Maleficent is the name of the Queen Witch in Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. Sleeping Beauty is an American animated musical fantasy film produced by Walt Disney based on The Sleeping Beauty by Charles Perrault. Maleficent is the antagonist of Walt Disney's 1959 film Sleeping Beauty. She is characterized as the "Mistress of All Evil" who, after not being invited to a christening, curses the infant Princess Aurora to "prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel and die" before the sun sets on Aurora's sixteenth birthday.