Orthodox Nature in Disney's Sleeping Beauty (1959)

Whereas studios like UPA and Rankin/Bass embraced modernism, thematically, aesthetically, or both, Disney Studios maintained its conflict with modernism, even while engaging the technology of the modern age. Steven Watts described Walt Disney as “a sentimental modernist” (87). Although he experimented “with the forms and techniques” of modernist art, “[h]is true aesthetic heart… continued to beat to an internal rhythm of nineteenth-century sentimental realism,” a realism Watts equates with the Victorian age. According to Watts, “modernism emerged in direct opposition to the principles and sensibilities of nineteenth-century Victorianism,” seeking to reconcile dichotomies perpetuated by Victorianism: “human and animal, civilized and savage, reason and emotion, intellect and instinct, conscious and unconscious” (87). Disney both embraced and resisted this modernist move, blurring boundaries based on the separation of reality and fantasy in his aesthetic while valorizing Victorian binaries that perpetuated a bourgeois status quo. Disney counters a sometimes modernist aesthetic with “flourishes of sentiment and naturalism” (Watts 92) in many of his films, highlighting an orthodox domesticity that conflicts with modernist ideals.

Adherence to “orthodoxy” continued in most of the Disney films from the 1960s forward, but in several films both before and after Walt Disney’s death, Disney blurs boundaries between “human and animal, civilized and savage, reason and emotion, intellect and instinct, conscious and unconscious.” Because of such blurring, the binary between human and nonhuman nature breaks down, and borders become more permeable while still adhering to the ideas of sentimental populism Watts describes. According to Watts, Disney “carried into adulthood an ideology—like his aesthetics, it was instinctive and emotional rather than systematic and articulate—that glorified ordinary Americans, blended democratic sympathies and cultural conservatism, and flowered from the roots in his rural, Midwestern background” (96).

In Sleeping Beauty (1959), for example, the Russian ballet is transformed into a fairy tale story like Snow White and Cinderella in which domestic bliss is achieved with the help of woodland creatures like birds and rabbits. Aurora (the Princess in Sleeping Beauty) and nature are one in a rural cottage and meadows where she hides from an evil curse. As Aurora sings, an owl dons a prince’s cape to dance with her, and birds hold up the sleeves as they join in. All the animals support her in the meadow. And the three fairies who save her each represent a natural element. 

Here nature and the supernatural are one, with Maleficent, the evil fairy who cast the spell to place Aurora into an eternal sleep, turning a forest into a briar patch that looks as mean as she is. She even turns into a dragon to fight Prince Philip and keep him from kissing and awakening Aurora. The two sides of nature reside in the two extremes of supernatural, but the “good” side wins, and domestic bliss is restored. In Sleeping Beautydomesticity is seen as a force as natural as the creatures that help Aurora attain her dream of marriage to a prince and a happily ever after ending.