Sleeping Beauty (1959)

“In this slumber of death, only true love’s kiss shall break the spell.”

In 1959, Walt Disney released Sleeping Beauty, his most ambitious and expensive animated feature to date. Nearly a decade in the making and reportedly costing six million dollars—a record for animation at the time—the film was both a technical marvel and a commercial gamble. Upon release, it was met with mixed critical reception and underwhelming box office returns, casting a shadow over the studio’s feature animation department for years.

And yet, Sleeping Beauty has since been reclaimed as a triumph: a film of exquisite visual grandeur, artistic audacity, and mythic resonance. Though it lacks the emotional warmth of Snow White or the storytelling elegance of Cinderella, it possesses a different kind of power—operatic, stylized, and breath-taking in scope.

A Tapestry Brought to Life

The most immediately arresting feature of Sleeping Beauty is its look. Art director Eyvind Earle, inspired by medieval tapestries, Gothic illuminated manuscripts, and pre-Renaissance European art, brought an unprecedented aesthetic discipline to the film. Every background is meticulously detailed, every tree and mountain rendered in flattened, vertical forms, echoing the ornamental density of 14th-century art.

Unlike the rounded, fluid realism of earlier Disney features, Sleeping Beauty is composed like a series of tableaux. Characters move through layered, stylized worlds that emphasize verticality and geometry. The effect is theatrical—almost architectural. At times, the film feels like an animated stained-glass window.

Some critics at the time found this approach cold or static. But viewed today, in an era when animation often chases photorealism or hyperkinetic action, the formal elegance of Sleeping Beauty feels almost radical. It is a film to be looked at as much as watched.

“At times, the film feels like an animated stained-glass window.”

Tchaikovsky, Reorchestrated

Sleeping Beauty is also Disney’s only animated feature to draw its entire score from a pre-existing classical work. Adapted from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s 1890 ballet, the music was arranged and reorchestrated by George Bruns to align with the film’s dramatic beats. It’s a sumptuous, romantic score, lending the film a sense of gravitas and operatic sweep.

Musical cues are woven seamlessly into the story—from the ethereal lilts of Aurora’s forest ballad “Once Upon a Dream” to the menacing fanfares that announce Maleficent’s presence. The integration of balletic music and movement reinforces the film’s sense of ritual and timelessness.

This approach also reflects Disney’s broader mid-century fascination with blending animation and classical music, as seen earlier in Fantasia (1940). But here, the marriage is narrative-driven, not abstract: music reinforces mood and myth, rather than interpretive imagery.

Princess, Prince, and the Power of Myth

The story, adapted from Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, is archetypal: a cursed princess, a sleeping kingdom, a heroic prince, and a climactic kiss of true love. But Sleeping Beauty tells it with a sense of epic remove, more akin to fairy tale theatre than character-driven drama.

Princess Aurora (voiced with crystalline sweetness by Mary Costa) is famously passive, with only 18 lines of dialogue. Prince Phillip (Bill Shirley) is more active than most Disney princes to date, even engaging in swordplay, yet still more symbolic than complex.

The real protagonists, arguably, are the three good fairies—Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather—whose dynamic personalities and magical interventions drive much of the plot. Their comedic bickering and acts of bravery bring much-needed warmth and human scale to the otherwise formal proceedings.

But the film’s true star is Maleficent, voiced by Eleanor Audley in one of Disney’s most iconic vocal performances. Regal, vengeful, and icily charismatic, Maleficent is not just a villain—she’s a dark deity, commanding thorns, lightning, and fire. Her transformation into a dragon in the film’s climax remains a benchmark in animated spectacle.

“The real protagonists, arguably, are the three good fairies… but the film’s true star is Maleficent.”

Form Over Feeling?

Despite its artistry, Sleeping Beauty has long been critiqued for its emotional detachment. Aurora is more icon than individual, and her romance with Phillip is largely symbolic—a brief encounter followed by fate. The characters serve the structure of a myth, not a psychological drama.

But this is by design. Sleeping Beauty is a fairy tale in the truest sense: archetypal, ceremonial, and elemental. It does not ask us to relate to the characters as we might in Pinocchio or Beauty and the Beast. Rather, it invites us to witness them—like stained glass saints—moving through a story older than memory.

The film functions almost like liturgy: there is a sense of fate, of ritual, of cosmic balance. This can feel distancing to some viewers, especially younger ones. But for others, it is precisely this formality that gives the film its haunting, dreamlike power.

Legacy and Restoration

Though not a commercial triumph upon release, Sleeping Beauty has grown steadily in stature over the decades. A 2008 digital restoration revealed the full brilliance of Earle’s background paintings, and the film is now widely recognized as a visual masterpiece. Its influence can be seen in everything from The Legend of Zelda to Tangled to Maleficent (2014), which reimagined the villain as a tragic antihero.

It also marked a turning point in Disney history. After Sleeping Beauty, the studio pivoted toward cheaper, xerox-based animation styles (as seen in 101 Dalmatians), and wouldn’t return to fairy tale musicals until The Little Mermaid three decades later.

Today, Sleeping Beauty stands apart from its Disney siblings—not just for its art, but for its tone. It is less a children’s film than a moving manuscript, an illuminated legend preserved in motion.

Final Verdict

Sleeping Beauty is not the warmest or most emotionally immediate of Disney’s classics, but it is the most formally daring. It elevates fairy tale into high art, balancing stylized visuals, symphonic music, and mythic storytelling in a way few animated films have attempted since.

It is a film of vision—flawed, perhaps, in its restraint, but unparalleled in its aesthetic unity. Like a cathedral, it invites awe rather than affection. And in that awe, it finds its magic.

Essential Viewing For: Fans of classical animation, medieval art, myth-based storytelling, and anyone curious about what happens when Disney dares to make a film not for children, but for legend.