Sleeping Beauty is a 1959 American
animated film produced by
Walt Disney and based on the
fairy tale "La Belle au bois dormant" by Charles Perrault. The 16th animated feature in the Walt Disney Animated Classics series, it was released to theatres on January 29, 1959 by Buena Vista Distribution, and is the last fairy tale produced by Walt Disney (after his death, the studio returned to the genre with 1989's
The Little Mermaid) due to its initial box office disappointment.
The film was directed by Les Clark, Eric Larson, and Wolfgang Reitherman, under the supervision of
Clyde Geronimi, with additional story work by Joe Rinaldi, Winston Hibler, Bill Peet, Ted Sears, Ralph Wright, and Milt Banta. The film's musical score and songs, featuring the work of the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, are arrangements or adaptations of numbers from the 1890
Sleeping Beauty ballet by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
Sleeping Beauty was the first animated feature to be photographed in the Technirama widescreen process. The film was presented in Super Technirama 70and 6-channel stereophonic sound in first-run engagements. Only one other animated film, Disney's The Black Cauldron, was shot in Technirama.
Princess Aurora, the film's titular character, appears for fewer than eighteen minutes in the film (excluding the time she appears as an infant at the beginning).