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Maleficent, restored and looking better than ever. (Photo Courtesy of Walt Disney Home Entertainment)

It's DVD Day!

Today is particularly exciting because the big, big release this week is Sleeping Beauty, which means I finally get to tell you about the super-cool behind-the-scenes event I attended this summer.

Today's release of Sleeping Beauty means more than just the opening of the Disney Vault: Today, a classic of Disney's past is uniting with the studio's quest into future technology. (Okay, the future technology in use today -- I'm getting caught up here.)

At the event, I got to see a presentation of the original Sleeping Beauty footage alongside the newly restored animation that is featured in today's release. If I may... "Wow!"

Though Sleeping Beauty was filmed in something called Technirama 70 -- an ultra-wide aspect ratio -- it ended up being shown in Cinemascope, a more narrow ratio. In other words, each frame was clipped off at the edges. For this DVD, Disney completed a frame-by-frame restoration and used the full frame, meaning there is truth to the advertisements promising you'll "see more than ever before." At the event I attended, one scene I saw included only two of the good fairies initially, but in the restored version, you see all three. A whole extra Good Fairy!

We also got to see some of the amazing hand-drawn and colored artwork, including many pieces that spent nearly 50 years in Japan: In 1960, Walt Disney hand-selected more than 300 original cels, backgrounds and concept art for an exhibit, The Art of Animation. The exhibit began at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, before the pieces toured 17 department stores in Japan. Later, the art was passed on to Chiba University for educational purposes, survived a campus move (among other significant events), and then was discovered by a faculty member, who contacted Disney's Japan headquarters to ask what to do with the work.

Some of the rare pieces include a sequence of images by Eyvind Earle, who drew the extremely detailed and distinct forest backgrounds for Sleeping Beauty.

"There is no way to put a price on these works," said Lella Smith, creative director of Disney's Animation Research Library. (That's Smith in the photo at right, in the Animation Research Library.) It's true, but it hasn't always been that way: Today, a piece by Eyvind Earle could command thousands, but back in the '50s and '60, official cels from Disney animation sold for a few dollars a piece at Disneyland.

The last Disney film to use hand-inked cels and the final fairy tale feature produced by Walt Disney himself (he did later work on The Jungle Book), the new 2-Disc Sleeping Beauty DVD also includes Grand Canyon, a short that ran before the film; a storyboard recreation of the originally planned musical opening; and a virtual walk-thru tour of the Sleeping Beauty Castle at Disneyland.

I posted a trailer and a feature about Earle late last week, so don't miss out. I have a few more Sleeping Beauty goodies to share this week as well, so come back soon.