Beauty and the Beast (1991) observations

[ZurinArctus85]

Even though it was released in Russian, I never got to watch Disney's Beauty and the Beast until today. I just finished watching it, and I have to say it is a beautiful movie. However, it was released over 20 years ago, and due to the (disappointing) direction modern society has turned, I would personally modify the script to be better geared towards adults. The original is a fantasy novel written by a French author, which is why the movie was set in France. The original story is great, and the music is something modern writers could study.

 

I was observing the animation in detail, however I missed a few canonical references to real things. The architecture of Beast's castle is very...evil themed, I would say. Vampiric in nature, with gargoyles and dragons, and as Cogsworth said, very Baroque. "If it ain't Baroque, don't fix it." The ballroom is incredible, the Disney animators in the 90s were really good especially with the near-3D animation they produced for the flying camera effects. I want to make a reproduction of Beast's castle in Oblivion or Skyrim.

 

I would make some modifications to the movie script, definitely less singing. I would also elaborate on the intro sequence, extending the movie to maybe 2 and a half hours with extensions in the wolf fight scenes. I noticed the weather during the course of the movie change. When the movie starts the leaves are just beginning to turn, like Summer is transitioning to fall. Then most of the movie is set during the winter when belle is less inclined to leave the castle. Towards the end, it's spring, and in the final scenes of the movie there's a massive summer storm so I would say the movie spans a year.

 

More script modifications would include general camera work, as doing some things (vertigo, for one) are very hard to do with animation from that time.

Aside from that I would probably do live action with Beast largely CGI.

 

The last thing I would do, but because this is just a personal thing, I would have Belle be too late to save Beast, and she chooses to live with him in his beast form. I think this would teach a valuable lesson to younger kids, that even though she failed to change him back she still put his beastly looks aside and saw him for who he really is. Beauty really is deeper than the skin.

 

And a final question was in my head the whole time. What species is Beast? He looks like a bison, with the horns and everything. Bison don't have claws though, and his body was reminiscent of a lion. I never read the original French book because I don't know french, but as soon as I find an available English or Russian translation I will definitely read it.

 

I think that if Disney stopped making the watered down movies like Frozen and made a newer version of Beauty and the Beast using CGI at the very least critics would give better ratings. I saw Zootopia in theatres and was very disappointed by the accelereated story, and this is something producers need to stop. The Hobbit trilogy suffered greatly from plot acceleration, however the LOTR series was very well done. Since the Beauty and the Beast original work is in the French Public Domain, I'm hoping someone sees its potential and reworks it. There are troves of hidden treasure in old novels, and Disney is great at exploiting these, however it's time that someone else picked them up.