Beauty and the Beast (1991)

This review includes full spoilers. Proceed accordingly. For other movie reviews from me, click HERE:

Dusty: You will join me for this review. That’s not a request!

Rating: G
Director: Gary Trousdale, Kirk Wise
Writers: Linda Woolverton (animation screenplay), Brenda Chapman (story), Chris Sanders (story), Burny Mattinson (story), Kevin Harkey (story), Brian Pimental (story), Bruce Woodside (story), Joe Ranft (story), Tom Ellery (story), Kelly Asbury (story), Robert Lence (story), Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont (original story), Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve (based upon the original tale by)
Stars: Robby Benson, Paige O’Hara, Richard White, Rex Everhart, Angela Lansbury, Jesse Corti
Release Date: November 22, 1991
Runtime: 1 hour, 24 minutes

THE PLOT:

via wiki

An enchantress disguised as an old beggar woman arrives at a castle and offers a cruel and selfish prince an enchanted rose in exchange for shelter from a storm. When he scornfully declines, she reveals her true form and transforms him into a beast and his servants into household objects. To break the curse, the prince must learn to love someone and gain that person’s love before the last petal of the rose falls; otherwise, he will remain a beast forever.

Several years later, in a nearby village, Belle, the bookworm daughter of eccentric inventor Maurice, dreams of adventure while constantly rejecting advances from Gaston, an arrogant hunter. One day, Maurice travels to a local fair to present his latest invention, a wood-chopping machine, but becomes lost in the forest. Upon seeking refuge in the Beast’s castle, he is eventually detained for trespassing. After Belle finds Maurice locked in the castle dungeon, she offers to take his place as a prisoner; the Beast agrees.

Belle meets the castle’s servants, including candelabra Lumière, mantel clock Cogsworth, teapot Mrs. Potts, and her son Chip, a teacup. When she finds the enchanted rose, the Beast angrily forces her to flee outside. Wolves ambush Belle, and the Beast rescues her, getting injured in the process. As she nurses his wounds, they develop a rapport.

In the village, Maurice fails to convince the townsfolk of the Beast. Hearing Maurice’s statements, Gaston bribes Monsieur D’Arque, the warden of the local insane asylum, to have Maurice declared insane and locked up, which Gaston will use to blackmail Belle into marrying him in exchange for Maurice’s release. Before they can act, Maurice leaves to attempt a rescue alone. Belle discovers Maurice’s predicament via a magic mirror. Out of his love for her, the Beast releases Belle to rescue him. Returning to town, Belle reveals the Beast via the mirror, shocking the townsfolk and proving her father’s sanity. Realizing she has fallen for the Beast, Gaston jealously has her thrown into the cellar with Maurice and rallies the villagers to kill the Beast. Chip, who stowed away when Belle left, frees the two with Maurice’s machine.

As the castle’s servants defeat the villagers, Gaston attacks the depressed Beast, who regains his spirit upon seeing Belle return and spares Gaston’s life, but Gaston fatally stabs him before losing his footing and falling to his demise.^[c] Belle tearfully professes her love to a dying Beast as the last petal falls, which undoes the curse, reviving the Beast and restoring him and his servants to their human forms. The prince and Belle later host a ball for the kingdom.

My Review

If you’re under forty, Disney’s animated Beauty and the Beast was probably your introduction to this fairy tale, originally written in the 18th century by French novelist Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve. The novel touched upon a “let’s remake this over and over” type of nerve inside the human artistic psyche, because it spurred an almost immediate abridgement and re-write by French novelist Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont in 1756. From there, the remakes just keep coming.

Belle, the Beauty, is a young woman who lives in an ideal French village, where she is the most beautiful woman in town, where she is encouraged to be literate, where her eccentric father is an inventor, and where everyone tolerates the fact that she wanders through town singing about how she’s too good for the town and everyone in it. Perhaps it clarifies some observations to realize she’s the Princess that America’s young bookish girls have been idolizing for the last three decades.

The rest of the story is a tale of two men. Gaston is the most handsome and successful man in the village. He wants to marry Belle and to have a large family with her. Beast is a… well, what actually is he? Part man, part bear, part pig, part buffalo? He also selfishly wants Belle to love him.

On a surface level, the one who looks good is bad, the one who looks bad is good, and Belle kind of sleuths out which is which throughout the movie. This is the deep fairy tale theme of the movie that resonates across time. How does a woman who is almost always physically weaker than her male suitors sort out which men are good for her and which aren’t? Jordan Peterson provided a surprisingly insightful analysis of the story on the Joe Rogan podcast that is worth hearing (imbed below):

I like Peterson’s analysis above, but I would add one other layer. Both Beast and Gaston are beastly. Both try to capture Belle’s affections in the wrong ways. Both manipulate Belle through her father. (It’s easy to forget, once we get to the end of the movie, that Beast kidnapped Belle’s father early in the movie, did a prisoner swap for Belle, all in the name of manipulating her into falling for him and breaking the curse on him.) Beast even threatens to starve her when she refuses to dine with him.

The key difference between the two is that Beast saves Belle from wolves after she runs away from his castle. When he does this, getting injured in the process, she softens toward him, and he sees that change in her demeanor. He then softens toward her. Gaston never gets an opportunity to save Belle from wolves. Would he have done so if she were in danger? I am convinced that he would have tried. Would that have aided his cause to win her over? I suspect strongly that it would have.

What did Belle ultimately fall in love with then? Masculine strength self-sacrificed on her behalf? Perhaps. The one other distinguishing moment for Beast is that he displays the nobility of character to let Belle go to her father – demonstrating that he won’t control her. Would Gaston have done the same in the same situation? It’s impossible to know. Belle never looked at him with the love and affection that wrought the change in the Beast. (Keep in mind, Beast would not – and did not – let her leave, either, without her change toward him happening first.)

What is the fairy tale lesson regarding how a woman is to tame a beast? First, she must encounter an actual Beast. Weak or already tamed men do not qualify. Then she waits forever if necessary until he acts with self-sacrificial masculine strength on her behalf. She then responds with affection. Then she waits to see if that affection leads to controlling behavior or to trust and freedom. That’s the step-by-step dance of fairy tale romance.

I decided to rewatch and review this movie on the back of a conversation I had with Mrs. Reviews the other day regarding which Disney princess movie has the best soundtrack. We have this conversation semi-regularly (there is no actual answer) and I bring it up when I aim to elevate the mood in the house. Your initial reaction to the question might be to assume that The Lion King would be the runaway winner. A little bit of cross-comparison reveals that The Little Mermaid might not have a deep enough list of songs to be #1. The more I thought about it, the more that this movie stood out. Beauty and the Beast has the best villain song, a better love song than The Lion King, and most importantly, it has Angela Lansbury. I am irrationally loyal to Angela Lansbury, probably because some part of my brain learned to think of her, when I was young, as my murder solving British grandmother.

I have also been thinking about this movie a lot lately because my local NBA team just made the Western Conference Finals and our mascot Rumble bears the looks of having once encountered the same witch that Beast did. Rumble seems to have embraced the change, though.

This is a pretty good movie and I recommend it. It communicates a deep and profound message to its audience, but in a way that anyone of just about any age can enjoy it. Unlike most Disney films, it’s mostly non-traumatizing with Gaston’s apparent death being handled well and somewhat discreetly in my opinion. The music is fantastic, especially the music of the incomparable Angela Lansbury. I don’t know if I’ll be revisiting this one again any time soon, but I enjoyed it.

Have you seen Beauty and the Beast? If so, what did you think?