Prod. 2082 - Sleeping Beauty Draft

Time for a new feature film. Since Sleeping Beauty is up for the big beautiful BluRay experience - with music that will sound like originally recorded in Germany (I can hardly wait!) - it is the obvious choice. Therefor, throughout the next couple of weeks I will bring you the draft of Prod. 2082 - Sleeping Beauty.

Here are the cover and notes in the inside of my copy. It was originally kept in the Background Morgue - the storage of old BGs that was located in the basement of the Ink & Paint building on the Burbank lot. This has, of course, been transferred to the ARL, the Animation Research Library. For internal use, these drafts are said to have been digitalized, and the old ones discarded. Like this one...

Very interesting to me is the list of photostat numbers for the storyboards. When the board was OK'ed, it was photographed. From the negative numbers we can make some conclusions as to when the sequences were ready for full production. The first number are month and year of the negative. As we have learned from Frank and Ollie's Illusion of Life, the first sequence in animation was Boy Meets Girl, Seq. 8 - and lo, it has the earliest neg. numbers: April to July 1954. Followed by Seq. 07.0 - Fairies Plan, March 1955. The rest is from 1956 except Seq. 1 - Opening, Seq. 7.1 maleficent Kicks Goons Around and the last Seq. 21, Girl Awakens and Ending, all from 1957...Disclaimer: As always, drafts were not meant as historical documents, they were made during production to be able to trace the person responsible for the actual drawings in case there was anything that needed to be cleared up. They were also used for footage counts, to establish credits, and to see if there were any "slackers." In many cases, a Supervising Animator would pose out a whole sequence, but only animate a few scenes, if any at all. Therefor, the draft MAY not always give a clear view of who was the main responsible person. But it is right now all we have...