O, Prince! How Clear You Are on Blu-ray

With its two-dimensional figures and flattened perspectives, the Walt Disney classic “Sleeping Beauty” imitates the look of an illuminated manuscript from the Middle Ages, but its bright, buzzing colors — aquamarine, chartreuse, magenta, goldenrod — are unmistakably those of midcentury America. It’s as if a Book of Hours had been crossbred with an Amana appliance catalog.

Those colors practically soar off the screen in the new Blu-ray version of “Sleeping Beauty” that Disney released last week, making it the first of this studio’s perennials to appear in that new, high-definition format. It’s an appropriate choice, given that “Sleeping Beauty” was itself a product of a high-definition technology of its time, shot in a process, Super Technirama, that yielded 70-millimeter prints with an aspect ratio almost as wide as that of Cinerama.

Equipped with six-channel stereo sound (remixed to DTS 7.1 for the Blu-ray release, though the original tracks are also included), “Sleeping Beauty” thundered forth on Jan. 29, 1959, an imposing embodiment of American technology at its grandest and most self-confident.

In the works for almost eight years, with a budget of $6 million, staggering at the time, the film was meant as a triumphant return to the epic scale of “Pinocchio” and “Fantasia.” Disney animators had drifted through the 1950s with the diminished resources and shrunken ambitions of films like “Alice in Wonderland” (1951) and “Peter Pan” (1953).

For audiences of the period, however, the picture proved to be a bit too grand and too remote. Scolded by critics for its generic characters and relative lack of warmth and humor, “Sleeping Beauty” returned less than half of its investment and ushered in another era of austerity at the studio. Disney animation turned to the small-scale, sitcom-type format of films like “One Hundred and One Dalmatians” (1961), and “Sleeping Beauty” would prove to be the studio’s last animated feature based on a fairy tale until its loose adaptation of “The Little Mermaid” in 1989.

More significantly, perhaps, it was the last Disney film to be hand-inked on animation cels, rather than transferred, by photocopying, from the animators’ sketches and paintings. Henceforth, the handmade element — unevenly applied color fields, broken lines and even the occasional greasy fingerprint — would disappear from the Disney universe, eternally to be missed.

The Blu-ray “Sleeping Beauty” is so sharp that it is occasionally possible to glimpse the tiny shadows cast by misaligned cels, which adds a welcome humanizing factor. But otherwise the digital restoration has eliminated all stray dust motes and turned the color fields into perfectly solid blocks. (“Sleeping Beauty” is also being issued in a standard-definition version, and Disney has included a copy of the standard disc in the Blu-ray box as well.) The effect is to turn a cold film into something slightly, subliminally colder.

According to the opening credits, this “Sleeping Beauty” was inspired by Charles Perrault’s 1697 version of the fairy tale, with other narrative elements drawn from the Russian ballet of 1889, scored by Tchaikovsky. But it is also a film of its time, with themes of adolescent romanticism and rebellion taken from the emerging teenage melodramas of the late ’50s. Released the same year as Delmer Daves’s “Summer Place,” the Disney film offers a Beauty — Princess Aurora — whose long, blond hair and perky demeanor come from the same California cauldron as the Mattel Barbie doll (born March 9, 1959) and Sandra Dee’s Gidget.

When Aurora (with the beguiling voice of Mary Costa) meets her Prince Phillip (Bill Shirley) in a bower populated by sweetly anthropomorphized animals (who seem to belong to an earlier period of Disney animation), they instantly fall in love, and no amount of parental protest is going to keep them apart. Phillip’s father caves in immediately to his son’s expressed desire to marry a peasant girl. (Her royal identity has not yet been established.)

But overcoming the objections of Maleficent (Eleanor Audley), the evil sorceress who functions as a malevolent mother figure, requires more active opposition. Maleficent transforms herself into a dragon — “Now you shall deal with me, O Prince, and all the powers of hell!” — for a climactic battle with Phillip that features the film’s most spectacular animation.

Both the Blu-ray and standard versions are two-disc sets that come with a plethora of extras. For the adult cinephile, there are an excellent commentary track featuring John Lasseter of Pixar, the critic Leonard Maltin and the Disney animator Andreas Deja; a 43-minute documentary on the film’s making; a complete Disney television special from 1959, “The Peter Tchaikovsky Story”; and the Oscar-winning documentary short, James Algar’s “Grand Canyon” (29 minutes of ravishing widescreen images of the natural wonder of the title, set to Ferde Grofé’s “Grand Canyon Suite”) that was shown in theaters with “Sleeping Beauty” in its first-run engagements.

For the little ones the overstuffed set offers a music video of Emily Osment performing the film’s signature song, “Once Upon a Dream”; a cluster of games; a tour of the “Sleeping Beauty” attraction at Disneyland, now shuttered; and the ominously titled “Dragon Encounter Audio Sensory Experience,” which may be better left to the imagination.

Disney is also using the Blu-ray “Sleeping Beauty” to push the company’s new BD Live technology, which requires an Internet connection. Every time I tried to load it on my desktop computer, my software player choked on the 58-page “End User’s License Agreement” and crashed, so I don’t know how well the new features work. But I’m not enchanted with the concept: the promotional material says that BD Live will allow little viewers to exchange text messages while they are watching the movie; create video clips of themselves and inject them directly into the film; and play a trivia game using a chat function.

Has Disney decided that American youth suffers from an excessively long attention span? Things have come to a curious pass when children have to be entertained during their entertainment. (Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment, Blu-ray, $34.99; standard-definition, $29.99, G)

Also Out on Tuesday

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