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. People tend to be casually aware that fairy-tales came from “long ago,” but they give little thought to how these stories may have been shaped by telling and retelling across generations--which certainly extend far beyond their induction into the lineup of Walt Disney Feature Animation.
It tends to surprise people, for example, to find out 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. Neither of those things happened in the Disney movie, and so those plot points, like the texts in which they feature, evaporate in the public imagination.
Yes, I would categorize this as a problem because I feel we as a society owe it to ourselves to be mindful of the stories we use to guide 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 could potentially get into the film's place within musical history, its many technological innovations, the way it empowers the marginalized or disenfranchised, but I'll have to save that all for a different day. Today, let it suffice to say that 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. And neither has it impeded my enthusiasm or curiosity for the original fairy-tale or its many adaptations.
My hope today 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 the interest of keeping things focused, we'll confine our analysis here.
“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, hoping this will anger The Beast and cause him to eat her when she returns. This doesn't actually unlock any animal rage in him, but it does break his heart.
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.
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, whose work in the world of theater helped him bring this rich fantasy to the screen--back in a time when fairy-tales were beyond the normal reach of moving pictures.
In a similar way that you can tell in The Wizard of Oz that Judy Garland is running into a painted background, you can see the seams and nuts and bolts holding this together. The story itself can also feel somewhat confined with just how small the stage is that they're working with. There are some decently sized set pieces in this film--the courtyard staircase, the pond garden, etc. But I won’t deny that watching this movie, I find myself longing for this fantasy draping to stretch a little wider. I want the luxurious backdrops of Gone with the Wind.
But of course, this is one of those spaces where you have to remind yourself that this was one of the first times anyone in Hollywood was trying to make an elaborate fantasy picture. For that, we can respect the film’s ambition—for daring to be the first to break the ice.
That is the advantage this movie has over modern fantasy films with their CGI castles. This film enables you to meet the fantasy at its level, to open your heart to the things that came naturally when you were a child. 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. Rudimentary trick, enchanting pay-off.
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.)
Another one of those little threads that tends to catch the average viewer off guard is that 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. The Beast in this film has monstrous proclivities in that he like kills and eats wild deer, yes. But this is more a condition of his animal state than a character attribute that he has to resolve. This is something he feels a lot of shame over, and Belle choosing not to condemn him for his animal nature is what reveals her kind and discerning heart. Belle rightly observes that “There are men far more monstrous than you, though they conceal it well.” The engine of this romance is getting Belle to complete the circle and learn to not just tolerate her Beast, but love him as well.
Belle catches onto the fact that he’s not a bad guy right from the start, but it will take a minute for her to realize that she has the capacity to feel genuine romantic affection for something she finds repulsive. 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. This is how the story has played out for most of its lifetime.
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:
Cocteau is aiming this treatise on innocence and faith squarely at adults—there are no child characters in this adaptation. And he's asking a different kind of “innocence” than what we are typically asked in a lot of contemporary children’s media. This isn’t demanding any retreat into a state of blameless non-actancy—this isn’t teasing us with the possibility of not having to face adulthood any longer. This is asking us to imagine if we approached our adult problems with the same kind of earnestness and belief that comes to kids naturally. That is the difference between Belle, who looks beneath the surface to see someone worth loving in The Beast, and Avenant or Belle’s sisters, who only ever think of their own material gain.
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.
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.
But there's one specific alteration that really defines this adaptation: 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.
The
Disney version doesn’t have this touchstone. That part of the narrative is
supplied instead by Belle’s encounter with The Beast in The West Wing—the
episode where he frightens her out of the castle. This turns a sort of external obstacle into something internal. His beastliness manifests not as
some grosser animal behavior--he is uncivilized and monstrous, and that is the thing that keeps them apart.
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 casting his lot in with criminals.
The Beast in this adaptation is sort of caught halfway between the Disney version and the Cocteau version. He’s depicted as having some real thorns, but his propensity for animal behavior does not portend any unexamined cruelty or selfishness. He's actually generally quick to apologize to Belle for stepping out of line. His real character flaw has nothing to do with being beastly.
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."
“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 reasons why Walt never succeeded in adapting the fairy-tale in his time was not wanting to compete with the much-adored Cocteau film. Thus, 90’s Disney had to distinguish this adaptation from the Cocteau masterwork. 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.
Cocteau also probably gave them the idea to add in a romantic foil for The Beast. Gaston and Avenant aren't carbon copies of each other--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.
But there's one specific alteration that really defines this adaptation: 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 onus of growth 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 as he learns to control his temper and put someone else's needs before his own.
Both the Cocteau and the Gans adaptation have some storybeat where Belle comes across The Beast as he is devouring an animal in a way that could only be described as monstrous. This is the part of the story where Belle is the least convinced she could see this guy as a romantic partner. She basically walks in on him like shaving his back and thinks, "Nope. Can't do this."
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. "If he can learn to love another, and earn her love in return." Love is something Beast has to earn, not something Belle has to give.
This adaptation was arguably the first version of the story to look at the framework of the fairy-tale and see it as a way of exploring the romantic union as a vehicle for self-improvement, of choosing to be the best version of yourself and discovering that your best self and their best self might be very good for one another.
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 movie makes me wish that big-budget fairy tales were just a thing Hollywood did outside of the Disney remakes.
This movie imagines some new backstory for both Beauty and Beast--there are character-specific reasons for something like The Beast being triggered over The Merchant stealing his rose. But unlike most contemporary fairy-tale adaptations, this film doesn’t feel the need to graft any new gimmick to the story in order to justify its existence or sell itself to a millennial audience. (e.g. what if Red Riding Hood had to uncover an underground plot to sell Granny's goodie recipe on the black market?) This film recognizes what it means to be timeless—for a story to have relevance no matter what generation it premieres to.
This adaptation is less about reinventing the text and more about zeroing in on specific features already in it. Gans' film looks at Belle's journey of discovery against the backdrop of her leaving behind childhood and especially her family, but again, that was already kind of the engine of the Beaumont writing. All the necessary material was already in the text, it just needed a keen eye and careful curating to bring it to the surface.
In this version, Belle also volunteers herself to take her father's place, something the film took from the Disney adaptation. In both the original text and the Cocteau adaptation, that arrangement is made without her express knowledge. But the trade also takes specific meaning in this context: she’s the baby of the family and this is her first time away from home, and she's learning about what it means to open herself up to a sexual partner.
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. It even carries a PG13 rating despite its very vibrant, lyrical aesthetic, very in line with a children's fantasy. There’s a charged moment, for example, where Belle sees The Beast tearing apart an animal on his bed, and the positioning carries some sexual suggestion. And that’s not the film just trying to be clever, that’s just ratifying the metaphor. This is and always has been a story about a young girl learning about that part of manhood we would call animal and how that can feel like such a frightening prospect.
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.
Probably the biggest overlap is Belle and Beast having some kind of ballroom dance teasing out their potential union. 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!”
The Beast in this adaptation is sort of caught halfway between the Disney version and the Cocteau version. He’s depicted as having some real thorns, but his propensity for animal behavior does not portend any unexamined cruelty or selfishness. He's actually generally quick to apologize to Belle for stepping out of line. His real character flaw has nothing to do with being beastly.
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 her requests to stay home 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.)
One specific choice that ends up taking a lot of real estate in my mind has to do with the 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.
This is another one of those things that sounds cliche, but in execution, it feels like the perfect conclusion for this specific situation. Belle's greatest fear was her family being torn apart, so much that she resisted a very natural transition into adulthood. But 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 abide. What's more, this same love is reborn within the space of her new family, one which she presides over with the man she loves.
But it was on my second or third viewing that I caught onto the specific wrinkle of having Belle's happy ending not in the castle, but in the countryside. I think it would comply with the established narrative to imagine that maybe Beast was just kind of bored of his castle and chose a life with Belle in the country. But this being a fairy-tale, there's also a really easy reading of the film where the castle and the magic spell were all fictionalized: Belle has been telling her children a romanticized account of her romance with their father.
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--why waste time on a movie where they can't even get Belle's hair color right?
But it was on my second or third viewing that I caught onto the specific wrinkle of having Belle's happy ending not in the castle, but in the countryside. I think it would comply with the established narrative to imagine that maybe Beast was just kind of bored of his castle and chose a life with Belle in the country. But this being a fairy-tale, there's also a really easy reading of the film where the castle and the magic spell were all fictionalized: Belle has been telling her children a romanticized account of her romance with their father. The rick-roll ending of “it was all just a dream/make-believe” normally reads like a cop-out to me. Like, it's a story about magic and fairies--this is what we signed up for. But in this story, I also think it works. This function goes a long way to explore why we even have 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. I feel like the story is faithful to its own fantasticality--partially because the views of the countryside at the end are at least as lovely as the shots of the castle. I don't watch this and feel cheated, I feel like I have learned something about how the magic of fairy-tales is also an active thread here in the world outside the storybook.
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 people are going into this with tampered expectations.
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. 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.
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.
How many of us keep fairy-tales on our shelf that don’t have the Disney seal? How many of us have ever seen a film adaptation of a fairy-tale that wasn’t a direct spin-off of one of the Disney animated canon? And how much are we missing out on because of all that?
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 adds texture to the sentimentality I feel for the Disney film. There is absolutely room to entertain multiple renditions of the story. And that is one of the reasons I don't find this elitism, that so often shows up in the discourse, truthful or useful.
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| For extra credit, also seek out the 1978 version by Juraj Herz |
From what I've observed, a part of this lack of curiosity comes from a fear. A protectiveness. People keep Disney movies in their bubble because they fear that once we bring down the walls of Jericho then these films will lose their savor. 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.
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?
While you’re thinking about it, here’s a link to the Beaumont fairy-tale.
--The Professor
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