Disney's lavish, stylized retelling of the fairy tale, rendered in a medieval-tapestry visual style. Bill found it a frustrating assignment: he regarded it as an austere, inferior version of Snow White, lacking the small sympathetic creatures that gave films like Dumbo and Cinderella their warmth.
Bill was blunt about the film in a 1978 interview with Mike Barrier: "...but a lot of times you'd work on things that weren't good to draw. Like Sleeping Beauty; it was a bxxxxrd. You draw this beautiful girl dancing in the forest with the prince, there was nothing to get a hold of." He considered Sleeping Beauty an austere and inferior version of Snow White, citing the lack of any small, sympathetic creatures like those in Dumbo and Cinderella.
His contribution
Bill contributed story work but found little to engage his strengths in a film built around stately romance rather than comic character. His surviving sketches from the production lean toward the grotesque and the monstrous, including the demonic creatures of the villain Maleficent's domain, where his imagination had more room to move.
Story sketches
- RELEASED
- January 29, 1959
- DIRECTOR
- Clyde Geronimi
- BASED ON
- La Belle au bois dormant by Charles Perrault (1697)
- BILL'S ROLE
- Story Artist
- RUNTIME
- 75 min