Tale as Old as Time: The Many Adaptations of Beauty and the Beast

       Once Upon a Time ...when The Professor was a teaching assistant for his film program’s introductory class, he had to plan and execute a lesson on film directing. The idea was to show them clips from two separate versions of the "Beauty and the Beast" fairy-tale and compare and contrast the directorial visions. When he told them neither of the films were Disney, one of his students blurted out something along the lines of “Wait, there are Beauty and the Beast movies that aren’t Disney?”

      So ... Beauty and the Beast is hardly the only fairy-tale to experience this. The Disney retelling of any fairy-tale tends to supplant any pre-existing version of the story. We’re casually aware that fairy-tales came from “long ago” but give little thought to how these stories may have been shaped by telling and retelling across generations—this is just how the stories are, we think. The public is largely unaware, for example, that Grimm’s Snow White does not awaken with love’s first kiss or that Andersen’s Little Mermaid was seeking immortality in addition to true love. This leads to the growing problem of fairy-tales fading into obscurity as a consequence of Disney’s pop culture mastery.

      Yes, I would categorize this as a problem because I feel we as a species owe it to ourselves to be mindful of the stories we use to guide our moral development across generations. Then there’s the frightening possibility of versions of a story—or entire stories—being erased from the public consciousness altogether.

    I feel somewhat uniquely qualified to advocate for this because any time I have been on this argument's receiving end, it always seems to come from someone harboring a not-so-secret disdain for the Disney film, or rather the Disney library as a whole. There's this underlying subtext that the fairy-tale itself is the gold standard of storytelling and the 1991 adaptation by Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale only a commercialized, hollowed duplicate, and I just don't think that's a fair appraisal of the film. I adore the Disney animated film, and I don't think that's something I can just attribute to nostalgia or the ubiquity of the Walt Disney company.

    My hope is to nurture some curiosity for the Beauty and the Beast fairy-tale by studying the interactions between various tellings of this story, and I don't think that I need to drag down the Disney version in order to do that. Stories share a base genealogy that comes from different times and different peoples playing off one another in the dance of storytelling. And viewing something like Disney's Beauty and the Beast in the context of not just the story from which it originated, but other fellow adaptations, reveals something special about the game of adaptation--a game in which there doesn't need to be any losers.

     We’ll focus our reading on the Disney film that everyone knows and the two adaptations from my aforementioned TMA 102 lesson: Jean Cocteau's 1946 adaptation and Christophe Gans' 2014 adaptation. These aren’t the only adaptations of the fairy-tale—not by a long shot—but in studying Disney’s relationship with the field of fairy-tale films, they stand out as some of the most significant. 

“Once Upon a Time . . .” Beauty and the Beast 1757

     Tracing the exact origin of a fairy-tale is always tricky. Folk tales such as these were usually passed down orally before being put down to pen, and the themes and motifs themselves predate any attempt to organize them into one body. The first formalized iteration of what is known as “Beauty and the Beast” is attributed to Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve’s 1740 novel, which was later abridge by Jeanne-Marie LePrince de Beaumont into a novelette in 1757, and it is this telling that we will use as a reference point.

      In this fairy-tale, Beauty (often named "Belle" in retellings) is the youngest daughter of a struggling merchant, a merchant who after getting lost in the woods plucks a rose from the estate of a terrifying Beast. As punishment for trespassing, Beauty must be sent to live with the Beast. 

    During her stay, Beauty is treated as an honored guest, and she enjoys her company with the well-mannered Beast with whom she dines each evening. During their dinners Beast asks her to marry him. Though she is fond of him, she cannot bring herself to love him for his unseemly appearance. She is eventually permitted a week’s visitation to her family, though her vindictive sisters trick her into extending her stay, which breaks the heart of the Beast. 

    When she returns to find him close to death, Beauty tearfully begs him not to leave her as she realizes she has come to love him. This declaration of love changes the Beast into a handsome prince before her eyes. Her Beast was in fact a prince all along, and only through her love was he finally restored to his princely form. And so they are free to begin their happily ever after together.

      It’s commonly accepted that, in addition to teaching kindness and internal beauty, the Beauty and the Beast story was invented as a parable to explain marriage and sex for young children, especially girls. In days of old, marriage would have seemed much like being passed from your father’s house to the house of a strange animal-man. The lesson being taught is that while this ritual would seem strange and even repulsive at first, with patience and kindness this Beast would transform into a desirable Prince with whom romance would feel natural.

 

  The Beauty and the Beast story has a lot in common with something like the Cinderella fairy-tale in that it exists in the pop culture lexicon almost more as a motif than a fully formed narrative on its own. There are a few hundred "Beauty and the Beast" type stories that are not literal descendants of the Beaumont/Villeneuve writing. This echoes how most cultures across the world have some close variation of the Beauty and the Beast story in their history. This all gives the fairy-tale more opportunities to mutate. In the interest of keeping things simple, this survey will stick mostly to film adaptations of Beaumonte/Villeneuve story.

      Early cinema shied away from adapting these fairy-tales because they were hard to visualize with limited special effects. These stories tended to work better in animation because it was easier to draw fairies and magic spells than it was to photograph them. Hence, Walt Disney animation became the household for such stories. But Disney was not the first to touch this fairy-tale. Not by nearly fifty years.

“I Have a Good Heart, but I am a Monster” Beauty and the Beast 1946

        We owe our first feature-film adaptation of the fairy-tale to Monsieur Jean Cocteau. His film featured Josette Day in the role of Belle and Jean Marais as the Beast. Cocteau's work in the world of theater helped him bring this story to the screen. Using stage tricks to invite the magic, he let the audience’s imagination fill in the blanks. When Belle first enters the castle, for example, she wanders down a hallway of billowing curtains. Cocteau had actress Josette Day stand on a skateboard, hidden by her dress, as she was pulled down the hallway with a rope, giving the impression of Belle gliding down the hall. This is what it looks like when a film speaks to children without patronizing them.

      This is also probably the most faithful adaptation of the original fairy-tale. Not a lot of additions or alterations were made to Villeneuve's writing. Details like the merchant plucking the Beast’s rose as a present for Beauty are still here. As are Belle’s vain and vindictive sisters who ask their father for expensive and materialistic goods, creating a contrast between Belle’s goodness and her sisters’ wickedness. 

      One of the few additions to the story is that of the romantic alternative for Belle, in this version named Avenant. Added specially for the film adaptation, Avenant is a childhood friend of Belle’s brother, Ludovic. He starts out a decent guy, and Belle even admits that she could have loved him, but as the events of the plot unfold, Avenant reveals an inner darkness in himself. The promise of jewels and riches within the Beast’s castle, as well as Belle’s continued rejection of his feelings, bring out the greed in Avenant, and he and Ludovic plot to rob the Beast’s castle. As he breaks into the castle, Avenant is shot by a statue of the goddess Diana, turning him into a beast himself.

       This occurs in tandem with the transformation of Belle’s Beast back into a prince. It’s roughly at this point that the audience realizes that the actor that portrays Avenant is the same that has portrayed the Beast all this time and is now portraying the Prince. This film introduced the idea of Beast’s internal beauty being juxtaposed with that of another character who represents external beauty but internal beastliness. (Sound familiar? Hold on to that.)

     On that note, it might also be useful to understand an element of the fairy-tale not present in this telling, or even the original Beaumont story, that of Beast’s internal monsterhood. Cocteau’s Beast does not need to be tamed by Beauty. He’s a perfect gentleman right from the start (the little rose squabble aside) without the need for an intervention from Belle. Their love comes to fruition not when Belle has purified Beast’s soul through her goodness but when Belle softens her heart and realizes that she can love a monster.

     In dominant fairy-tale lore, the Beast is only ugly on the outside and has no arc of learning kindness and gentleness. The conflation is largely a product of the domination of Disney adaptation in pop culture, something we’ll touch on soon. It’s not a given that The Prince is transformed into a Beast because he was a bad person (the reasons for the curse will vary between tellings). In Cocteau’s film the Prince was punished by a fairy because his parents refused to believe in magic. The conflict here isn't one of Belle's goodness rubbing up against Beast's monsterness, but rather Belle learning to give space for her own dormant childlike imagination. This is perhaps the most central component of Cocteaus' vision, which is detailed in the film's opening crawl, reading: 

“Children believe what we tell them. They have complete faith in us. They believe that a rose plucked from a garden can plunge a family into conflict. They believe that the hands of a human beast will smoke when he slays a victim, and that this will cause the beast shame when a young maiden takes up residence in his home. They believe a thousand other simple things. I ask of you a little of this childlike simplicity, and, to bring us luck, let me speak four truly magic words, childhood's open sesame: ‘Once upon a time...’”

      For nearly fifty years this was the definitive "Beauty and the Beast," much like how Walt's "Snow White" was the "Snow White." The Disney adaptation of Beaumont's fairy-tale is fairly free of competition in the modern film landscape, but it's not because it was the first to bat. Indeed, the Disney film owes at least a part of its success to Cocteau's experiment.

“For Who Could Ever Learn to Love a Beast?” Beauty and the Beast 1991

        This film, directed by Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale, was released in Fall 1991 and represented a creative revival among Walt Disney Animation. The studio had previously tried to adapt this fairy-tale into their animated canon not long after their success with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, but shelved the project after failed attempts to reinvent the story. The studio returned to the drawing board in the late 1980’s to produce what has become known among the masses as the definitive Beauty and the Beast.

       One of the suspected reasons why Walt never adapted the fairy-tale in his time was not wanting to compete with the much-adored Cocteau film, thus compelling 90’s Disney to distinguish this adaptation from the Cocteau film. The writing team has specifically mentioned having trouble creating tension over two people having dinner together every night, which is basically all that happens in the fairy-tale. This motivated the writing team to introduce a number of plot mechanics to give the story a shape more in line with traditional Hollywood storytelling. As a consequence, this ends up being one of the looser adaptations of the fairy-tale. Of the three we're exploring it's certainly the one that deviates most from the Beaumont story. Still, many of the influences from the Cocteau film are clear.

      The fairy-tale describes the castle being filled with invisible servants who tend to Beauty’s every need. In the Cocteau film, Belle would come across a magical doorway and a disembodied voice would call out her name as it opened for her. Disney ran with that idea and gave these enchanted objects names, personalities, and character development. Thus, Lumiere, Mrs. Potts, Cogsworth, and Chip were born.

        Another remixed idea is that of the foil character for the Beast. Gaston isn’t a carbon copy of Avenant--Avenant is notably more eloquent than Gaston, and Gaston more bloodlusty than Avenant--but there are striking similarities. Both are externally handsome, but reveal in themselves a deep-rooted beastliness that highlights how goodhearted the Beast is despite his monstrous appearance.

        The Disney film also opts to drop a few set pieces from both Cocteau and Beaumonte/Villeneuve, and it also allows itself to introduce a few items of its own. Gone are Beauty’s siblings. Belle here is an only child (though interestingly one draft of Disney’s film gave Belle a younger sister). Belle's virtue is contrasted against the vapidity of not her sisters but the other women in the village who swoon over Gaston. The function of the rose also differs between the two films. In the Cocteau film, the rose plays roughly the same role as it did in the fairy-tale: a thing that the merchant takes from the Beast to set the plot in motion, and also a symbol of external beauty. Disney spun that around and endowed the rose with magical properties and turned it into the film’s ticking clock. 

        This is also the first telling of the story to feature a fight between the Beast and the antagonist at the climax. Avenant and the Beast, though thematic mirrors of each other, never interact in the film. (And I'm not sure how they would since they were played by the same actor and green screen wasn't really a thing yet.) The Cocteau film introduced the idea of a foil character for the Beast, but the Disney film allowed the Beast to face off against his darker alternative in a thunder-scored battle for his humanity. 

        This brings us to the Disney version's most significant alteration: the Beast character himself. In the original fairy-tale and the Cocteau film, the Beast is a benevolent figure right from the start. His transformation is purely a physical one that comes about because of an internal change within Beauty. It’s only when classical Beauty softens her heart that classical Beast is restored to his princely form.

       Disney shifts the need to change onto the Beast, transforming him into a tortured soul wracked with his own vices whose exterior beastliness is a manifestation of his internal monsterhood. This is something he must overcome himself. Yes, breaking the spell is conditional on Beauty loving him, but the film frames this condition in such a way that places the responsibility on Beast, not Beauty. The prologue states this explicitly: “If he could learn to love another and earn her love in return, then the spell would be broken.” Love is something Beast has to earn, not something Belle has to give. 

    So Disney's Beauty and the Beast certainly brought a lot to the table on its own, but it also inherits a lot from stories outside of it. That to me is actually an exciting prospect. It shows that films within the Disney library aren't just made in a void. They interact with the larger film ecosystem just as "real movies" do. Because it's not just that Disney's Beauty and the Beast takes from other films, it inspires others also. 

“Belle, if you don’t come back . . . I will die” Beauty and the Beast 2014

        In 2014, France premiered another high-budget adaptation of the fairy-tale starring Lea Seydoux and Vincent Cassel. Gans was inspired by James Cameron’s Avatar and wanted to create a similarly resplendent experience for the fairy-tale realm. And it shows.

  This film returns to some of the more latent themes of the fairy-tale not explored in great depth in either the Cocteau or the Disney film, one of them being familial love. Belle’s siblings are back in this version, though graciously none of them want to feed her to the Beast. Belle kind of plays Beth March in that all she wants is to have her family together always. Belle fears losing her family to both natural transitions of life, like her sisters getting married, and external forces, like her brother Maxim getting involved with shady characters. Belle offering up herself to the Beast takes on a unique angle here: she’s the baby of the family and this is her first time away from home. This ties back to the fairy-tale’s function of teaching children about rites of passage into adulthood, leaving your father’s house to live with your lover.

On that note, this film also leans more into the sexual undertones of the fairy-tale. This isn’t Fifty Shades of Beast, but the film lends itself to a reading of sexual awakening in a way not explored in, say, the Disney film. There’s dialogue between Belle and The Beast about his capacity to “fulfill all her desires,” for example. This is a more logical route than one might think because, again, the fairy-tale was partially a way of explaining sex to children. In this way, the film is one of the more mature adaptations and even carries a PG13 rating.

      

          Though Gans’ adaptation feels more a response to Cocteau’s film than the Disney film, a few elements standout as being inspired by the ’91 movie specifically. One element lifted from the Disney version is the climactic confrontation when the Beast’s palace is invaded by outside forces. As in the Disney version, Beast nearly kills Perducas (the closest thing this version has to a Gaston/Avenant character), but his inner humanness compels him to stay his hand. Rather than returning Beast’s mercy, Perducas strikes a fatal blow at the Beast. It is this fatal strike that elicits Beauty’s confession of love, not a broken heart as it was in the fairy-tale.

        Even more notably, Belle and Beast have a ballroom dance in this film, even if it plays a different function than in the Disney version. Here, Belle bargains with the Beast: one dance for a visit with her family, and the Beast agrees. Despite her broadcasted disdain for the Beast, dancing with him feels comfortable, natural even, and she entertains a fantasy of being happy with him. But when Beast asks her outright, “Could you love me?” she angrily rebuffs him: “Try whatever you want to enchant me, to bribe me. You'll always disgust me!” This scene gives us a window into the conflict Belle feels over her growing romantic longings for the Beast. Belle resists the idea of romance because it represents growing up and her family being torn apart: falling in love with any man might as well be falling in love with a monstrous Beast. 

        Beast’s characterization here is another interesting note. Through flashbacks we learn that The Prince once had a wife (referred to simply as “The Princess”) whom he adored but to whom he was emotionally neglectful. Ignoring the requests of The Princess to stay home and be with her, The Prince pursues the elusive and magical golden doe. He finally slays the creature, only to discover that the doe was his Princess in disguise. The Princess is actually the daughter of the god of the forest, and she forsook immortality to experience love. The Princess dies in the arms of the Prince, transforming into a bush of roses, and the god of the forest punishes the Prince for his neglect with a curse of beastliness.

       It’s implied that Beast is so enraged at the Merchant stealing a rose because it represents him ravaging the grave of his lost love. Where Belle is guided by her love for her family, Beast is haunted by his failure to take care of his. So, yes, the Beast has to learn to love in order to break the spell, but it's less a transition from brute to gentleman, as it is in the Disney film, and more from "restless boyfriend who just wants to spend his weekends with his drinking buddies" to "dutiful husband capable of tending to his partner's emotional needs." This ties back to this film’s focus on the binding power of familial love.

      This film also employs the trope of having an in-universe narrator, a mother, reading the story from a storybook to young children. We find out at the end of the film that this narrator is none other than Belle herself reading to her children the story of her love with their father. Cliche as it may sound, this ending is oddly poetic. Belle's greatest fear was her family being torn apart, so much that she resisted natural transitions into adulthood such as marriage. The Belle we see in the end is a Belle who recognizes that while she and her siblings must eventually leave the nest, the love they have for each other will keep them together, and this same love can be felt in the form of her new family, one which she presides over with the man she loves.

      What’s most interesting is that this happily ever after has Belle and her family living not in the Beast’s luxurious castle, but in the countryside. Perhaps Belle and The Prince decided they prefer the simple life. Or perhaps there never was a castle to begin with. There's a really easy reading of the film where the castle and the magic spell were all part of a fictionalized account of Belle’s romance with her husband as she explains it to her children. 

       The rick-roll ending of “it was all just a dream/make-believe” normally reads like a cop-out to me, but in this story, I think it goes a long way to explore the function and use of fairy-tales in the first place. Maybe Belle’s husband is actually just a farmer, but in her eyes he’s a Prince who might as well have been held captive by a magic spell that only their love could have broken. This is what fairy-tales do--they give fantastical shape to real, lived experiences and through their embellishment capture hidden truths that are lost in more "realistic" tellings. This Beauty and the Beast echoes Cocteau’s take on the ways that childlike imagination enables us to more fully step into adulthood.

      The Gans film was well received within France, but international audiences, particularly American audiences, were less enthusiastic. The movie has a 6.4 on IMDb and a 36% on Rottentomatoes, half of what Disney's 2017 reinterpretation of its own movie received. This isn’t unthinkable, the movie isn’t beyond reproach, but when I see criticisms of the movie such as “Gaston sucks in this one!” (and I see them often) I suspect that the Disney movie is having undue influence over the movie’s reception. Indiewire's review, for example, refers to Belle's sisters as being "ripped from the Cinderella playbook" apparently forgetting how it was standard that Belle had sisters until Disney did away with them. Disney's 1991 film is the default version, and to many the only version, of the fairy-tale. Anyone else who tries to enter the field must be prepared to answer what they did to Mrs. Potts.

Song as Old as Rhyme . . .

     The phrase “Tale as Old as Time,” is interesting as it relates to the legendary song penned by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken featuring in the 1991 animated film from which it originates. After all, the “Beauty and the Beast” motif has existed in some way in every culture on earth and has since been retold through various mediums countless times. Tale as old as time indeed.

      At the same time, this phrase is also emblematic of how the film has shackled the fairy-tale. The story of Beauty and the Beast is inseparable from the Disney film from which this song originates. People know the story of Belle, the girl from a poor provincial town who wants adventure in the great wide somewhere and finds her happily ever after with the Beast whom she transforms with her innate goodness. These are nonnegotiable features of the story. Everybody knows Belle is a brunette--why waste time on a movie where they can't even get Belle's hair color right?

         Is this Disney’s fault? Is Disney actually killing fairy-tales? A little. Again, Disney is doing its job, and it’s very good at its job, but placing the fault all in the court of the untouchable titans of the entertainment industry gives us consumers permission to stop asking what our role in this game is. I’m more interested in how our own lack of curiosity causes our culture's most important stories to wither away.

For extra credit, also seek out the 1978 version by Juraj Herz

     How many of us keep fairy-tales on our shelf that don’t have the Disney seal? How many of us have ever seen, or felt any interest in, a film adaptation of a fairy-tale that wasn’t a direct spin-off of one of the Disney animated canon? Maybe we are deliberately keeping Disney movies in their bubble because we fear that once we bring down the walls of Jericho then these films will lose their savor to us. We like the Disney film so much that we want it to have the whole helping of our love because if it has to share the plate with anyone then it’s just not special anymore.

        I feel like that is a conclusion pushed by a lot of voices who try to champion the fairy-tale at the expense of the Disney film, but that hasn’t been my experience at all. And that is one of the reasons I don't find this elitism that so often shows up in the discourse truthful or useful.

    Understanding that the Disney film is a link in a much larger chain has only enriched my affection for it. Many of the film’s most iconic features—the enchanted objects as characters, Beast’s redemption arc, etc.—were not handed to the creative team on a plate, they were the products of artists fully participating in the creative process. Comparing the artistic inflections of each version, like why the Beast was transformed, adds texture to the sentimentality of the animated film. Moreover, it opens the door to other interpretations of the story. What do we have to lose by increasing our library?

        The Disney film that we all love came about because the world recognized that there was room for more interpretations of this story. Disney didn’t look at the Cocteau film and think, “Well, the world already has the one. Who needs another?” In that spirit, don’t we have that same obligation to keep the door open for other storytellers to have their turn?

        While you’re thinking about it, here’s a link to the Beaumont fairy-tale.

                                    

                   --The Professor