Sleeping Beauty Castle Walkthrough

We may have been the only family in California for whom climbing all those stairs to look at dioramas was an annual tradition. You could go up and through without much of a line or anything, which apparently led to its being shut down for seven years in the 2000s. But Sleeping Beauty has always been my favourite Disney movie, and the castle was the only presence it had in Fantasyland. Heck, even my beloved Maleficent dragon was purchased on Main Street, USA. It’s also true that this was a fairly mellow, laidback thing that a family of four could do in the middle of the afternoon without having to stand in line.

Obviously, the castle itself has been standing at the entrance to Fantasyland since Opening Day. This was actually four years before Sleeping Beauty was released in theatres, while the film was still under development. It took nearly a decade to make, and in 1957, there was enough there to open a series of dioramas along a hallway with stairs running to the top and back down again. This neatly handled Walt’s concern that the castle’s interior was wasted space. Originally, the dioramas were in the style of Eyvind Earle’s art for the movie. In 1977, it was redone like the window displays down at the Emporium, and that’s the one I grew up with.

You may note that this is, among other things, not exactly the most accessible thing going. When it was reopened in 2008, a ground-floor room was established that let people experience the walkthrough without having to literally go walking through it. If there’s seating there—and I don’t know, because the one time I’ve gone to Disneyland since then I took the stairs as I had as a child—that sounds like a nice opportunity to sit somewhere relatively quiet for a few minutes, a thing much in demand at the Disney parks.

Don’t get me wrong; the Earle art is one of the reasons the movie’s my favourite in the first place. It’s exquisite, and reminding people of that is no bad thing. That said, there’s always going to be a place in my heart for the ‘70s edition, where the light that lures Briar Rose up the hidden stairs is played by a cotton ball with a lightbulb in it on a very jerky mechanical arm. Silly? Yes. Hokey? Oh, my, yes. But of such silliness are childhood memories made.

So it’s less exciting than a dark ride. But there’s still something charming to it, not least Walt’s concern that the space not be wasted. This is akin to the idea for Pirates of the Caribbean, in fact—walkthrough dioramas. The difference being that you don’t need Walt and company to tell you the story of Sleeping Beauty. You already knew it. This is just a way of reminding you that, if you choose to view a version of that story, you could do worse than to watch the Disney version with art by the incomparable Eyvind Earle.