DVDizzy Forum

Recently I watched Sleeping Beauty and couldn't help but talk about something that has been bugging me.

Has anyone noticed that the movie has some consistency problems, especially with the character's eye colors?

This happens a lot with Aurora and the Three Good Fairies.

The Fairies sometimes sport normal, black cartoon eye dots. Then in the same shot, they sport detailed, colored eyes (Merryweather has blue eyes while Flora and Fauna have brown eyes). I think they do this just so they can convey more feelings and emotions.

But what about Aurora? Her eye color changes a lot! The best example of this is during the "Once upon a dream sequence" and the scene where she receives her dress and cake. Throughout the whole song sequence, Aurora has cartoon dot eyes and stays that way for the remainder of the scene.

But when she returns home, her eyes are much more detailed and are brown!

This totally contradicts the scene in which Aurora is rescued by Prince Phillip and wakes her up. Her eyes are blue in that shot!

No, I won't condemn the movie for it. Its just a small detail many will probably not notice, but it always struck as something odd.

I mean, the Disney movies prior to Sleeping Beauty were always consistent with small details like that. Snow White looked the same in every scene and so did Cinderella, Alice and Wendy. Maybe Aurora wears contacts and they kept falling off?

Any thoughts on this?

I've always noticed this, too. The first reasoning that would come into my head is that colored, detailed eyes are more difficult to pull off than simple, black eyes (especially in distant shots). The problem, though, is that characters like Cinderella, Alice, and Wendy consistently had blue eyes even when they were pretty far from the camera. The only thing I can think of is that the animators spent so much time with Sleeping Beauty's intricate design and backgrounds (they often had to use protractors and compasses to get precise lines) that they couldn't be bothered with detailed eyes unless the character was in a close-up.

As for the shot where Aurora wakes up with blue eyes, we can say this is a result of the spell. Notice that Aurora's tiara whenever she's awake is completely gold. When she's asleep, though, it's embedded with rubies, which I believe are meant to represent blood drops. When she wakes up, the rubies are still on her tiara, so I can only assume her eyes were an after-effect of the spell (along with her tiara) and both went back to normal by the time she went downstairs to meet her parents.

Oh, and Aurora's eyes aren't brown; they're gray (some consider them to be purple, but I think gray is more likely).

Weird, I could've sworn that they were brown.

But good to know I'm not the only Disney freak that has noticed this!

The movie was in production for ever and it is probably a result of new or different people coloring or design changes that happened during production. The Once Upon a Dream Scene was animated first so they may have decided to change it after that. (This is what happened with The Black Cauldron and Taran's tunic changing color)

Also has anyone notice that Aurora's dress changes from Pink to Blue allot? What's up with that?

Flanger-Hanger wrote:Also has anyone notice that Aurora's dress changes from Pink to Blue allot? What's up with that?

I know!

Girl can't make up her mind!

But what I always found surprising is that in the ending sequence Aurora's dress was always changing yet no one seemed to noticed .

Aurora merchandise bothers me with the inconsistencies in eye color. Sometimes it's purple, but more often than not, it's blue. I think that sometimes it may even be brown. One time, at Sears, I saw a Princess comforter, and Belle had no eyebrows on it...it's freakier than Aurora's changing eye color.

blackcauldron85 wrote:Aurora merchandise bothers me with the inconsistencies in eye color. Sometimes it's purple, but more often than not, it's blue. I think that sometimes it may even be brown. One time, at Sears, I saw a Princess comforter, and Belle had no eyebrows on it...it's freakier than Aurora's changing eye color.

So the inconsistencies are carried over to the merchandise...

That's crazy, I always considered Aurora/Briar Rose to have brown eyes. It makes her stand out more, blonde hair and brown eyes. That's not too common in cartoons, usually the blonde characters have green or blue eyes.

i prefer her eyes purple like Disney Kid does.

Disneykid wrote: As for the shot where Aurora wakes up with blue eyes, we can say this is a result of the spell. Notice that Aurora's tiara whenever she's awake is completely gold. When she's asleep, though, it's embedded with rubies, which I believe are meant to represent blood drops. When she wakes up, the rubies are still on her tiara, so I can only assume her eyes were an after-effect of the spell (along with her tiara) and both went back to normal by the time she went downstairs to meet her parents.

Cursed Crown? Very interesting. You know, I've thought for a while that the red tear-drop shaped parts on Snow White's sleeves represented red blood from when her mother pricked her finger while sewing and wished for a child with lips as red as the blood from her finger. "Ouch! That f***in' hurt! I hope my child looks like that!" WTF?!

Anyway, I disagree about that cursed crown. Also notice that when Aurora is asleep, she's, well, motionless. And so is the crown. And it's much easier to put detail on something that doesn't move, because then you don't have to keep re-drawing that detail in every frame.

When tehe crown is first made, it's spinning, then it's being placed on her head, and it's still for an instant until Aurora starts to cry and puts her head down, making the crown move with it. Basically, the crown is always moving with her head as she moves, up the stairs, until finally she pricks her finger and stops moving. The first time the crown is jeweled is also the first time it's still, and it's not the only one getting detail. Aurora's all shaded and air-brushed (I actually read in an interview with Marc Davis he regretted the air-brushing) lying on the floor. So Aurora's getting shadow detail and the crown's getting jewel detail.

Then, Aurora's a cel again and not a background when the fairies put her to bed, but she's still still, so they only have to draw the detail once and that crown won't be moving. Then, we see Aurora as a detailed, shaded background again in Maleficent's vision she shows to Phillip, and naturally the crown is detailed with her, hence the jewels. And it's still.

Finally, the prince goes up to what I think is a background of Aurora, and when he kisses her and her eyes flutter...well, I know that there's a technique of making one background or even a cel of the part of a body that doesn't move, while multiple cels of the parts that do move are put on it. I don't know what's that called, but I sure it exists because Aurora is shaded and detailed (very evident in her collar) during that scene while her eyes flutter open. And once on The Simpsons it was obvious the technique existed when Homer's upper body didn't move while his face did. I don't know how to explain it, but I could tell his shoulders were static and they only created multiple frames for his face.

Anyway, to put it simply, when something moves, it's harder to keep re-drawing the detail, and still keep it looking nice. But if it's still, you can detail all you want. If something is still for a few frames, but will move later in that shot, it would be silly to detail it for the few frames it's not moving and then have to remove the detail when it does move. It's seriously a lot of jewels to be drawn perfectly in the same exact positions at different angles.

When I say still, I mean it's not going to move in the shot at all. That's why they can detail it all they want, because the many jewels won't be moving.

Also, the majority of the scenes where we see Aurora's crown jeweled are close-ups, would you agree? Well, maybe not close-ups, but she's never particularly far away when we see those jewels, so that could also explain it. Actually I lied, I think. When Maleficent says "here's your precious princess" she is kind of far away, but she's still all detailed(if you watch, it appears they did two differenty backgrounds for when the camera zooms in on Aurora, one where she's farther away and one close-up. The far away one complicates my "it's also detailed because it's close-up" theory). And when Phillip comes over to her from the stairs, she's far away. Is it jeweled there? If so, maybe it disproves my close-up theory, but if something's close-up it's easier to detail it than from far away.

Sorry this was so long about a crown!

Maybe she has magic eyes?

Some of you have seen Sleepy Beauty way too many times.... I kid, I kid! Though, now that I think about it, I do remember the eye colors as well.....

Disney Duster, your theory's an interesting one, and would make sense except for one thing: I find that the Disney animators are sticklers for detail. They work very hard keeping things consistent, even if it's a small wardrobe detail. I can't see them with the attitude of, "Oh, it's going to be too hard to animate rubies on a moving crown. Let's just put them on when it's a static painting." If they found it too difficult to put rubies on, they wouldn't have put them on during the static shots, either, because it'd cause a fairly major continuity error. The theory of more detail doesn't really apply here. Every time we see Aurora realistically airbrushed, her features and wardrobe are still the same. The only added detail lies in the shading of those features, so I don't see them adding a new wardrobe detail just because the tiara's in a realistic close-up shot. If they could create Aurora's curls in motion (those must've been a nightmare to animate), they can certainly animate a few red dots on a moving tiara, especially considering the curls in Aurora's hair move more wildly than her tiara ever does.

matbe the jewels are just there as part of her sleep. or maybe the fairies bought it at the same place Ariel bought her dissapearing shoes and where Maurice got the supersmart horse of his.

Disney officialy claims that Aurora's eyes are purple. They look purple to me in that scene when she sees her birthday cake and the dress and in that scene in the end when she opens her eyes I think they can be considered as blue-purple. The fact that they look black in the rest of the movie is because they're not detailed, just like the whole crown issue.

Aurora's eyes are supposed to be Blue, like the standard blond heroine of the day. The continual "color retiming" of virtually every Disney release makes it really hard to keep track of anything.

Auroras' eye style varies in part because in those old hand trace and paint days it was simply impossible to consistantly ink the tiny details in her eyes __unless__ the character filled up most of the cel. Hence Aurora's eyes were black unless she was close to us, at which point she reverted to the standard blue iris / black pupil.

Cinderella was done a little differently. In medium shots, for Cindy and her Stepmother, the inkers/painters made the eye iris black and painted the pupil the iris color. You can see this best with the Stepmother, who went from black eyes with green pupils in medium shots to green irises and black pupils in close ups. Again, the hand trace technology couldn't allow for much better.

However, look at CINDERELLA III. Thanks to digital technology, very sharp pencils and high resolution vectorization of the drawings, Cindy and her Stepmother almost always have detailed irises and pupils of the proper color. Unfortunately, like any hand drawing, those tend to shimmer from time to time.

The one thing thats bothered me about Sleeping Beauty is how.......flat she looks when Maleficent reveals her to the three fairies, she just looks pancake like to me However I did notice how the fairies eyes went to the single black dots when they were at the Forbidden Mountain, and were sneaking past the guards. As for Aurora, I've never noticed her eye color changes, I'll have to keep an...eye out for it However...back to seriousness....has anyone heard of the original story? It's rather........non-family friendly thats for sure.

I heard Aurora's eyes were red and posses the Sharingan. hmmmm...




v sharigan eye v

Poody wrote:Some of you have seen Sleepy Beauty way too many times....

That's impossible.

Eyvind Earle was Sleeping Beautys' production designer, and he created a flat, very modern, stylized look for the film, with Walt's blessing (UPAs' flat, modernistic styling had already influenced animation design during the 50's and this may have rubbed off on Walt and Eyvind.). Eyvind's styling was reflected in SB's characters, which complement Eyvind's backgrounds.

In some ways, Eyvind's designs were kin to those of Mary Blair, the latter of which was a major factor in the design of SMALL WORLD, and had influence on Cinderella and many other Disney productions.

As for Red Eyed Aurora; oy... Possessed by Maleficient at last? Red Eye from flash camera?