Disney's Beauty & the Beast
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The Disney company's animated feature film Beauty and the Beast (1992) tells a well-known folk story in a fresh way, developing personalities for the characters that were not apparent in the fairy tale from which the story is taken. The film added other features and characters, including something feasible only in a fairy tale or an animated film, anthropomorphic furnishings that turn out to be enchanted servants left with their changed master. An animated film is built of abstract images, for no matter how much the artist may attempt to render reality, it is always only an image of reality and thus an abstraction. The abstract images of the animated film are developed so as to serve the needs of the story, to convey not only the details of the story as such but also the underlying meaning which constitutes plot. The story of Beauty and the Beast is well-known, and what this film needs to do is not convey the story in its bare essentials so much as shape the way the viewer responds to this particular version of the story. Many of the images constitute what might be called aspects of the iconography of the fairy tale--the castle, the simple village, the creature, the enchantress who casts a spell, the beauty who can take the spell away, the enchanted mirror, and so on. These are images that are readily understood on first viewing as conveying certain set ideas that emerge from the fairy tale, though there can be variations. In Beauty and the Beast, for instance, the p
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used him to lose his link with nature demonstrated by his unnatural appearance and the changed atmosphere in and around his castle. The story of the change is told in a series of still drawings, not unlike the stained-glass windows of cathedrals. The first "moving" image comes when the newly-created Beast, in despair, scratches his nails through a painting over the mantel. The sense of what he has lost is embodied in the rose that is kept in a glass case, and that bright rose in the darkened house is the image of nature, of what was once part of the castle and part of the Prince's world but that is now kept at a distance or enclosed in glass. Significantly, the first view we have of Belle is when she leaves her cottage and is surrounded by the flying birds and bright foliage of nature.
Now, all this might seem simply harmless to most people, but there are critics who find that Disney is pandering to the audience by presenting images that falsify the intent of the original stories the studio presents, that may perpetuate certain stereotypes and unwanted social attitudes, and that do little to enrich the life of the audience beyond creating a soothing but false image of the world. The audience has changed in how it views the
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1447
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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