatic childbirth, and sexual harassment. If these things are a trigger or are otherwise upsetting, please skip to “Read More” (or the paragraph after the Jack Sparrow gif) where I look at today’s episode proper.

There’s a a folklorist I follow named Austin Hackney; he’s a talented and disciplined author whose passion for fabulism is evident in his Folklore Thursday videos. His introduction on the story of The Robber Bridegroom, however, gave me pause:

It’s a fine example of just how dark and scary fairy tales can be before…Disney and the like dissolved them in the saccharine solutions of their retellings.

It’s not easy to convey in text but the distaste for Disney is evident in his voice. On the one hand, I get it, gigantic corporate overlord devouring IPs while demanding worship and all that. On the other hand, it’s unfair to cover all of Disney’s fairytales under such a massive blanket statement. Most fairy stories you can recount in five minutes tops; if you’re not going to alter them when adapting to a visual medium, you’re doing the audience and the creative team involved an extreme disservice. The artists would have very little room to stretch their creativity, and audiences, well, to say their tastes and suspensions of disbelief have changed since the fifteenth century would be a gross understatement – and that’s where Sleeping Beauty comes in.

I’ve already gone on record saying how Disney’s retelling is one of the stronger entries in the canon, both visually and in the story department. The wise decision of putting the Fairies front and center transforms the simple plot into a tale of revenge, political intrigue, and espionage with a feminist twist.

Also there’s a dragon battle. Saccharine retelling, my Aunt Fanny.

The story it’s based on, however, isn’t nearly as riveting. Much of it feels like a series of “this happened then that happened”, not helped by the titular character being there to only snooze through it. Surprisingly, the element of a cursed beauty trapped in eternal slumber and in need of rescue has appeared in many stories before its current incarnation, from Egypt’s “The Doomed Prince”, to Siegfried and Brunhilde in the Volsunga saga, to the medieval courtly romance Perceforest. It’s from there that Italian author Giambatta Basile was inspired to write his version of Sleeping Beauty, otherwise known as “Sun, Moon, and Talia”. Unfortunately, in adapting Perceforst, he kept in one unsavory detail that snowballs into an avalanche of…

Well, a cursory search on Youtube will give you a plethora of clickbaity titles such as “THE DARK HORRIFYING ORIGINS OF DISNEY’S SLEEPING BEAUTY” and “THE REAL EFFED-UP STORY OF SLEEPING BEAUTY”. Loathe as I am to say it, they’re not wrong.

In Basile’s story, Talia is a wealthy lord’s daughter who is prophesized to be doomed by a flax splinter. Her father decrees that all flax, which is used for spinning, is banished from his castle. One day teenage Talia finds an old woman spinning under a tree. A flax splinter gets caught in her finger when she has a go at it and she collapses, seemingly dead. Her father can’t bear to put her in the ground, so he shuts her in an opulent tower bedroom and abandons the estate altogether. The place gets so overgrown that it becomes part of the forest. A king goes hunting and discovers the tower when his hawk flies in through the window. He makes his way in, finds Talia, and is so taken by her beauty that he “grew hot with lust” and…

He rapes her. In no uncertain terms.

While she’s unconscious.

And still underage.

Those were my reactions too while researching this story.

And it gets worse. King Epstein leaves Talia after he reaches his happy ending and completely forgets about her. Nine months later she goes into labor – while still unconscious – and wakes up, no doubt confused and horrified, when one of her babies sucks the flax from her finger. Her, for lack of a better word RAPIST, then suddenly remembers Talia and returns to the tower for another go only to discover he’s a father now. Talia is okay with the situation when he explains what he did to her, and he visits her frequently for more lovemaking…even though he’s married to someone else.

And it keeps. Getting. Worse.

The queen learns about Talia after the king shouts her name in his sleep one too many times. Rather than call out her philandering rapist husband, she lures Talia to the palace, accuses her of being a whore and orders her and her children to be executed. Talia buys herself some time by doing a slow striptease for the queen, crying and screaming as she’s forced to hand over her clothes. The king returns just as she’s down to nothing and has his first wife killed instead. And the moral of the story is, I kid you not, “Those whom fortune favors find good luck as they sleep”.

So, yeah, regarding adaptations of Sleeping Beauty, you can only go up from there. Most of them tend to be pretty rote retellings of the later Charles Perrault or Brothers Grimm versions – which, to their credit, completely omit the rape, wedlock, infidelity, just about everything that makes this tale traumatic. I am perfectly fine with dragon-slaying and True Love’s Kiss saving the day over…THAT. They also end the story with the prince and princess getting their standard happily ever right after the kiss with no first wives or cannibalistic stepmothers getting in the way*, which is a plus in my book.

Like a number of fairytales, Sleeping Beauty has come under fire from feminists as of late; while their arguments against Snow White and The Little Mermaid seem shallow at best, I understand where they’re coming from in this instance. The thing is, when you get right down to it, the Sleeping Beauty is more of a macguffin than a character. The people in her life want to claim or destroy her, and she often has little to no say in the matter. Whomever chooses to adapt her story has to make the characters surrounding her more interesting if we want to remain invested. Few versions exist where the Sleeping Beauty has a better-defined character or an active role in the plot because of what has to happen to her. Today’s episode of Faerie Tale Theater leans heavily on the former, but I admire their attempt at the latter mainly because of who they cast in the part.

An Introduction to Faerie Tale Theatre Reviews

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1980's, 80's fantasy, 80s, actors, Aladdin, anthology, anthology series, beauty and the beast, Big Bad Wolf, brothers grimm, celebrity, celebrity casting, Cinderella, dwarfs, Faerie Tale Theatre, fairies, fairy, fairy tale, fairy tales, folk tale, folk tales, frog prince, goldilocks, goldilocks and the three bears, gretel, grimm, hamelin, hans christian andersen, hansel, hansel and gretel, introduction, Jack and the beanstalk, little mermaid, little red riding hood, magic mirror, mirror, nightingale, pied piper, Pinocchio, puss in boots, Rapunzel, red riding hood, review series, rip van winkle, rumpelstiltskin, series, seven dwarfs, shelley duvall, sleeping beauty, snow queen, Snow White, snow white and the seven dwarfs, television review, television series, the boy who left home to find out about the shivers, the dancing princesses, the emperor's new clothes, the emperor's nightingale, the little mermaid, the pied piper, the pied piper of hamelin, the princess and the pea, the princess who had never laughed, the snow queen, the twelve dancing princesses, three little pigs, thumbelina, tv review, tv series, witch, witches, wolf

“Hello, I’m Shelley Duvall. Welcome to Faerie Tale Theatre.”

Once upon a time in the faraway land of Malta, an actress named Shelley Duvall starred in a little movie called Popeye. A blithe innocent spirit, Ms. Duvall kept herself entertained with a charming book of fairy tales in between shooting. Duvall recounted the story of The Frog Prince to her costar, Robin Williams, who found the tale humorous enough to his liking. From there, an idea sprung that would stay with many a child of the 80s and 90s.

From 1982 to 1987, Duvall produced and hosted Faerie Tale Theatre, a 27-episode long anthology series on Showtime. She convinced many of the biggest stars of the time to play the roles and even a few well-known auteurs to direct using her clout and gregarious charm. Duvall herself would star in seven of the episodes as well. This show, along with HBO’s Fraggle Rock, proved to be one of the first successful examples of cable programming and cemented itself as a cult classic. My own experience with Faerie Tale Theatre stems from renting episodes on VHS from my library at a very young age. Back in the day, if you really wanted to know what you were in for, then you could turn to the VHS cover. Yes, we’re all familiar with the old adage about not judging a book et cetera, but there’s an art to home media releases that’s tragically all but lost. The VHS tapes of Faerie Tale Theatre had a specifically crafted painting made for each episode done in a famous art style that the episode itself replicated in its set and costume design. Apart from giving you an idea about the content on the tape, it was just pretty to look at. Tell me, which is the more inviting, this –

or THESE?

After a lengthy time gap, I rediscovered the entire series on Youtube and watched with fascination. While many of the effects and the over-reliance on green screen certainly dates it, there’s a nostalgic charm that’s far from a deal-breaker. This was well before Disney began building upon and later deconstructing classic fairy tales with the Renaissance and Revival periods of animation, meaning the stories are told completely straight with just the bare amount of changes needed to fill an hour runtime. Seeing a score of well-known actors in fantasy costumes playing to the cheap seats can make you feel like you’re watching a pantomime, but there’s hardly a moment where it seems like they’re doing it just for the paycheck. Everyone involved looks like they’re in on the idea of putting on an entertaining show. Some performances remind us how excellent some of the actors are at their craft, others show sides to their talent that were rarely seen – though for the most part, there’s plenty of ham to go around, ham smothered in heaps of delicious cheese.

So I’ll be going through every episode in order, providing a ranking, a little bit of the stories’ history, why they were changed, and how they hold up compared to other versions. I won’t be classifying the reviews season by season as the amount of episodes in each one is erratic, with some having as many as six or as few as two. Despite their being only twenty-six of them (plus one reunion episode), there’s going to be a lot to unpack.

See you tomorrow when I review the first entry in this series, The Tale of the Frog Prince.

March Review: Sleeping Beauty (1959)

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Whenever I discuss Sleeping Beauty with someone who doesn’t share my enthusiasm for Disney, they have an irksome tendency to get it muddled with Snow White; their excuse being “it has the same plot”. I’ll admit, there are some surface similarities that even the most casual viewer can pick up on: a fairytale where a princess is forced into unconsciousness and wakes up with some necking, the comic relief and villain being the most beloved characters, a little frolic in the forest with animals, the antagonist plunging off a cliff, you get the idea. In fact, Sleeping Beauty even reuses some discarded story beats from Snow White, mainly our couple dancing on a cloud and the villain capturing the prince to prevent him from waking his princess. Yet despite that, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty are two wholly different movies shaped by the era and talents of the time.

I’ve discussed how Walt Disney was never one to stick to a repeated formula, no matter how successful it was. He must have noticed the parallels between his first movie and this one, but decided to make one crucial change for Sleeping Beauty that would forever differentiate the two: the look. We all know the traditional Disney house style: round, soft shapes, big eyes; charming as it was and still is, Walt was sick of it after several decades. Meanwhile, artists like Mary Blair and Eyvind Earle were producing gorgeous concept art that rarely made a perfect translation into the Disney house style.

Walt wanted to make a feature that took the pop artistry of their designs and made the animation work for it instead of the other way around – which brings us to another animation studio that was doing well at the time, United Pictures Animation, or UPA.

UPA didn’t have the kind of budget Disney normally had for their animated projects, but what they lacked in fluidity they made up for in style. Watch The Tell-Tale Heart, Gerald McBoing-Boing and Rooty-Toot-Toot to see what I mean. UPA were pioneers of limited animation, taking their scant resources and creating some striking visuals with bold geometric designs. Through this, they defined the look of 50’s animation. Though perhaps unintentional, Sleeping Beauty comes across as Disney’s response to UPA, or what would happen if UPA had the funds they deserved. The characters’ contours are angular but effortlessly graceful, defining their inherent dignity and royalty. And the colors, ohhh the colors…

Because of the immense amount of work required to animate in this difficult new style (and in the Cinemascope ratio, no less) as well as story troubles and Walt barely supervising the animation studio now that he had his hands full with live-action films, television, and a theme park, Sleeping Beauty had a turbulent production that lasted the entirety of the 1950s. For a time, Chuck Jones of Looney Tunes fame was set to direct. Director Wilfred Jackson suffered a heart attack partway through production and Eric Larson, one of the Nine Old Men, took the mantle from there before Walt Disney replaced him Clyde Geronimi. And even after that, Wolfgang Reitherman teamed up with Geronimi as co-director to get the film finished after no less than three delays. Also, Don Bluth got his foot in the door as an assistant animator for this feature, beginning his short-lived but impactful tenure at Disney. Did all this hamper the movie, or did they succeed in what they set out to accomplish?

Well, one of the reasons why this review took so long was because I had a hard time not repeating “MOVIE PRETTY” and “MALEFICENT AWESOME” over and over. Make what you will of that.

Updates and Sleeping Beauty’s 60th Anniversary Article

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1950's, anniversary, krimson rogue, moviebabble, sleeping beauty, the book was better, twilight, twilight new moon

I hate being in this position. I pride myself on getting all my work done right on time. I hate to keep you all waiting, especially when this month’s particular review is a long-anticipated reward for an act of generosity. This lateness is something I can’t apologize enough for. I can promise this, however – it’ll be out shortly after February’s review is posted, and those aren’t the only things I have planned for then.

I try not to make excuses when it comes to my writing, but in this instance I do have my reasons. One, I wasn’t kidding at the beginning of the month when I said all that work piled up on me. Not only was I trying to finish my book dummy before a certain deadline, but I got a great job video editing for Krimson Rogue and his awesome review series The Book Was Better, which you should definitely go check out when you’re done reading this. And what masterpiece of literature-based cinema was I tasked with to prove my worth?

“The sparkling…it’s burned into my mind forever…”

All right, to be honest I only covered the last episode of a three-part review of New Moon; but it still meant watching the movie, skimming through it for clips and fighting the urge to roll my eyes back into my skull any time Kristen Stewart’s slackjawed stare cropped up, which was far too often for my sanity. I had plenty of fun ripping into it with Krimson, but now I’m more than ready to wash my hands of that time and soul consuming monstrosity*.

Two, it felt awkward having a review of Disney’s second animated movie come before, without giving too much away, February’s review. It’s a familiar, comforting story I know and feel relief that Miss Stewart has never had anything to do with –

Oh COME ON!!

On a lighter note, this week marks the 60th anniversary of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, and I’ve written up another article for MovieBabble that covers its artistic merits. Click HERE to check it out! Happy birthday, you beautiful dreamer.

I look forward to sharing the next review in a few days’ time. Until then, I hope the first month of the new year has been promising so far.

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* – And speaking of soul consuming monstrosities, my next job for Krimson will be the video game adaptation of Dante’s Inferno, which will be coming sometime in a few weeks on his channel. I never thought I’d relish the sight of killer demons and painfully bloody ironic tortures, but after sparkly vampires and poorly rendered werewolves with six-packs, it’s like sweet eyewash.