Sleeping Beauty (1959)
- Clyde Geronimi originally wanted a completely different ending for the film, but test audiences preferred the one we see today.
- The original script for Sleeping Beauty was written over a decade before production finally began in 1959.
- Before Mary Costa was cast, several major A-list stars turned down the lead role because they felt the script was too risky.
Sleeping Beauty is a 1959 American animated musical fantasy produced by Walt Disney Productions, the studio's most lavish and technically ambitious animated film at the time of its creation. Based on Charles Perrault's fairy tale, the film follows Princess Aurora, who is cursed at birth by the evil fairy Maleficent to prick her finger on a spinning wheel spindle and die before the sun sets on her sixteenth birthday. Three good fairies โ Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather โ hide Aurora in the forest as a peasant girl named Briar Rose, but Maleficent's curse proves inescapable.
Sleeping Beauty's production took nearly the entire decade of the 1950s, and the animation was the most detailed and expensive Disney had ever attempted โ the backgrounds were styled after medieval tapestries and illuminated manuscripts, giving the film a distinctive, angular aesthetic unlike any other Disney production. Maleficent, with her horned headdress, green-black color scheme, and ability to transform into a dragon, became Disney's most visually iconic and feared villain. Tchaikovsky's ballet score was adapted by George Bruns.
Sleeping Beauty was a commercial disappointment that contributed to Disney's retreat from expensive animated features but has since been recognized as one of the studio's greatest artistic achievements.
