What was the first animated film to use the Technirama widescreen process?

Sleeping Beauty was the first animated film to use the Technirama widescreen process. Disney used the larger Super Technirama 70 presentation to showcase the film’s expansive compositions and highly detailed backgrounds.

Technirama combined a widescreen photographic process with an anamorphic image. For selected engagements, Sleeping Beauty was printed and projected in 70mm with six-track stereophonic sound. The format helped give the film a grand, theatrical scale, especially in scenes such as Aurora’s forest wandering, the royal procession, and Prince Phillip’s battle with Maleficent.

The film is sometimes confused with Lady and the Tramp, which was Disney’s first full-length animated feature photographed in anamorphic widescreen, but it used CinemaScope rather than Technirama. Sleeping Beauty followed it in 1959 and became the first animated feature made in the Super Technirama 70 format. The demanding process also required unusually large artwork from the animators.