In the 65 years since its initial release, Walt Disney’s animated film Sleeping Beauty has become a modern classic. While the movie was initially considered a box-office flop, costing the studio $6 million to produce but earning only $5 million from its initial run, the film is now one of Disney’s most artistically acclaimed features, thanks to the innovative style of artist Eyvind Earle. But completing the masterpiece involved a painfully slow creation process, daunting technical challenges, and disagreements among the artists.
Adapted from Charles Perrault’s 1697 fairytale The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood, Disney began developing the film in 1950 following the commercial success of Cinderella. According to historian Charles Solomon’s book, Once Upon a Dream: From Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty to Disney’s Maleficent, Disney instructed his staff to create “a moving illustration” that maintained a consistent visual style in order to differentiate Sleeping Beauty from his previous work. As film critic Leonard Maltin writes in his 1995 book The Disney Films, Disney envisioned the film as his magnum opus and was prepared to go to any expense necessary to fulfill his vision.
Disney’s Sleeping Beauty was an artistic achievement years in the making. (Uploaded to YouTube by Disney)
Original sketches for the film were completed by artist John Hench, who returned from a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Cloisters in New York City with an artistic vision for the film. For his sketches, Hench drew inspiration from the museum’s iconic unicorn tapestries, whose use of crisp edges and superimposition were well-suited for animation. These initial sketches were then adapted by Eyvind Earle for the film’s background styling, which so inspired Disney that he placed the illustrator in charge of the film’s artistic direction.
Earle’s work on Sleeping Beauty was influenced by a variety of artistic styles, from the pre-Renaissance work of European artists Bruegel and Botticelli to Japanese prints and Persian miniatures, among others. A key inspiration for the film’s artwork was taken from the illuminated manuscript Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (The Very Rich Hours of the Duke of Berry), a book of hours dating from the 15th century and perhaps the best surviving example of manuscript illumination from the Middle Ages. According to Solomon, this piece became the source for many of the key colors used throughout the film, including “the lapis lazuli blue of the knight’s banners, the yellow-green of Maleficent’s flames, the shell pink and paler blue of Aurora’s gown.”
Unlike previous Disney films, Sleeping Beauty contains an array of intricate details, with each scene unfolding like the decorative tableaus they were modeled after. From the towering castles and baroque interiors of the opening sequence to the lush greenery and ominous silhouettes of the forest, the film’s artwork represents an abrupt departure from the less heavily stylized illustrations of films like Snow White and Cinderella.
Animators and artists discuss the process of making Sleeping Beauty. (Uploaded to YouTube by Walt Disney Animation Studios)
Perhaps the most intricately designed aspect of the film occurs during the final battle scene, in which Maleficent conjures a forest of thorns to ensnare Prince Phillip and prevent him from rescuing Aurora from her enchanted sleep. To animate the scene, Disney turned to xerography, a new and innovative method in which illustrations were directly copied onto celluloid sheets mechanically, eliminating the need to hand ink each animated cel. This method would become the industry standard for the next 30 years, until it was replaced by computer-generated images in the ’90s.
According to biographer Bob Thomas’s book Walt Disney, the Art of Animation, Earle created over 300 visual-development paintings and hundreds of sketches throughout his five years of working on the film, as well as dozens of background paintings, some measuring up to 15 feet long. CEO of Eyvind Earle Publishing, Ioan Szasz, reported that the illustrator was so concerned that his art would be simplified that he insisted on completing them himself, often working on as many as 30 paintings at one time.
Despite the artistic quality of Earle’s work, many of the film’s animators felt that his style was not suitable for the art form. According to Szasz, Sleeping Beauty was the first animated film whose artistic direction was determined by background paintings, a strategy that was largely contested by many working on the film. Indeed, animators struggled to make the characters stand out against the heavily stylized background paintings, and supervising director Clyde Geronimi told interviewers Michael Barrier and Milton Gray that “the backgrounds became more important than the animation.”
Yet another difficulty lay in Disney’s decision to film the movie in Super Technirama 70, a brand new 70 mm exhibition format that required illustrators to work with very large sheets of paper and create twice as much art to fill the frame.
For these reasons among many others, the film’s production was delayed for a number of years. As journalist Neil Gabler writes in his book Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, the film was originally slated for release in 1955, but by 1954 Disney was heavily involved in various other projects, including plans to build his Disneyland theme park and development for The Mickey Mouse Club TV show, among others. By the time of the film’s release in 1959, production delays had cost the studio significantly, with the forest scene alone totaling $10,000, according to animator John Canemaker’s book Walt Disney’s Nine Old Men and the Art of Animation.
Aurora meets Prince Phillip in the iconic forest scene, which cost $10,000 to produce. (Uploaded to YouTube by DisneyMusicVEVO)
In the wake of these costs, Disney made several significant changes to his filmmaking process. According to Canemaker, Disney instated a quota system to keep production costs down, requiring animators to create a specified number of drawings each day. He additionally switched from hand-drawn animations to the xerography method, making Sleeping Beauty the last Disney film to be made with hand-inked cels.
In his book Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in its Golden Age, Michael Barrier writes that Earle left Disney Studios by 1958, just one year before Sleeping Beauty was released. With artistic decisions falling to Geronimi, he softened the background paintings throughout the film to prevent them from competing with the character animation. Yet, Earle’s impact on the world of animation cannot be denied. The film has served as a source of inspiration for countless illustrators, influencing the background and color styling of films like Pocahontas and Frozen, among others. Due to its significant cultural and artistic impact, Sleeping Beauty was even selected for preservation in the United States’ National Film Registry in 2019.
Today, 65 years after its initial release, many regard Sleeping Beauty as the most artistically distinct animated feature ever produced. While the film was initially panned by critics for its uninspired plot and characters, it has since gained almost universal acclaim for its visual design, largely due to the artistic decisions of its lead illustrator.
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