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In the kid-friendly version -

Princess Aurora and Prince Phillip meet in the woods, where they sing 'Once Upon a Dream' and instantly fall in love.

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An evil sorceress without much motive -

The evil Maleficent casts a spell on Aurora to die by pricking her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel before sunset on her 16th birthday.

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True love triumphs -

Fortunately, one of the good fairies changes the spell so Aurora will fall into a deep sleep instead, but the only way to wake her from her sleep is true love's kiss. Maleficent tries to stop Prince Philip from reaching Aurora, but ultimately fails.

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The original story -

Charles Perrault’s ‘Mother Goose Tales’ inspired Disney, but it was Italian author Giambattista Basile's 1634 story 'Sun, Moon, and Talia' that inspired Perrault in the first place.

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A slightly different tale -

The princess, named Talia, falls "dead" when a piece of flax is wedged under her nail, and her family leaves her in a palace alone. One day, a king happens upon the palace and climbs in through a window.

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Far from true love's kiss -

He finds her lying unconscious, as though dead, and is overwhelmed with sadness, but blood coursing through his veins he “gathered the first fruits of love.” As if sexually assaulting an unconscious woman wasn’t enough, throw some necrophilia in there too.

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Then he leaves -

After having satisfied himself in this horrendous act, the king returns to his kingdom and wholly forgets about Talia for nine months.

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She gives birth -

In those nine months, Talia grows pregnant and delivers twins, who come with two fairies that put the babies, named Sun and Moon, at their mother's breast. Somehow the fairies are more believable than snoozing through a twin labor.

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True love's suckle -

They couldn't find her nipple, so instead began to suck at her fingers, and one of them managed to suck the splinter of flax out. Talia awoke! Instead of screaming in confusion at her surroundings, she simply started to feed them.

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The king remembers she exists -

After nine months of never thinking about Talia, the king remembered and decided to go visit her again, giving the excuse of going hunting. You can probably guess his intentions...

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He finds her awake -

To his surprise, he finds Talia and the twins, and overjoyed he recounted what had happened between them. In a big stretch even for fiction, Talia and the king bonded and spent a few days together.

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But it doesn't end there -

The king returns to his kingdom with the promise that he'll take her back with him soon. Why all the secrecy? Oh yes, that's right: the king has a queen.

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The wife wasn't going to stand by -

After such a long hunting trip, and the king's strange compulsion to repeat Talia and the babies' names out loud, she rightfully grew suspicious. She threatened one of his men, and he told her everything about Talia.

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Here the plan gets wicked -

The queen sent after Talia in the name of the king, asking her to send the children because he wanted to see them. Talia, clearly brain-damaged, did as requested

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Revenge is a dish best served hot -

The queen ordered her cook to kill the babies and cook them into tasty dishes for her husband. The cook didn't have the heart, however, and took the babies home to his wife, while using lamb for the meal.

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The king ate it up -

The king kept remarking at how delicious it all was, and the queen creepily kept saying, “Eat, eat, you are eating of your own.” Very subtle. Eventually he got annoyed and said indeed he was eating his own because she doesn't provide anything for him.

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This made the queen hunger for more -

She sent for Talia this time, again in the name of the king, and decided she would burn Talia at the stake for what she did to her. Talia tried to explain that the king took her while she was unconscious, but the queen ignored her “excuses.”

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Beauty shows a moment of brains -

Talia asks to remove her clothes before being burned, and the queen agrees because she wants her rich robes. Talia screamed with every garment she removed, making for a genuinely surreal scene.

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The king heard -

The king was alerted by the noise and demanded to know what was happening. The queen revealed that she had cooked his children into the food he'd enjoyed, and he was so devastated he ordered that she be thrown into the fire.

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He was going to throw the cook in, too -

The cook revealed that he hadn't had the heart to kill the children, and his wife presented the king with his twins.

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The biggest twist of all -

Having conquered the villain of the story (the wife of a cheating rapist), the king, his victim, and the kids she gave birth to without her knowledge all lived happily ever after...

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A disturbing moral of the story -

It ends with the proverb, "Those whom fortune favors / Find good luck even in their sleep."

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It went through a few revisions... -

Disney's 'Sleeping Beauty' came about in 1959, in what is known as the "Classic Era" of Disney.

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But retained the same attitude towards women -

Sleeping Beauty became part of the trio of princesses who personified the traditional, obedient, taciturn housewife stereotype, where outward beauty was privileged above all.

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The spurned queen becomes the evil witch -

The character of Maleficent is one of the greatest changes, as a spurned (yet horrifically violent) wife is replaced by a jealous evil sorceress with seemingly little motive.

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Live-action evolution -

But Disney's 'Maleficent' (2014) completely changed the narrative again. The live-action film re-tells the story from Maleficent's side, who is not evil at heart but does evil things when betrayed by a man she loved.

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Giving Basile's queen some justice -

Maleficent casts the sleep spell on the man's daughter, yes, but she also tries to take it back after she gets to know her. After the spell hits, Maleficent brings Prince Philip to the comatose Aurora hoping for the antidotal true love's kiss.

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The greatest modern twist - But Prince Philip's kiss doesn't work! In despair, Maleficent kisses the girl's forehead, and she wakes up. The film ultimately positions the famed antagonist as the princess' true love.

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And the man who wronged her is the slain villain -

Aurora's father, the man who sought refuge with Maleficent and then betrayed her by drugging her and cutting off her wings in order to become king, dies in the end. Perhaps this was some degree of penance paid for the behavior of Basile's king.

See also: How Disney princesses have changed radically over the years.

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