Every year on my birthday, I try to watch Disney’s Sleeping Beauty.
I’m not sure exactly when I started doing this. I watched it a lot as a child, again, usually on or around my birthday. I was in love with the colors and images, the Foley art behind the hoofbeats, and pretty much everything about it. Aurora was secondary (though I did love her final dress – and yes, blue is best, and that’s not just because Merryweather is amazing, thank you). I adored Maleficent (haven’t seen the Jolie films and don’t really want to) and Samson (Prince Philip’s horse, who I contend is an ancestor of Maximus).
Looking back, Sleeping Beauty is what hooked me on medievalism and fantasy. The style (especially the backgrounds) of Sleeping Beauty were inspired by medieval tapestries, and there’s an element of illuminated manuscripts to them as well. My very first forays into the SCA were scribal, with plans to pen and illustrate period fairytales, which would ultimately be bound together. I’m still a fan of the weird and rare static bardic art of books and stories.
I’m thinking about all this again recently because my birthday is coming up was yesterday, and I‘ll once again curled up on my couch, maybe this year with my kids to watch Sleeping Beauty.
In 2011, Shoomla created a digital art series reimagining Disney Princesses in “historical” clothing. Buzzfeed followed up a few years later in 2015 with an article doing the same with models. Both are… questionable at best. And since all the best/most fun projects are fueled by spite, I decided to try and try and create Period Princesses.
The plan is to track down the earliest written (because oral would be super difficult to nail down) versions of various tales that later became Disney princesses – to start with, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, and Cinderella.
This is the kind of research project that bubbles in the back of my brain like a pot roast in a crock pot. I occasionally check on it, spend an hour or so digging for more resources which I skim and save to a file, then go on about my day. The most work I’ve done on it was recreating a pair of Han Dynasty shoes1 which were inspired by Ye Xian’s story – arguably the earliest known/written version of Cinderella.
A period Sleeping Beauty is a substantially messier, though [TW: SA, r*pe]. In the original stories, our heroine has even less agency than she does in the Disney film and is actively victimized. Still, it’s an opportunity to not only research 14th century clothing from the Low Countries (but maybe 15th century Burgundian because the origin is sketchy) but also to shed light on feminist issues in period stories.
Oh, and yeah, that dress is gonna be blue.
- I have a second version of this project which I will someday upload the documentation for – as soon as I find the digital copy of it on my laptop… ↩
