Sleeping Beauty (1959 Film)

Sleeping Beauty (1959 Film)

Sleeping Beauty is a 1958/1959 American animated musical fantasy 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. It is the last fairy tale produced by Walt Disney due to its initial box office disappointment; the studio did not return to the genre until years after Disney's death with the release of The Little Mermaid (1989).

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 film to be photographed in the Technirama widescreen process. The film was presented in Super Technirama 70 and 6-channel stereophonic sound in first-run engagements. Only one other animated film, Disney's The Black Cauldron (1985), was shot in Technirama.