Beauty Parade

Sleeping Beauty is a 1959 American animated musical fantasy film produced by Walt Disney Productions and released by Buena Vista Film Distribution. Based on Charles Perrault's 1697 fairy tale, the film follows Princess Aurora, who was cursed by the evil fairy Maleficent to die from pricking her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel on her 16th birthday; she is rescued by three good fairies, who change the curse so that Aurora falls into a deep sleep and will be awakened by true love's kiss. The production was supervised by Clyde Geronimi, and was directed by Wolfgang Reitherman, Eric Larson, and Les Clark. It features the voices of Mary Costa, Bill Shirley, Eleanor Audley, Verna Felton, Barbara Luddy, Barbara Jo Allen, Taylor Holmes, and Bill Thompson. Sleeping Beauty began development in 1950. The film took nearly a decade and $6 million (equivalent to $66,267,000 in 2025) to produce, and was Disney's most expensive animated feature at the time. The film's tapestry-like art style was devised by Eyvind Earle, who was inspired by pre-Renaissance European art; its score and songs, composed by George Bruns, were based on Pyotr Tchaikovsky's 1889 ballet. Sleeping Beauty was the first animated film to use the Super Technirama 70 widescreen process and was the second full-length animated feature filmed in anamorphic widescreen, following Lady and the Tramp (1955). Sleeping Beauty was released in theaters on January 29, 1959, to mixed reviews from critics. The film was a box-office bomb in its initial release, grossing $5.3 million (equivalent to $58,536,000 in 2025), and losing $900,000 (equivalent to $9,940,000 in 2025) for the distributor. Consequently, many employees from the animation studio were laid off. Sleeping Beauty's re-releases have been successful, and it has become one of Disney's most artistically acclaimed features. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Scoring of a Musical Picture at the 32nd Academy Awards. Maleficent, a live-action reimagining of the film from the eponymous character's perspective, was released in 2014, followed by a sequel in 2019. The latter year, Sleeping Beauty was selected for preservation in the United States Library of Congress's National Film Registry as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".