In 1951, Walt Disney hired the American illustrator and painter Eyvind Earle (1916-2000) to design the look and ambience of his feature-length animated film, Sleeping Beauty (1959), adapted from the story by Charles Perrault. In his role as 'Colour Stylist,' Earle not only produced abundant conceptual studies (for mood, lighting and scenery), he also painted many of the backgrounds used in the finished film. In an effort to create an 'authentic' historical atmosphere for the film, Earle conducted research into fourteenth- and fifteenth-century European tapestries, paintings and illuminated manuscripts, but his style remains grounded in the influence of post-war architecture, illustration and interior design. Aside from being a failed representation of history (typical of anachronism) this balancing act was arguably necessitated by a cultural context in which modernism had been widely accepted and commodified in American design culture.My paper seeks to address these shifting ideologies of taste and form in relation to the film's notoriously conservative rhetoric of gender.