This Day in Disney History: Sleeping Beauty (01/29)

Sleeping Beauty is an American animated musical fantasy film produced by Walt Disney based on The Sleeping Beauty by Charles Perrault and Little Briar Rose by The Brothers Grimm. The 16th film in the Walt Disney Animated Classics series, it was released on this day in 1959, by Buena Vista Distribution. This was the last Disney adaptation of a fairy tale for some years because of its initial mixed critical reception and underperformance at the box office. The studio did not return to the genre until 30 years later with the release of The Little Mermaid (1989). However, the film is now hailed as one of the greatest animated films of all time.

The film's musical score and songs are arrangements or adaptations of numbers from the 1890 Sleeping Beauty ballet by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Along with Tchaikovsky, Igor Stravinsky's (!) music compositions were also popular in the film.

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