Sleeping Beauty 3 (section)

Rising from a rugged hilltop, a castle of needle-thin spires stretches toward a sky glowing in shades of rose and dusky pink. A winding path leads up the craggy slope, and if you follow it down, you will spot a small figure in white heading toward that far-off fortress. Eyvind Earle painted this scene as a background for Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty in 1959, and the twilight colors give it the exact hush of a fairy tale about to unfold. Neat rows of rounded shrubs and spindly bare trees frame the foreground, adding to the sense of an enchanted, slightly eerie kingdom.

Earle's look here is instantly his own. Drawing from medieval tapestries and the flat, graphic quality of Japanese woodblock prints, he built his worlds out of sharp angles, tidy patterns, and trees so stylized they almost seem carved from geometry. This was a daring break from the soft, rounded style Disney had leaned on for years, and Earle fought hard to make his sharper, more modern vision the heart of the film.

That bold choice came at a cost. Sleeping Beauty took years to finish and became the most expensive Disney animated feature of its time, partly because each of Earle's richly detailed backgrounds took so long to paint. Viewers back then were split on the unusual style, but the passing decades have been kind to it. Today his paintings stand among the most admired art ever made for animation, and a single glance at this rosy, spellbound castle shows exactly why.