In the original fable, the princess sleeps for 100 years, and the Prince finds her and wakes her up after the aforementioned century has passed. This idea was dropped for the Disney film so that the Prince could be introduced much earlier in the story.
In the original German fairy tale, the Sleeping Beauty is named Briar Rose; she is Princess Aurora in Italian translation.
Live actors in costume served as models for the animators. The role of Prince Phillip was modeled by Ed Kemmer, who had played Commander Buzz Corry on television's Space Patrol five years before Sleeping Beauty was released. For the final battle sequence Kemmer was photographed on a wooden buck. All the live actors' performances were later screened for the animators' reference.
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.
One of the film's iconic scenes - when Briar Rose meets Prince Phillip for the first time to the tune of "Once Upon a Dream" - was called Sequence 8 when it was being produced. It was a particularly hard sequence to get right (Walt Disney rejected it several times) and ultimately had to be done 4 times, almost bankrupting the studio in the process.
One of the first instances when the movie soundtrack album featured the orchestral score instead of just songs from the film. This set the precedent for soundtrack albums that followed.
Only one other Disney animated film was shot in the same format of Technirama and that was The Black Cauldron.
Princess Aurora's long, thin, willowy body shape was inspired by that of Audrey Hepburn.
Princess Aurora's mother does not have a name in the movie, but in promotional materials she is named Queen Leah. Disney Studios have no record of who provided her voice.
Second only to Dumbo (who didn't speak at all), this Disney title character has very few lines of actual dialogue throughout the entire film, 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.
Several story points for this film came from discarded ideas from Walt Disney's previous fairy tale involving another sleeping heroine: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. They include Maleficent's capture of the Prince and the Prince's daring escape from her castle. Disney discarded these ideas from Snow White because he believed that his artists were not able to draw a human male believably enough.
Shot on a 35mm Technirama double-frame negative (which is as big as two regular Academy frames joined together) running horizontally through the animation camera, with each frame photographed three times (once with a red filter, once with a blue filter, and once with a green filter). This negative was then printed on both CinemaScope-compatible anamorphic film and Super Technirama 70mm film, the first film released in Super Technirama 70.
Such was the attention to detail brought about by the widescreen process was that some of the character animators were only capable of producing one drawing of their characters a day. 24 drawn images are needed to make up one second of movement on film.
The Disneyland castle was named for this film, even though the park opened four years prior to the film's release.
The elaborate background paintings usually took seven to ten days to paint. By contrast, a typical animation background takes one workday to complete.
The first Disney animated feature to be created for the 70mm format.
The first Disney animated film on which Walt Disney personally worked to be released in high definition.
The last fairy tale produced by the studio up until The Little Mermaid.
The little-known second half of the original Sleeping Beauty fable involves the Prince's attempts to protect Sleeping Beauty and their children from his mother who is an ogress. In the end, of course, she is thwarted and jumps into a pot of live serpents to avoid being killed by her own son.
The ominous piece of music to which Maleficent hypnotizes Aurora into pricking her finger is called "Puss-in-Boots and the White Cat." In Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's ballet, it is used for a comic number in which two cats snarl at and try to scratch each other.