Sleeping beauties

Countless stills never made it on screen, and Solomon reprints many of those marvelous drawings and sketches: red pencil drafts of Dopey and Sneezy; discarded pastel sequences from "Sleeping Beauty"; an early rendering of Timothy the mouse with his ear pressed against Dumbo's trunk (before the artists decided that the title character wouldn't speak).

Some stories were developed but seemed too weak or lacked mainstream appeal, and were subsequently abandoned. (Four teams tried to adapt "Don Quixote" to animation.) There's plenty of interesting trivia included: Disney scrapped the first few months of work on "Pinocchio" after deciding the puppet was too much of a "sarcastic wise guy"; a team of artists spent nine years perfecting "The Rescuers."

Somewhat less compelling is the inclusion of material from two more recent full-length features ("Wild Life" and "My Peoples") that were never produced. Both incorporated digital art, and those pictures are noticeably flatter on the page. But this is a treasure for its beautiful "lost and found" images (works of art in their own right) from beloved films and for the author's historical insights.

-- Carmela Ciuraru