To break the curse, Beast must learn to love Belle and earn her love in return before the last petal falls from an enchanted rose or else the Beast will remain a monster forever. The film also features the voices of Richard White, Jerry Orbach, David Ogden Stiers, and Angela Lansbury. Beauty and the Beast is a 1991 romantic musical comedy fantasy animated film produced at Walt Disney Feature Animation.
It is the 30th film in the Disney Animated Canon and the third film in the Disney Renaissance. The film tells the story of a prince who is transformed into a Beast and a young woman named Belle whom he imprisons in his castle. To become a prince again, the Beast must learn to love Belle and win her love in return before the last petal falls from an Enchanted Rose, or he will remain a Beast forever.
Another notable character who is absent in Beaumont's fairy tale is Gaston, the sexist villain who attempts to charm Belle with his brawn in the Disney movies. In the original fairy tale, Belle has two older sisters who treat her horribly (à la Cinderella). When the Beast allows Belle to go visit her family, the sisters trick her into staying longer than the week that the Beast allowed her to be gone, hoping the Beast would devour her for not returning in time. Belle has a nightmare of the Beast dying and realizes that she loves him despite his appearance.
She returns to find that he has starved himself for each day she did not return to him. She confesses her love and the spell is broken, with the Beast alive in his human form. Beauty and the Beast is without a doubt one of Disney's finest classics. The first animated film to ever be nominated for best picture and after you see it, you could understand and agree with it's nomination. Beauty and the Beast is going to be one of those films that will always be remembered, I know that it's a movie that I will show my children one day. It has unbelievably terrific animation, a beautiful story, lovable characters, and is just over all a perfect movie.
I really love this film so much, I don't think anyone couldn't fall in love with it. In June 2014, Walt Disney Pictures announced that a live-action film adaptation of the original film was in the works, with Bill Condon directing and Evan Spiliotopoulos writing the script. In September 2014, it was announced that Stephen Chbosky would re-write the script. In January 2015, Emma Watson announced on her Facebook page that she would portray Belle in the new live action remake film. In March 2015, Dan Stevens, Luke Evans, Emma Thompson, Josh Gad, Audra McDonald, and Kevin Kline joined the film as the Beast, Gaston, Mrs. Potts, Lefou, Garderobe, and Maurice, respectively.
The following month, Ian McKellen, Ewan McGregor, Stanley Tucci, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw joined the cast, as Cogsworth, Lumière, Cadenza, and Plumette, respectively. Composer Alan Menken returned to score the film's music, with new material written by Menken and Tim Rice. In June 2015, Menken said the film would not include the songs that were written for the Broadway musical. Gad added that eliminating the "cartoonish" parts of LeFou meant taking steps to make the character seem more real, which resulted in more focus on LeFou and Gaston's relationship.
As for the castle element, perhaps the abode where Beast and his enchanted servants live just isn't under lock and key quite as heavily as the animated version of the castle. Indeed, elements of Beauty and the Beast appear in tales from many different cultures. In Cupid and Psyche – a myth from Ancient Rome – Psyche is transported to a magical palace, where she is served by invisible servants and not allowed to see Cupid's true form. In East of the Sun, West of the Moon – an old Norwegian fairy tale – a young girl is taken to a castle hidden in a mountain, served by invisible servants and not allowed to see the bear by night. Also, in The Singing, Springing Lark from the Brothers Grimm, the enchanted prince is disguised as a lion. There's no explanation for why Belle's mother doesn't appear in Disney's 1991 animated movie, but her absence anchors the plot of the new live-action film.
Although Belle's father, Maurice, is still too sad to talk about his late wife, Belle's deepening relationship with the Beast helps her discover that her mother's death is the reason she came to live a boring, provincial life. Through an enchanted book that transports the Beast anywhere in the world , Belle finds out her parents lived in Paris when she was a baby. She quickly learns that her mother died tragically of the plague, forcing Maurice to flee to the village with his daughter.
This backstory adds dimension to Belle's character, providing a foundation for her to better understand the Beast and his life. The marketing around the new live-action Beauty and the Beast has been nonstop, but so have the half-baked hot takes looking for what's problematic in this story. Smoodin writes in his book Animating Culture that the studio was trying to make up for earlier gender stereotypes with this film. Smoodin also states that in the way it has been viewed as bringing together traditional fairy tales and feminism as well as computer and traditional animation, the film's "greatness could be proved in terms technology narrative or even politics". Emmanuel Cosquin collected a version with a tragic ending from Lorraine titled The White Wolf , in which the youngest daughter asks her father to bring her a singing rose when he returns.
The man cannot find a singing rose for his youngest daughter, and he refuses to return home until he finds one. In the castle, the girl discovers that the white wolf is enchanted and can turn into a human at night, but she must not tell anyone about it. Unfortunately, the girl is later visited by her two elder sisters who pressure her to tell them what is happening. But she continues to pop up throughout the film and helps transition key moments of the story. The rose that she leaves behind is a symbol of the curse -- the Beast must find true love before all the petals fall.
But in the live action, Belle's love for roses leads to more than you know from the animated version. Their widely-known story is thought to have inspired Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve's 1740 French fairy tale Beauty and the Beast. The best known version of Villeneuve's story and the basis for the films was written 16 years later by Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont and was geared more toward young ladies than adults. The fashions in the Disney movies indicate that the time period is the mid to late 1700s, which is reflective of the time period of the fairy tale, not of the true story that inspired it. Upon seeing the initial storyboard reels in 1989, Walt Disney Studios chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg was dissatisfied with Purdum's idea and ordered that the film be scrapped and started over from scratch. The studio had approached John Musker and Ron Clements to direct the film, but they turned down the offer, saying they were "tired" after just having finished directing Disney's recent success The Little Mermaid.
Katzenberg then hired first-time feature directors Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale. Wise and Trousdale had previously directed the animated sections of Cranium Command, a short film for a Disney EPCOT theme park attraction. In addition, wanting another musical film, Katzenberg asked songwriters Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, who had written the song score for The Little Mermaid, to turn Beauty and the Beast into a Broadway-style musical film in the same vein as Mermaid. Ashman, who at the time had learned he was dying of complications from AIDS, had been working with Disney on a pet project of his, Aladdin, and only reluctantly agreed to join the struggling production team. To accommodate Ashman's failing health, pre-production of Beauty and the Beast was moved from London to the Residence Inn in Fishkill, New York, close to Ashman's New York City home. Here, Ashman and Menken joined Wise, Trousdale, Hahn, and Woolverton in retooling the film's script.
Walt Disney first attempted to adapt Beauty and the Beast into an animated film during the 1930s and 1950s, but was unsuccessful. Following the success of The Little Mermaid , Walt Disney Pictures decided to adapt the fairy tale, which Richard Purdum originally conceived as a non-musical. Disney chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg eventually dismissed Purdum's idea and ordered that the film be a musical similar to The Little Mermaid instead.
The film was directed by Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise in their directorial debut, with a screenplay by Linda Woolverton and the story was supervised by Roger Allers. Lyricist Howard Ashman and composer Alan Menken wrote the film's songs. Ashman, who additionally served as the film's executive producer, died of AIDS-related complications six months before the film's release, and the film is thus dedicated to his memory.
In a Flemish version from Veurne titled Rose without Thorns , the prince is disenchanted differently than in Beaumont's and Villeneuve's versions. The heroine and the monster attend each of the weddings of the heroine's elder sisters, and to break the spell, the heroine has to give a toast for the beast. In the first wedding, the heroine forgets, but in the second she remembers, and the beast becomes human. This book is Villeneuve's Original Beauty and the Beast story, first translated into English by J.
Although it contains the familiar plots and themes of more recent shortened versions of the tale, Villleneuve's original piece of story telling explores the back story of both Belle and the Beast. The Beast was a prince who lost his father at a young age, and whose mother had to wage war to defend his kingdom. This edition was originally published in 1858 and contains two beautiful engravings by Edward Corbould and the Brothers Dalziel.
The animated version has a sense of nostalgia that the live action fails to provide, and the singing in the animated version is arguably better. Also, the humor is more intriguing, which is likely due to the lighter tone. Lastly, the progression of Belle and Beast's love story is much more playful, where as the live action is much heavier, similar to real life. For a Disneymovie, the playfulness of love is what people go to the theaters for — not love's reality.
Beauty and the Beast is an animated romantic musical fairytale about a young beautiful girl named Belle who offers to take her father's place in the dungeon of a hideous Beast's castle. The beast accepts Belle's proposal and releases her father and Belle honors her commitment to stay at the palace with the beast. The story follows how the beast falls deeply in love with Belle but she only sees an ugly monster.
Not knowing the beasts true identity she shuns him at first but things take on a twist after Belle gets to know Beast as a kind and caring being. A wonderful story for the family that teaches you can't always judge a book by its cover. Disney has struggled to define exactly what it wants to do with its seemingly endless run of live-action remakes of animated classics. Are they meant as homages, updates, "brand deposit" reminders of existing franchises, or just high-profile cash grabs?
Maleficent tried to give Sleeping Beauty's villain a tragic backstory, and wound up as a pretty but uncomfortably imitative merging of Disney's film and the Broadway hit musical Wicked. Cinderella made the title character more bland and passive, ramping up the villain's personality at everyone else's expense. Most critics regard the 1991 animated film as superior to the 2017 live-action remake.
David Sims of The Atlantic wrote that the 2017 film "feels particularly egregious, in part, because it's so slavishly devoted to the original; every time it falls short of its predecessor , it's hard not to notice". During the course of production, many changes were made to the structure of the film, necessitating the replacement and re-purposing of songs. After screening a mostly animated version of the "Be Our Guest" sequence, story artist Bruce Woodside suggested that the objects should be singing the song to Belle rather than her father.
Wise and Trousdale agreed, and the sequence and song were retooled to replace Maurice with Belle. The film's title song went through a noted bit of uncertainty during production. Originally conceived as a rock-oriented song, it was changed to a slow, romantic ballad. Howard Ashman and Alan Menken asked Angela Lansbury to perform the song, but she did not think her voice was suited for the melody. When she voiced her doubts, Menken and Ashman asked her for at least one take and told her to perform the song as she saw fit.
Lansbury reportedly reduced everyone in the studio to tears with her rendition, nailing the song in the one take asked of her. "Human Again" was dropped from the film before animation began, as its lyrics caused story problems about the timeline over which the story takes place. "Something There," in which Belle and Beast sing of their growing fondness for each other, was composed late in production and inserted into the script in place of "Human Again." Disney completely created the idea of the magical rose in both its 1991 and 2017 film versions of Beauty and the Beast. In these films, the red rose measures the amount of time the Beast has left to undo the enchantress's curse.
Unless he can earn a true love's kiss before the last petal falls, the Beast and all his servants will remain in their present form forever. While the Disney cartoon made the story famous, the fairy tale has actually been in rotation for quite some time. In 1740, French novelist Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve wrote La Belle et la Běte, her version of a folktale that has actually been around for about 4,000 years. Bearing only nominal resemblance to the Disney flick, the original French tale is a dark metaphor instructing women to learn to love whomever they're betrothed to, whether he's a beast or guy who acts beastly.
The centuries-old fairytale of Beauty and the Beast is a story of transformative love, and of learning to see someone's inner beauty, that ends in a blessed matrimony with a handsome prince. The studio's 1991 film remains arguably the greatest of its animated works, somehow managing to adhere to a rigid musical formula while injecting atmosphere, deep characterization , and beautifully written, funny, and intelligent songs. It's perhaps no wonder, then, that Bill Condon's new live-action remake is also a swooning romance. Here is a film that truly only has eyes for the 1991 Beauty and the Beast; unfortunately, this reverence makes for a far unholier union. Her second issue was with how in the live action adaptation, Beast was able to travel to and from his castle via the magic mirror. This is despite the fact that Linda Woolverton wrote the castle in the animated movie as being "impenetrable." Following that, the mythology in the new Beauty and the Beast just didn't work for Woolverton, hence her displeased outlook.
The live-action movie also added a small detail that aligns it to the original Grimm's fairy tales. The Beast does not imprison Maurice until after he has stolen a rose from the garden. In the animated version, the Beast imprisoned Maurice merely for coming into the castle.
The movie was so popular that it grossed $425 million at the box office and became the first-ever animated picture to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture. The live-action remake, released in 2017, quickly became one of Disney's most popular movies ever. To start, Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont's French fairy tale Beauty and the Beast has far less magical elements than the Disney movies. For example, memorable characters like Cogsworth and Lumière are not in the fairy tale. In fact, the whole concept of the servants being transformed into magical furniture by the curse is absent.
Instead, the Beast lives by himself and has a much lonelier existence. Therefore, more parallels can be drawn between the fairy tale and the real-life story of Petrus Gonsalvus than between the Disney movies and Gonsalvus' story. The Disney 1991 animated classicBeauty and the Beasttells a magical tale with the important moral of learning to love beyond appearances. The popular film was followed up with sequels and in 2018 Disney released their live-action version that starred Emma Watson and Dan Stevens.
However, despite these family-friendly versions filled with songs, talking objects, and lighthearted comedy, the original 1740 French novel by Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve told a very different, much darker story. Ashman and Menken wrote the Beauty song score during the pre-production process in Fishkill, the opening operetta-styled "Belle" being their first composition for the film. The Beauty songs were mostly recorded live with the orchestra and the voice cast performing simultaneously rather than overdubbed separately, in order to give the songs a cast album-like "energy" the filmmakers and songwriters desired. Beauty and the Beast premiered as an unfinished film at the New York Film Festival on September 29, 1991, followed by its theatrical release as a completed film at the El Capitan Theatre on November 13. The film grossed $331 million at the box office worldwide on a $25 million budget and received widespread critical acclaim for its romantic narrative, animation , characters and musical numbers.
Beauty and the Beast won the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy, the first animated film to ever win that category. In April 1994, Beauty and the Beast became Disney's first animated film to be adapted into a Broadway musical, which ran until 2007. In a Portuguese version collected by Zófimo Consiglieri Pedroso, the heroine asks for "a slice of roach off a green meadow". The father finally finds a slice of roach off a green meadow in a castle that appears to be uninhabited, but he hears a voice saying he must bring his youngest daughter to the palace. While the heroine is at the palace, the same unseen voice informs her of the goings-on at her father's house using birds as messengers.
