Beauty and the Beast: Special Edition (no 27)

(USA 1991/2001 95m) DVD1/2

Tale as old as time

p  Don Hahn  d  Gary Trousdale, Kirk Wise  w  Linda Woolverton  story  Mme.le Prince de Beaumont  ed  John Carnochan  m/ly  Alan Menken, Howard Ashman  art  Brian McEntee

VOICES BY:- Paige O’Hara (Belle), Robby Benson (Beast), Jerry Orbach (Lumière), Angela Lansbury (Mrs Potts), Richard White (Gaston), David Ogden Stiers (Cogsworth/ Narrator), Jesse Corti (Lefou), Rex Everhart (Maurice), Bradley Michael Pierce (Chip), Jo Anne Worley (wardrobe),

When conducting the heroine round a tour of the enchanted castle, pompous clock Cogsworth attempts to make a little joke with his immortal line “if it’s not baroque, don’t fix it.”  The very line could read as a diagnosis of the problems Disney’s animation output at the time Beauty and the Beast was green-lighted.  Long gone the halcyon days of Snow White through Bambi, though Cinderella, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp and One Hundred and One Dalmations were good, they were far from great.  Yet they were masterworks compared to the drivel of the seventies and eighties, where they plumbed truly new depths.  By the late eighties, computer animation was coming into vogue – one recalls a magnificent shot of a chandelier and ornate staircase in Oliver and Company that was a sign of things to come – and in 1989 The Little Mermaid was released to rapturous audience and some critical acclaim.  It was the first in a new line of Disney animations, equal parts cartoon and musical.  Yet it was two years later when that combination hit the jackpot with this third classic adaptation of Mme.le Prince de Beaumont’s ‘tale as old as time.’

            I say third as, though everyone knows of Cocteau’s magisterial La Belle et la Bête forty-five years previously – not least the Disney artists, who make several homages to it in their own version – there was also a very fine gothic interpretation by Juraj Herz in 1978 which was altogether darker and, though not quite as good, more than satisfactory.  Disney’s film was not just a throwback to the glory days of 1937-1942, their sixth animated feature masterpiece, but it set new grounds in musical history, too.    Students of Broadway musicals, and indeed their Hollywood counterparts, could have a field day.  One is sucked in from the very opening number, the flamboyant, extravagant ‘Provincial Life’, which owes as much to Stephen Sondheim as to the original story, a multi-chorused audience pleaser which captures a lighter-than-air feel from the outset.  Then there’s the comedy number, ‘Gaston’, which is a joy in itself, and the almost Rodgers and Hammerstein style title number, performed as only she could by Angela Lansbury.  Piece de resistance, however, must be the magnificent, kaleidoscopic Busby Berkeley pastiche, ‘Be Our Guest’, which may well rank with the very best musical numbers caught on film and enough to send Uncle Walt into raptures in the giant screening room in the sky. 

            Though very much a throwback to the fairytales of Disney’s yore, this reincarnation is somewhat different; gone are the wet fish heroines of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, in a new incarnation, romantic and dreamy, for sure, but also feisty, strong and wilful – a heroine very much for the modern era.  It ushered in a renaissance of Disney animation, which continued with Aladdin and The Lion King, but then ground to halt.  The reasons largely the same reasons that led to the original decline; complacency towards its audience, inferior songs (the tragic early death of lyricist Howard Ashman even before Beauty’s premiere was a big loss) and a regrettable tendency to try and modernise stories so much that they became unrecognisable from their originals.  Not to mention choosing stories few people cared about and the fact that traditional animation was becoming old hat with the new exciting CGI opportunities explored by Pixar.  Beauty represented a final flowering of traditional animation, a magic rose that eventually, like that in the film, was doomed to shrivel up for good.  Now restored to DVD – with an excellent previously excised song, ‘Human Again’ – it’s a tale for all time.  If beauty truly is found within, it’s within a DVD case.  Keep it, and savour it.