Disney animated features have typically had a central romance, ever since the first one in SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS, but their Academy Award-nominated fairy tale musical-romance about Stockholm Syndrome and borderline bestiality is often considered the pinnacle of the Disney fairy tale. And it is so romantic if you don't think about its inconsistencies in character logic. I don't know; I love it, but I feel compelled to point out to other people who love it that the reasons why they may love it might not actually be there. It's complicated.
BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (1991)Directed by Gary Trousdale, Kirk Wise
Featuring the Voices of: Paige O'Hara, Robby Benson, Richard White, Jerry Orbach, David Ogden Stiers, Angela Lansbury, Rex Everheart, Tony Jay
Rated G
Availability: Available for rent or purchase at some retailers and websites, but kept at limited availability by the distributor
The string of commercial/critical hits at Walt Disney Animation Studios from 1989 to 1999 is sometimes referred to as the "Disney Renaissance", and of those ten films included (including THE RESCUERS DOWN UNDER and POCAHONTAS, the former being commercially underwhelming and the latter being critically disappointing), 1991's BEAUTY AND THE BEAST is generally considered the crown jewel of that era. Becoming the highest-grossing animated film to date (currently, it ranks at 19th domestically for highest-grossing animated films and is second only to THE LION KING for the Disney Renaissance), it is also the most-acclaimed film of the Disney Renaissance, and one of the most-acclaimed in Disney's history. It was the first animated film ever to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, something not repeated again until the allotted number of nominees was expanded from five to ten and 2009's UP and 2010's TOY STORY 3 received nominations. In addition, it was nominated for a further five Academy Awards, including Best Sound Mixing, Best Original Score (for which it won) and three nominations in the category of Best Original Song ("Be Our Guest", "Belle" and the winner, "Beauty and the Beast") and was the fourth Disney animated feature film added to the National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant". Odds are that just about anyone reading this has seen the film, so I don't really need to persuade you to watch it, but you may not know the fascinating story behind it.
Beauty and the Beast, while following the vein of a universal cultural myth, is best recognized in the 1756 published form by French writer Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont. Following the massive success of SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS in 1937, Walt Disney sought after other fairy tales that could be adapted into an animated feature, and one of those was Beauty and the Beast. These attempts to adapt the fairy tale carried on into the 1950s, but basically being a story about a young girl forced to eat dinner every night with a "beast" who asks her every night to marry him, Walt's story teams were unable to produce a satisfactory film story from the material. After French filmmaker Jean Cocteau's version, LA BELLE ET LA BETE, was released to acclaim in 1946, it claimed the spotlight as the definitive film version, and Walt's interest waned (several of Cocteau's concepts, such as the rival suitor and enchanted furnishings later served as inspiration for the Disney version).
In 1987, as WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT neared completion and a successful return to fairy tales appeared on the horizon with THE LITTLE MERMAID due for release in 1989, Beauty and the Beast was re-opened as a possibility. Disney sought an outside director, Richard Williams, an independent animator who was resentful of the Disney image but in charge of the animation unit on ROGER RABBIT, and Williams declined. Williams recommended his colleague, Richard Purdum, and for the first half of the film's production, Purdum developed the film as a non-musical set in 19th Century France. While more faithful to the fairy tale, the first twenty minutes in storyboard reels were sent to Disney executives who ordered that production be started over again by scratch. If you have a copy of the 2010 Blu-Ray release, you can actually watch the 20-minute story reel, listed as an 'alternate opening'.
Shortly after the order to restart production was given, Purdum left the project and songwriters Howard Ashman and Alan Menken were recruited to mold the story into a musical. Best known for campy off-Broadway musicals, notably Little Shop of Horrors, Ashman and Menken had been brought to Disney during production on THE LITTLE MERMAID, and in addition to writing the songs, Ashman also was instrumental to creating the film's story and tone. On BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, Ashman aspired to make a full-on Broadway-style musical, in contrast to the hipper, more mainstream route of THE LITTLE MERMAID. Key to this approach is the opening musical number, "Belle", an operetta-style number that would not be out of place in a Rodgers & Hammerstein or Gilbert and Sullivan play, and an unusually lengthy animated musical number.
Without a director to provide the necessary steady hand over production, two animators, Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, who had just finished directing the animated segments for the Epcot attraction, Cranium Command, were picked to stand in as temporary directors. Eventually, as the pair proved to be capable without being too bold, Trousdale and Wise were signed on as official directors.
Before the the film's completion, Ashman, an openly gay man, succumbed to the effects of the AIDS virus. In order to accommodate Ashman's rapidly deteriorating health, Disney moved much of the production team from California to Ashman's New York home at great expense. In March 1991, following an early press screening of the unfinished film, a group of animators and producer Don Hahn visited Ashman in his hospital room where his mother and his life partner kept vigil. Four days later, on March 14, 1991, Howard Elliott Ashman died of AIDS-related complications at age 40. At the end of the end credits, BEAUTY AND THE BEAST bears a dedication: "To Our Friend Howard, who gave a mermaid her voice, and a beast his soul. We will be forever grateful. Howard Ashman: 1950-1991." In 1992, shortly following the release of the film, Disney held an auction of original BEAUTY AND THE BEAST art, including pieces from the production, and donated the proceeds to the Gay Men's Health Crisis organization in Ashman's honor.
On September 29, 1991, in an unprecedented move for a Disney animated feature film that would create prestigious pre-release attention, an unfinished cut of BEAUTY AND THE BEAST played at the high-brow New York Film Festival. Despite only 70% of the film having been completed, with the rest made up of story reel drawings and rough pencil animation, the audience of adults, film critics and scholars gave the film an extended standing ovation.
BEAUTY AND THE BEAST was the second Disney film to be produced digitally, following the previous year's THE RESCUERS DOWN UNDER, which acted as something of a test for the brand-new Pixar-developed (yes, that Pixar) digital animation program, the Computer Animation Production System (CAPS). As recently as THE LITTLE MERMAID, animated films required that each animator's drawings be copied onto transparent celluloid sheets called 'cels' and then painted by hand. These cels would then be layered over a background painting, and the arranged images would be photographed. The typical running rate of photographs per second for a theatrical film is 24 frames per second, meaning that for each second of a movie, this process had to done 24 times. For an elaborate multi-dimensional shot, such as the famous tracking shot over Pinocchio's village in PINOCCHIO, or the opening shot of BAMBI, the arduous process of using the multiplane camera was necessary. The multiplane camera, invented by former Mickey Mouse animator Ub Iwerks, was essentially a stack of frames, each of which would be fitted with painted glass panels and cels, and a camera, mounted on rails that could descend down through the fixture as each panel could be withdrawn between frames, creating an illusion of real space.
What CAPS changed was that while the animators still drew the 24 drawings per second of film, but each drawing could be scanned into the computer program in which they could be painted and layered all in a digital environment without the cost of cels and at a far greater efficiency of time. The "digital multiplane camera" also made possible shots that were previously prohibitively expensive and at a practically unlimited quality, and hand-drawn characters could be animated onto 3-dimensional computer generated environments. Even as BEAUTY AND THE BEAST was far more elaborate than any animated Disney feature film in decades, it cost less than any other film of the Disney Renaissance, or even multiple previous Disney animated films.
The musical numbers "Be Our Guest" and "Beauty and the Beast" took advantage of these new possibilities and showcased them in spectacular fashion, but it was the latter that really stuck in audiences' minds. Originally uncertain of whether or not the digitally-rendered ballroom set would work as planned, the production team had a Plan B prepared just in case. This option would have featured Belle and the Beast performing their waltz to the ballad as in the finished product, but rather than taking place in the luxurious ballroom, the characters would waltz through a darkened screen, illuminated by a spotlight. Obviously, that would not have been ideal, but it would have met the deadline. Fortunately, the CGI ballroom was successful, creating one of the most famous scenes in any animated film, complete with a knockout crane shot from the chandelier down to the couple dancing on the floor, on which the reflections of the figures can be seen, and contrasting with the yellow and bronze tones of the room is the dark blue, star-filled sky seen through towering windows. Even 22 years later, it remains enthralling to see.
As much as I enjoy the film, and as finely polished as its craft is, I do have one major complaint of my own though; while she works as a rounded character, I do not sympathize with Belle, and I do not like her. Disney has always been plagued with problems of creating strong female role models in their fairy tale adaptations, with most of them, Snow White and Cinderella come to mind, personifying a spirit of unshakable faith in miracles while stoically cooking and cleaning until their prince takes them to live in a castle in the clouds (quite literally in SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS; it isn't hard to see why Mormon women seem to have a special affinity for Disney Princesses). While THE LITTLE MERMAID's Ariel didn't cook or clean, and was an improvement on the most recent previous Disney Princess, Aurora, from 1959's SLEEPING BEAUTY, and played an active role in her story, modern feminists and critics complained that her primary motivation and defining characteristic was still one of a desire for a man. While BEAUTY AND THE BEAST is first and foremost a romance, so the story is driven by a sexual tension between the heroine and a man (or half-man, making it very hard to argue that a gay Disney romance is inevitable at some point, proving that slippery slope of bestiality to homosexuality, or whatever it was that Duck Dynasty ignoramus claimed), but Belle is primarily characterized by a bookish personality , curiosity and ambition. She was still the subject of laments that she nonetheless required rescuing at the hands of a male counterpart (a somewhat ignorant complaint), and more prominently, that she exhibited traits of Stockholm Syndrome (a much more legitimate complaint) justified as true love.
My problem with Belle though, is that between her two suitors; Gaston, whom she rejects outright, and the Beast, whom she gradually comes to accept, there is no convincing argument that Gaston is any worse than the Beast at the start. If anything, Gaston was a better prospect than the Beast. Consider:
Gaston:
Defined by an out-of-control narcissism with a penchant for boorishness and bullying, he makes a benign proposition of marriage to Belle, which she rejects outright. In his bitter defeat, Gaston concocts a scheme to blackmail Belle into accepting his marriage proposal or else he'll have her father thrown in the looney bin. Belle's rejection of him sets off a direct course of events leading him to a role of villainy and ending in his eventual death and the implied death or injury of many of the townspeople who join Gaston in his crusade.
The Beast:
Having been cursed into a beastly form at the tender age of eleven for deliberately banishing an elderly woman to the frigid elements, he is sullen and prone to tempestuous outbursts in which he causes tremendous property damage (his own property, but still). He actually does lock Belle's father away, in a dungeon no less, simply because the man was on his property. Having resolved to keep Belle's father locked away until he rots, the beast changes his mind when he realizes he can have the girl instead! Despite keeping her prisoner and emotionally abusing her with violent tantrums, Belle comes to love him after he gives her a library and is sometimes nice to her. It turns out that he wasn't so bad deep down.
So, Gaston, a vain buffoon who makes an honest proposal of marriage, or the Beast, a prince (come to think of it, what the hell is he prince of?) with a two year-old's temperament and a history of potentially fatal senior neglect, whose idea of a courtship is keeping the girl prisoner? A guy who threatens to have your father locked away, or the guy who actually locks your father away himself? Bad choice, Belle. Just prior to the transformations at the film's finale, Belle throws herself over the dying Beast and whimpers, "This is all my fault." Yes, Belle, it is. Hope he doesn't regress into any of those bad behaviors during 'happily ever after'.
However, I really like the movie anyway, so whatever.
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