My Year With The Mouse

One attraction that many, MANY people don’t know exists is the Sleeping Beauty Castle Walkthrough. We all know what Sleeping Beauty’s castle is, but did you know that you can actually walk through the whole thing? And that it’s a big diorama of the Sleeping Beauty story?

Well you can, and it is.

You've probably walked right past this

The entrance is right next to the secret passage to Frontierland. You can see in the bottom left of the picture that there’s a lovely open book. I should have taken a picture of this, but I didn’t realized its significance, and by the time I was done I didn’t realize I hadn’t taken a picture of it.

My life is very hard.

Anyway, the walkthrough alternates between book pages and diorama scenes. The book pages tell the story

The first page was downstairs and I forgot to take a picture of it

The dioramas were very cool and illustrated key points of the story

OMG FIRE!!!

Now to back up a sec, King and Queen have this daughter and she’s all born and everything and then fairies come to give her gifts and one party crasher, Maleficent, who incidentally is the worst kind of party crasher, and I’m not talking about the one who eats all your Doritos and falls asleep on your couch. She’s the kind who puts an evil curse on things. And she curses Aurora (the baby) so that she will prick her finger on a spinning wheel and therefore die. Happy birthday! So anyway…

That’s where all of the spinning wheels were burned.

Post-burning, the three good fairies fly around, which makes it easy to get pictures like this:

I AM AN AWESOME PHOTOGRAPHER!

As the story continues, Aurora is drawn to the tower by a mysterious green light

That kind of looks like a Glow Worm

She pricks her finger, blah blah blah, and then hits the ground!

I hate it when this happens

Good news for Aurora! She’s not dead, just sleeping!

Quick thinking, fairy!

Then the fairies naturally do the next obvious thing, which is to put everyone to sleep.

How exactly does that work, anyway?

While everyone else is sleeping on the floor, and that can’t be good for your back, Aurora gets a bed.

That's hardly fair

Oh, there’s also this part about the true love’s kiss and Prince Phillip and he’s going to wake her up and everything.

In a lovely silhouette

But life is hardly that simple, right? Because then Maleficent gets All Pissed Off and summons up the flying monkeys or whatever to intercept Phillip.

I'll get you, my pretty, and your little dog too!

This is what demon-summoning looks like

And then, never one to outsource, Maleficent turns herself into a dragon.

Before...

Seriously, the camera ALWAYS adds 50 pounds

But there’s our plucky Prince Phillip, who takes on the dragon!

The book kind of sums it up here

And then Phillip climbs over the overgrown rose bush to deliver said kiss

"Right after this, we're getting a gardener"

And they lived (let’s all say it together) Happily Ever After!

Ahhhhh

So next time you’re at Disneyland, take a walk through the castle and feel Sleeping Beauty’s story!