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Film 928: Sleeping Beauty

Trivia: Art direction for this movie was inspired by European medieval painting and architecture.

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 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 second movement, after the overture. Also, the theme playing when the three fairies clean the cottage is based on "The Silver Fairy" movement, which, in its original form, is barely a minute long.

The third Disney film to undergo a painstaking computer restoration, after Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1987 and 1993, and Pinocchio in 1992.

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.

Princess Aurora's long, thin, willowy body shape was inspired by that of Audrey Hepburn.

In the traditional Italian version of this fairy tale, the Sleeping Beauty is named Princess Aurora. In the German version, she is named Briar Rose. The film incorporates both names by having Princess Aurora use the name Briar Rose while undercover.

The prince is named after Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh.

The restoration process involved four painstaking steps. The first step was to scan the original negative into a computer and subject the entire print to a deflickering procedure, evening out all the worn images and creating a cohesive canvas upon which the restoration artists could work. This was then followed by roto-scoping to extract the principal characters, dust-busting to remove all traces of dust and scuffing, and then re-inserting the characters into their cleaned-up backgrounds. Then all 180,000 frames would be completely repainted by up to 40 people in a process that clocked up nearly 48,000 hours. Once complete, the final product is then scanned onto a new negative.

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