I grumble all the time about Disney and Warner Brothers screwing up their classic cartoons by cropping them too tightly when they put them out on DVD — so I have to give credit where credit is due, when one of those studios loosens things up a bit.
Although the new Blu-Ray edition of Sleeping Beauty (1959) is reportedly the first version of that film, in any format, to show the full 2.55:1 aspect ratio, parts of it still seem a little tight to me.
To pick just one example at random, I can’t help thinking that the background artists who worked on the scene below would never have intended for the dishes to hover so close to the bottom edge of the frame, and I also can’t help thinking that the animators probably wouldn’t have wanted the cup that is raised by the one king to poke out of the top edge of the frame like that:
So I went back to the earlier DVD, which came out in 2003 and featured a 2.35:1 version of the film, to see how it compares to the new version — and I was shocked to find that the earlier DVD not only cropped the sides, as you would expect from a narrower aspect ratio, but it also cropped the top and bottom even more:
The colours look a little less vibrant in the old version, too. So, there can be no doubt: The current Blu-Ray edition (and the bonus DVD that comes with it) is far superior to the earlier DVD — even if I still wish the framing on the Blu-Ray weren’t quite so tight.
Incidentally, the earlier DVD included a 1.33:1 version of the film, in addition to the 2.35:1 version, presumably for those who avoid widescreen movies like the plague. Here is how it cropped the shots above for that aspect ratio — trimming just a hair more from the bottom, while admitting just a hair more at the top:
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