Although animator and Imagineer Marc Davis is famed for his design influence and animation performance of Maleficent in Walt Disney's 1959 animated feature Sleeping Beauty, less well-known is that the majestic and powerful dragon was the work of Ken Anderson (also remembered for another dragon, Pete's Dragon in 1977) under the direction of Woolie Reitherman. Marc said, "I had nothing to do with the dragon, but it was based on Maleficent…there was a consistentcy. This wasn't just a dragon she turned into, this was her own particular dragon."
Legendary animator and director Burny Mattinson also recalls that the dragon fight sequence was the first application of Ub Iwerks's adaptation of the Xerox™ technology for transfer of animation drawings to cels. "I think they went back over the Xerox line with ink and paint," Burny recalls, "but he did use the process as an experiment for enlarging and reducing her in the frame. That was actually the start of Disney using Xerox in animation. It was a very crude process. We used an Omega 8×10 enlarger as our camera and had these old aluminum inking boards coated with the Xerox material. It was very crude, but by the next picture, 101 Dalmatians, we had a first class Xerography operation."
Above: Maleficent as dragon, graphite on paper concept art. © Disney