Sleeping Beauty (1959) Feature Length Theatrical Animated Film

Sleeping Beauty was photographed in Technirama. This was an adaptation of the VistaVision process introduced by Paramount. Like VistaVision, the standard 35mm film traveled in a horizontal path through the camera, exposing a frame that was 8-perforations wide.... but the wrinkle that makes it different is that the photography was done with an anamorphic lens for a 1.5x squeeze... so where standard VistaVision was shown at 1.66 or 1.85, Technirama was then printed for first runs as "Super Technirama 70", which meant 70mm projection prints with an aspect ratio 2.55:1.

The "technicolor" in the credit was simply contractual, as they were the lab developing negative and making (Eastmancolor) release prints.... though the 35mm CinemaScope prints (cropped to 2.35) would have been made in 1959 by dye-transfer.

And to make it really interesting, the camera photography, like all Disney animation of the period, was photographed as color separations on Black & White negative film stock by the Successive Exposure process (each single color frame that you see on screen is in fact a "triple exposure" of the three successive frames of negative, first a red exposure, then a green and blue).

Courtesy of Scott MacQueen