I’ve said before I have never been much of a Disney fan. I was always more of a Loony Tunes guy. As such, when the Disney Renaissance hit and there was that big revival for the company in the wake of some big hit animated films, and I was a high schooler with little interest in a kids cartoon…well, I skipped ’em. I think the first I saw in theaters was Aladdin, and that was more because of Robin Williams’s Genie. And even then, I don’t think I saw another in theaters until Hercules. I’ve since seen a couple of the better-regarded ones on my own, but maybe the best of the batch from that era was easily Beauty and the Beast.
I mean, that one got the first Best Picture Oscar nomination for an animated feature. There have been a couple since then, but Beauty and the Beast was the first.
In a sense, Beauty and the Beast comes near the end of a certain period in animated features. It’s hand drawn, the background of the ballroom scene aside, something that would gradually disappear in the wake of CGI animation, and I have a number of Pixar films coming up later in the Stacker countdown. It’s a film where the voice cast is largely professional voice actors, one where the best known actors are Angela Lansbury (as Mrs. Potts) and Jerry Orbach (as Lumière). These days, even Disney’s own works use famous actors in various roles, a trend that they probably started with the aforementioned Aladdin even if Robin Williams initially went uncredited. And it comes from a time when Disney was still using fairy tales for plots, something they have more or less moved on from. Fairy tales do have that familiarity element to them even if they have elements that maybe don’t age well if you think about them too much.
To that end, here’s a YouTube video from a channel I help sponsor on Patreon that makes light of some of the things in this film that, you know, seem wrong if you think about them:
Man, I love hearing that guy say my cat’s name once a month.
Regardless of that, I think for something like Beauty and the Beast, much of what the video there is doing is overthinking a basic fairy tale. I would argue that Disney’s own live-action remake makes the same mistake while playing it much more straight than the above YouTube video. But I have other issues with most of the live action remakes, seeing as how they are largely less colorful scene-for-scene remakes with plot holes that weren’t really plot holes getting papered over in unnecessary ways. The real issues with Beauty and the Beast come from the way Beast and Belle fall in love. Beast spends his first few appearances pretty much living up to his name, but then the two fall in love and it’s sweet and all, but is that right?
You know what? It is. Why should Beast’s temper not also be a by-product of his curse? He can’t be an animal on the inside too? I’d have more issues with how the rest of the household also got cursed for the crime of, what, having to work for a guy who was an asshole to a woman traveler one night? What did they do wrong? But the answer there is simple: it’s a fairy tale. It shouldn’t be thought of too deeply. I had a record set as a child that had these projector parts where you inserted a paper disc and got a slide show that told a story as you listened to the record with these pictures you could see on a small screen or possibly projected onto the wall, and there was a “Beauty and the Beast” adaptation where the Beast was literally a male lion. No monster. He was a talking lion. And the result was still the same. Beauty/Belle has to fall for the Beast at the exact right moment to end the curse before it’s too late, after which he turns into a handsome prince. It’s an old story given the Disney spin in a fairly modern and original way.
Unless, of course, you’ve seen the 1946 live action French version of this story. Disney’s design for the Beast, to say nothing of the nature of his enchanted castle, seems a lot less original if you’ve seen that one. I know the Disney Beast is a hodgepodge of different real world animals, but the Beast in that French version sure does look a lot like him and was nearly 50 years old by the time Disney got theirs out to theaters.
Still, there’s a charm to the Disney version. There’s a dark side to show there’s some stakes. Gaston is a horrible human being but he’s handsome, so who cares? No one in the village, that’s for sure. Beast is pretty terrible too, but the difference is Beast can actually learn. Gaston scoffs at the idea of women reading. Beast lets Belle have the run of his library. Gaston expects Belle to marry him just because he says so while Beast does grant Belle freedom to leave if she so desires it eventually. Belle loses her temper with both, but Beast actually makes an effort to be a better person afterwards. He just needs to stop drinking soup right out of the bowl.
Plus, like any good Disney film, there are some great songs here. Beyond the title track, “Be My Guest” is an absolute delight with the Mardi Gras-for-dishes atmosphere, and it’s the sort of moment that only works in animation no matter how good the CGI gets for a live action remake. If anything, that’s probably why the live action remakes try to cover the plot holes that are more just wiseass internet snark theories: using real actors makes realism more of a requirement even if you still have a candelabra and a clock arguing with each other.
Disney hit some real highs with this film, but the good news for animation aficionados is they also got some competition, largely from Pixar, to get better. They don’t really make fairy tale adaptations anymore. If anything, Disney’s more recent animated features show trends of a young woman going on a quest of some kind, picking up various, sometimes more interesting and/or colorful companions, and then having the heroine save the day in a non-violent way by embracing some inner quality of her own by being an all-around better person. The closest the company has done to its old fairy tales is the original Frozen, and that one turned the fairy tale tropes on their head by making the instant love of a prince a plot point to point out how kinda messed up that is. Meanwhile, Moana, Raya and the Last Dragon, and Encanto all did the aforementioned female inner power story in different and unique settings. Now, don’t think I don’t like or approve of that female empowerment story. I actually do. It’s just an observation I’ve made that point out how, despite different fantastical settings and cultures on display, the plots of those films follow a similar progression, much like Disney’s old fairy tale adaptations did.
But man, when Disney hits a high point like they did with Beauty and the Beast, they really do something special.
NEXT: Up next is not another Jimmy Stewart film. No, instead it’s one where I honestly wasn’t sure what to make of it the first time I saw it because it wasn’t like the sort of films I usually saw. I’ll explain what that means when I post my thoughts to 2007’s There Will Be Blood,.
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