Wow, it certainly took me long enough to get around to discussing the work of Eyvind Earle (1916-2000). Earle painted and designed backgrounds for many of the Disney shorts in the 1950s, including MELODY, TOOT WHISTLE PLUNK AND BOOM, PIGS IS PIGS, THE TRUTH ABOUT MOTHER GOOSE and PAUL BUNYAN. He was also the art director of SLEEPING BEAUTY (1959) and largely set the tone for the look of the film’s backgrounds. There is no question that Earle produced some excellent work during the 1950s, particularly on the Disney shorts, but in my opinion, his art direction on SLEEPING BEAUTY was an artistic failure. It took me a long time to understand why I didn’t like Earle’s art direction on the film. That’s because in and of themselves, there are some beautiful backgrounds throughout SLEEPING BEAUTY. It’s not that Earle’s vision for the film is poor; it’s that as art director, his vision extended only as far as his backgrounds and didn’t encompass the needs of the entire film.

The costliest mistake was that Walt Disney granted an inexperienced animation artist like Earle so much control over the look of the film. When Earle was made the film’s art director in 1955, his total experience in animation totalled less than four years. He failed to understand the nature of animation production, which demands a creative give-and-take between competing artistic visions. Instead, Earle insisted that everybody follow his unwavering artistic ideas, not recognizing that his vision wasn’t expansive enough to carry an entire animated feature on its own. He ended up alienating himself from the animation crew, and didn’t pay attention to how his backgrounds worked in context of the character designs, animation and storytelling. Perhaps that’s one reason why people frequently describe the film’s look as ‘cold.’ Earle was unable to bridge the visual gap between backgrounds and characters, and there is an uneasy distance between the film’s visual elements. Granted, Tom Oreb did a commendable job of styling the character designs to fit into Earle’s visual scheme, but it is a superficial stylization that wasn’t followed through by the animation director or the animators.

The poor visual harmony of SLEEPING BEAUTY is moreso apparent when placed alongside Disney’s follow-up feature 101 DALMATIANS. Here is a terrific example of what happens when an entire crew is on the same page. DALMATIANS screenwriter and storyboard artist Bill Peet, who set the tone of the film’s design, had worked in animation for over twenty years, and he understood the type of characters that could work in animation. Peet’s direct and sketchy visual styling was picked up by the film’s art director Ken Anderson, who developed the look of the film in tandem with other artists like layout stylist Ernie Nordli, color stylist Walt Peregoy and character stylist Tom Oreb. Animator Marc Davis, who was sympathetic to the modernist qualities of the film, delivered one of the finest animation performances of his career, Cruella de Vil. 101 DALMATIANS feels solid visually because it was creatively inclusive and the entire crew was working together, unlike SLEEPING BEAUTY where a single individual took charge of the design and unsuccessfully tried to force the entire production to adapt to his stylistic eccentricities.

Below are some of Earle’s concept paintings for SLEEPING BEAUTY. The first two are extremely atypical of what we’ve come to associate with the SLEEPING BEAUTY style. One is a stark drawing of trees that recalls German Expressionist woodcuts. The other is a black-and-white painting of organic, abstract birds flying through some dreamlike space. The other two paintings, which look more traditionally Earle, are color keys from the film.

(click on images for larger versions)