STUDIO: Disney
RELEASE DATE: October 7, 2008
FEATURES: All New Cine-Explore Experience
All New Maleficent's Challenge Game
All New Dragon Encounter Audio Sensory Experience
All New Audio Commentary With John Lasseter
Never Before Seen Alternate Opening
Watch, Chat And Play With Friends Online While Watching The Movie
Bonus DVD Movie Disc

They've done it again. Disney's first animated classic in Blu-Ray is what people like to call in technology a game-changer. It's a new standard for animation on the home market. Never a studio to do things the easy way, Disney has taken the 50th anniversary of one of their most beloved and influential films and made it into not just another DVD release but an event. Sleeping Beauty: 50th Anniversary Edition in Blu-Ray shows the true potential of this format. It's not just a pretty picture. It's not just a flawless audio track. Much, much more than DVD, Blu-Ray can be an absolutely immersive experience, the kind of purchase that you don't just watch and put on a shelf but that you actually spend time with and enjoy repeatedly. Sleeping Beauty: 50th Anniversary Edition is breathtaking on every level, redefining an American classic by using a modern format. Piece by glorious piece...

MOVIE: I suppose it's possible there are people out there unfamiliar with Sleeping Beauty, so first a little plot and history. Sleeping Beauty was a groundbreaking film in 1959, the sixteenth movie in the official Disney canon (in between Lady and the Tramp and 101 Dalmatians). But Sleeping Beauty was a technical leap forward and an artistic risk. It was the first animated feature shot in widescreen and revealed much more of the potential of the medium, focusing on craftsmanship above all else. There are very few animated films as strikingly beautifully animated as Sleeping Beauty. It is as influential a movie as Disney would ever produce. Children and adults around the world adore the story of Princess Aurora, a woman who fell under the spell of the evil Maleficent and needed to be saved the by the valiant Prince Phillip. Sleeping Beauty is a classic fairy tale and one of the best and most internationally beloved films of all time. If you adjust the total gross of the film it stands at over $500 million and in the top thirty of all time. Disney couldn't have picked a better film to kick off what looks like it could be an incredibly influential run on Blu-Ray.

VIDEO: From the look of it, Sleeping Beauty has rarely been seen in the presentation that it should have been. The packaging calls it a "Never-Before-Seen Expanded Version of the Film" but that doesn't really do it justice. DVD buyers have come to think that "Expanded" merely means a few extra minutes, sometimes even just seconds here and there, but in this case it is literally an expanded picture. Imagine a full frame picture that hasn't been stretched but cropped and now you're finally seeing what was always on the sides. The image here in this detailed description of the process makes clear that the ratio was always a bit wrong. As for image quality, I've seen Blu-Ray animation but I've never seen colors as well-defined or crisp as the 1080p widescreen picture for Sleeping Beauty presented in its original 2.55:1 scope. There isn't even the faintest hint of fade or colors bleeding into each other. They're so well-defined that the film looks like it could have bee made last year. It actually make me wish that filmmakers hadn't so quickly abandoned two-dimension animation. There's a beauty in this format that CGI can't always capture. It's a lost art that hopefully won't be missing for too much longer.

AUDIO: The audio track in up to 7.1 sound is good but is the least outstanding thing about Sleeping Beauty. You won't be disappointed but I found the track a little flat sometimes and not overwhelmingly impressive. The video is so remarkable that you won't notice that the audio isn't quite and you won't hear many 50 year old movies sound this good.

EXTRAS: Here's where Disney is changing the game. Sleeping Beauty is a work of art, a movie more focused on telling a majestic fairy tale than a lot of the more kiddie movies Disney made around it. The special features recognize the majesty of the film and don't baby up the extras, providing something for everyone. The adults will love it too, which is not always the case for animated films. So, the first disc of the two-disc Blu-Ray set includes film-related content like a new commentary track wih the awesome Pixar king John Lasseter, critic Leonard Maltin and supervising animator at Disney, Andreas Deja. The three discuss the influence and impact of Sleeping Beauty while they watch the movie and supplemental material like old stills, production photos, and concept art appears picture-in-picture on the screen. If you don't want the picture-in-picture or the occasional shots of the three men speaking, you can just listen to the commentary as an ordinary track, but I found the archival footage fascinating. One of the coolest things for a film historian like myself is the inclusion of "Grand Canyon", a short film that played before Sleeping Beauty on its initial release in theaters. Well, kind of short. By today's standards, it's practically a feature. It's nearly half an hour of shots of the Grand Canyon and other locales set to the "Grand Canyon Suite" by Ferde Grofe. The audio track on this one is a beauty. It's a riveting work of art and I had to think about how rare it must have been to see overhead shots of the Grand Canyon in a theater fifty years ago. We take this kind of material for granted nowadays. And the music is beautiful.

The other material on the first disc is for the little ones. They'll be blown away by "Dragon Encounter", a five-minute experience that instructs you to "Turn Off the Lights, Turn Up the Sound." The packaging calls it an audio sensory experience and it's really been designed to show the potential of 7.1 channels of sound. If you've got the right system, this is what to reach for to impress your friends. The Princess Fun Facts trivia track that can be played while watching the movie also seems aimed a bit at the little ones and a music video of "Once Upon a Dream" is clearly for them. Afficionados of the excellent music in the movie will like the "Music & More" feature which allows them to jump through the five songs in the flick and leave the silly plot behind. You can even subtitle the lyrics if you want to sing along.

Before we get to the second disc, we must discuss the much-hyped arrival of Disney BD-Live, the potential of which is overwhelming. Viewers need to first go to DisneyBDLive.com and register. Then the feature can be activated and a world of new content opens up to fans of the movie. After logging in, you can communicate with your friends online and on-screen while you're watching the movie in different locations. You can even have one friend act as a host and control the playback on all players, creating a synchronized experience. A cell phone or a laptop can be used to create chat between friends watching the same movie. Who said you need to be in the same room to enjoy Sleeping Beauty together? There is also a series of competitive games called the Disney Movie Challenge which asks trivia while the movie plays back and allows you to compete against others doing the same thing. (I wasn't very good. Even on Easy.) It gets crazier. Disney Movie Mail allows members to send video messages related to and including parts of scenes from the movie to send to their BD-Live friends. Most remarkable of all is the suggestion that soon viewers will be able to use points, apparently earned just by being active on the network - playing games, chatting, etc. - which will allow access to live events and updated bonus features. Imagine the potential of this technology - live commentary tracks, new downloadble featurettes, a new updated cut of the actual film - anything is possible.

I spent hours with the first disc of the Blu-Ray version of Sleeping Beauty before moving on to the second. It would be a MUST-own with just the first. And I have to admit, I was kind of overwhelmed by the time I got to the second. There are a series of games & activities that, once again, seem a little kid-driven. Maleficent's Challenge is a 20 Questions game, Briar Rose's Enchanted Dance Game is a memory test, and Sleeping Beauty Fun With Language is a vocab game. The true gems in the second disc come in the Backstage Disney section. Here's the meat of the Blu-Ray disc for hardcore film buffs, where you'll find tons of archival material related to Sleeping Beauty. It starts with a "Sleeping Beauty Walkthrough Attraction", a CGI recreation of an attraction that was in the castle at Disney World for many years. "The History of the Sleeping Beauty Castle Walkthrough Attraction" is a ten-minute look at the now-clsoed ride. A high-definition making of the film called "Picture Perfect" is informative and entertaining, covering every element of the film's production from inception to influence. Also included are "Eyvind Earle: The Man and His Art", "Sequence 8", "The Sound of Beauty: Restoring a Classic", "The Peter Tchaikovsky Story", and "Four Artists Paint One Tree". The final true gem in the set is the alternate opening to the film and a series of deleted songs that hint at the very different film that Sleeping Beauty could have been. TONS of reference material like storyboards sequences, live-action references that the animators used, art galleries, and publicity round out the set.

OVERALL: Since the end of the format war, it feels like there has been a seismic shift in the market like the kind we saw when VHS went to DVD or cassette went to CD. Blu-Ray has expanded its wings and shown its true potential through releases like The Godfather Restoration and Iron Man. But this is a new level. Interactivity combined with features for literally every generation in the house on top of a crystal clear video transfer of a beloved classic. Walt Disney changed the way people looked at not just animation, but movies in general. Sleeping Beauty: 50th Anniversary Edition has the potential to the same thing for the home entertainment market. It's a new world of entertainment that allows a movie to be more than just a distraction, turning it into an educational, historical, and interactive experience. Disney is leading the way again. It's the kind of release that you should buy even if you don't have a Blu-Ray player. You will eventually and this is the first thing you'll want to put in.