WHY IS DEATH IN THIS MOVIE?!
WHY IS DEATH IN THIS MOVIE?!
Daw, so nervous!!
Glen Keane, the supervising animator on the Beast, created his own hybrid beast by combining the mane of a lion, the beard and head structure of a buffalo, the tusks and nose bridge of a wild boar, the heavily muscled brow of a gorilla, the legs and tail of a wolf, and the big and bulky body of a bear.
Linda Woolverton drew her inspiration for the screenplay, not from Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast (1946), but from Little Women (1933), admitting that there’s a lot of Katharine Hepburn in the characterization of Belle.
Originally the Beast was supposed to be stabbed by Gaston twice: once in the leg and again in the side, followed by Gaston pushing himself off the tower and laughing maniacally while falling. The filmmakers changed it to just his side to avoid the already dramatic scene becoming too disturbing for children, but Gaston’s edited suicide is a probable explanation for his choosing such a dangerous position to kill the Beast despite knowing that he would never win Belle’s heart.
[For those who haven’t noticed this themselves] In the first song, where Belle sings in the town, she sits by a fountain. As she reads the book (described earlier, as an adventure with a prince in disguise. It sounds just like Beauty and the Beast), she flips to a page, with a picture. Look closely, and you will see see that she is in the bottom right, the beast in the middle left, and the prince’s castle in the middle.
All of the dialog spoken by Tony Jay (Monsieur D’Arque) heard in the film was recorded during his audition. This brief role led to him being cast as Judge Claude Frollo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996).
Caricatures of the directors, Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale, can be seen in the scene where Belle is given the book as a gift. As she is leaving the store three men are seen pretending to not look through the window and then they sing, “Look there she goes. The girl who’s so peculiar. I wonder if she’s feeling well.” They are the two men on the outside of the large blonde man.
The dance between Belle and her Prince in the finale is actually reused animation of the dance between Princess Aurora and Prince Phillip in Sleeping Beauty (1959). The original Sleeping Beauty (1959) pair had been drawn over to become the new Beauty and the Beast (1991) pair, and this was done because they were running out of time during the production of the movie.
The majority of the sculptures seen in the castle are different earlier versions of the Beast.
When Beast and Gaston are having their life-or-death struggle on the castle, Gaston yells, “Belle is mine!” Originally he was supposed to say, “Time to die!” but the writer changed it to fit Belle back in the scene.
Computer technology was considered for the rooftop fight and the forest chase, but the primitive state of the technology only allowed time to use it for the ballroom scene. Even for that scene, they had a fallback strategy: what they called the “Ice Capades” version, with just a spotlight on the two characters against a black background.
Art director Brian McEntee color keyed Belle so that she is the only person in her town who wears blue. This is symbolic of how different she is from everyone else around. Later, she encounters the Beast, another misfit, also wearing blue