Sleeping Beauty (1959 film) first Disney feature-film that did not have the same background animation material, but instead with new background animation material. "Sleeping Beauty" was the first animated film to be photographed in the Super Technirama 70 widescreen process, as well as the second full-length animated feature film to be filmed in anamorphic widescreen, following Disney's own "Lady and the Tramp" four years earlier. The film was presented in Super Technirama 70 and 6-channel stereophonic sound in first-run engagements. After many childless years, King Stefan and Queen Leah happily welcome the birth of their daughter, the Princess Aurora. They proclaim a holiday for
The Sleeping Beauty Quartet a warning that premature sexual encounters are destructive. Feminist theorists have focused on Sleeping Beauty's extreme passivity and the sexual nature of her awakening in the fairy tale. Anne Rice literalized these symbolic sexual elements—particularly, the passive sexual awakening or rape of Beauty that has been denounced by feminists—in the story by rewriting it into an explicit sadomasochistic erotica. However, Rice's cross-gender identification with the submissive male characters with receptive capacity in the trilogy—Alexi, Tristan and Laurent—enabled her to circumvent the equation of the female gender and masochism and, via their homoerotic interactions with the dominant male characters, she could