"Sleeping Beauty" is a fairy tale found in many cultural traditions that, in its most basic form, tells the story of a princess who is cursed by an evil being to sleep until a prince wakes her. In some versions, a "good" fairy places the entire kingdom in perpetual sleep to awaken with the princess, while in others, the heroine suffers the curse alone. Common themes found throughout "Sleeping Beauty" adaptations include the imagery of a dark, magical forest, a woman falling into an enchanted sleep after pricking her finger on a spindle, a sexual encounter during that sleep, and a curse placed on an infant over a perceived breach of etiquette.
The earliest recorded version of the tale is the 14th-century French chivalric romance, Perceforest. Though the million-word epic is nearly unrecognizable compared to the modern-day interpretation of "Sleeping Beauty," Perceforest establishes the themes and tropes carried through to 2014's Maleficent.
The most famous version of the tale is the folktale "Little Briar Rose," collected and printed in the third edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales in 1812. In the Brothers Grimm version, twelve "wise women" attend a gathering and give magical gifts to the newborn Princess Rosamund, nicknamed Briar Rose. An uninvited thirteenth "wise woman," bitter over her exclusion, curses the princess to die by pricking her finger on a spinning wheel when she reaches fifteen years of age. Another "wise woman" reduces the curse to a "deep sleep for a hundred years." Like King Stefan in Maleficent, the king in the Brothers Grimm tale burns all the spinning wheels in the kingdom and hides the princess, who accidentally uncovers a spinning wheel through a secret door. A hedge of thorns blocks Rosamund's tower, just as Maleficent and King Stefan create barriers from thorns. However, unlike the Disney adaptation, in the Grimm version, the entire kingdom falls into a hundred-year enchanted sleep, and a prince that Rosamund has never met breaks the curse.
In addition to its many cross-cultural reinterpretations, the "Sleeping Beauty" tale has been adapted across media. Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky famously composed three ballet scores inspired by the story of "Sleeping Beauty" as told by folklorist and author Charles Perrault, in 1888-1889.
Disney adapted Charles Perrault's La Belle au bois dormant into an animated musical in 1959. The film is visually inspired by pre-Renaissance European art and incorporates Tchaikovsky's melodies into its score. It received praise for its animation and score but criticism for its weak plot and anti-feminist characters. Despite initially being a box-office bomb, the film had a significant cultural impact, preceding many adaptations and reimaginings in film, television, and literature, such as Neil Gaiman's The Sleeper and the Spindle and Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales for Every Child 1995 episode, "Sleeping Beauty."
Disney's 2014 live-action remake, Maleficent, and its 2019 sequel, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, expand the antagonist Maleficent's narrative to add depth and sympathy to a character that has been one-dimensional in nearly all versions of Sleeping Beauty.
