Aurora

Princess Aurora, also known as Sleeping Beauty or Briar Rose, is a fictional character who appears in Walt Disney Productions' 16th animated feature film Sleeping Beauty (1959). Originally voiced by singer Mary Costa, Aurora is the only child of King Stefan and Queen Leah. An evil fairy named Maleficent seeks revenge for not being invited to Aurora's christening and curses the newborn princess, foretelling that she will die before the sun sets on her sixteenth birthday by pricking her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel. Determined to prevent this, three good fairies raise Aurora as a peasant in order to protect her, patiently awaiting her sixteenth birthday — the day the spell can only be broken by a kiss from her true love, Prince Phillip.

Aurora is based on the princess in Charles Perrault's fairy tale "Sleeping Beauty", as well as the heroine who appears in the Brothers Grimm's retelling of the story, "Little Briar Rose". For several years, Walt Disney had struggled to find a suitable actress to voice the princess and nearly abandoned film entirely until Costa was discovered by composer Walter Schumann. However, Costa's southern accent nearly cost her the role until she proved that she could sustain a British accent for the duration of film. In order to accommodate the film's unprecedentedly detailed backgrounds, Aurora's refined design demanded more effort than had ever been spent on an animated character before, with the animators drawing inspiration from Art Nouveau. Animated by Marc Davis, Aurora's slender physique was inspired by actress Audrey Hepburn. With only 18 lines of dialogue and equally as few minutes of screen time, the character speaks less than any speaking main character in a feature-length Disney animated film.

When Sleeping Beauty was first released in 1959, the film was both a critical and commercial failure, discouraging the studio from adapting fairy tales into animated films for three decades. Aurora herself received negative reviews from both film and feminist critics for her passivity and similarities to Snow White, and would remain Disney's last princess until The Little Mermaid's Ariel debuted 30 years later in 1989. However, Costa's vocal performance was praised, which inspired her to pursue a full-time career as an opera singer to great success. Chronologically, Aurora is the third Disney Princess. Actress Elle Fanning portrays a live-action version of Aurora in the film Maleficent (2014), a retelling of the 1959 animated film Sleeping Beauty from the perspective of the title character. Fanning returned to portray 21-year-old Princess Aurora in Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (2019), which is set five years later.