Did You Know?

Live actors in costume served as models for the animators. The role of Prince Phillip was modeled by Ed Kemmer, who had played Commander Buzz Corry on television's Space Patrol five years before Sleeping Beauty was released. For the final battle sequence Kemmer was photographed on a wooden buck. All the live actors' performances were later screened for the animators' reference.

HIDDEN MICKEY: When the fairies discuss how to help the king and queen, Merryweather makes cookies in the shape of Mickey Mouse.

For the first time on a Disney animated feature, one man, Eyvind Earle, was in charge of the color styling, background design, and the overall look of the film, even painting the great majority of the production backgrounds for this film. Earle's modernistic approach to design and painting resulted provided this film a bold, unique art style, even though his colleagues did not care for his production methods and art style while the film was in production. The elaborate background paintings usually took seven to ten days to paint. By contrast, a typical animation background takes one workday to complete.

Much of the musical score is based on Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's ballet "Sleeping Beauty". The musical score throughout the film was recorded by the Berlin Symphony Orchestra. The ominous piece of music to which Maleficent hypnotizes Aurora into pricking her finger is called "Puss-in-Boots and the White Cat." In Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's ballet, it is used for a comic number in which two cats snarl at and try to scratch each other. Various movements from The Sleeping Beauty ballet underwent some reworking for the Disney film. The opening song (Hail to the Princess Aurora) is actually the ballet's final, grandiose movement. Also, the three fairies' theme is based on "The Silver Fairy movement," which, in its original form, is barely a minute long.

This was the last Disney feature to have cels inked by hand. From 101 Dalmatians onward, the cleaned-up pencil drawings were xeroxed onto the cels. However, some of the scenes in this movie did use the xerography process.

In active production from 1951 until the end of 1958, setting a record (for which it is tied with another 70mm Disney film, The Black Cauldron) for being the Disney animated film with the longest production schedule.

Second only to Dumbo (who didn't speak at all), this Disney title character has only about 18 lines of actual dialogue throughout the entire film in which she only appears in the film for 18 minutes and which is actually about the three fairies who protect her, not about the Sleeping Beauty herself. Rose/Aurora is only featured in the film in very few scenes and hardly says anything. Her first line is spoken 19 minutes into the film, and her last is delivered after she learns of her betrothal 39 minutes into the film. However, she does sing two songs during this time frame.

Several story points for this film came from discarded ideas from Walt Disney's previous fairy tale involving another sleeping heroine: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. They include Maleficent's capture of the Prince and the Prince's daring escape from her castle. Disney discarded these ideas from Snow White because he believed that his artists were not able to draw a human male believably enough.

Walt Disney suggested that all three fairies should look alike, but veteran animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston disagreed with this idea, saying that having them be alike wouldn't be exciting. Also, the idea originally included seven fairies instead of three.

In the original fairy tale, the princess sleeps for 100 years, and the Prince finds her and wakes her up after the aforementioned century has passed. This idea was dropped for the Disney film so that the Prince could be introduced much earlier in the story. Also, originally Princess Aurora is the result of a spell cast on the Queen by a magical fish that she had thrown back into a pond after it wound up lying on the bank.

Princess Aurora's mother does not have a name in the movie, but in promotional materials she is named Queen Leah. Disney Studios have no record of who provided her voice.

George Bruns initially started scoring the film in Los Angeles in 4-track stereo, until he got wind of a new studio in Berlin that used 6-track stereo, so he decamped for Germany. Bruns' efforts were rewarded with an Oscar nomination..

Such was the attention to detail brought about by the widescreen process was that some of the character animators were only capable of producing one drawing of their characters a day. 24 drawn images are needed to make up one second of movement on film.

The last fairy tale produced by the studio up until The Little Mermaid.

This was in production at the Disney Studios for nearly a decade. Story work began in 1951, voices were recorded in 1952, the actual animation took place between 1953 and 1958 and the stereophonic score was recorded in 1957.

The second-biggest grossing film of 1959, just behind Ben-Hur.

To help promote the film, the imagineers working on the new Disneyland project modeled the castle on the one in the film.

One of the first instances when the movie soundtrack album featured the orchestral score instead of just songs from the film. This set the precedent for soundtrack albums that followed.

Animator Eric Cleworth based the dragon's head movements on those of a rattlesnake about to strike.

Even though it is not mentioned in the film, Maleficent's pet raven is named Diablo.

Walt Disney had toyed with the idea of his royal couple dancing in the clouds as a finale for both Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Cinderella. The concept finally got used in Sleeping Beauty. However, the idea was first used in the Bongo segment in Fun & Fancy Free.