Eyvind Earle joined Walt Disney Productions in 1951 first employed as an assistant background painter for "Peter Pan" before being promoted as a full-fledged background painter in the Goofy cartoon, "For Whom the Bulls Toil" and the color stylist of the Academy Award-winning short, "Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom". For "Sleeping Beauty", Earle said he "felt totally free to put my own style" into the paintings he based on Hench's drawings stating "Where his trees might have curved, I straightened them out…. I took a Hench and took the same subject, and the composition he had, and just turned in into my style." Furthermore, Earle found inspiration in French Renaissance utilizing works from Albrecht Dürer, Limbourg Brothers, Pieter Bruegel, Nicolaas van Eyck, Sandro Botticelli, as well as Persian art and Japanese prints. When Geronimi became the supervising director, Earle and Geronimi entered furious creative differences. Geronimi commented that he felt Earle's paintings "lacked the mood in a lot of things. All that beautiful detail in the trees, the bark, and all that, that's all well and good, but who the hell's going to look at that? The backgrounds became more important than the animation. He'd made them more like Christmas cards." Earle left the Disney studios in March 1958, before "Sleeping Beauty" was completed, to take a job at John Sutherland Productions. As a result, Geronimi had Earle's background paintings softened and diluted from their distinctive medieval texture.