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 primary variation is on images of beauty and the meaning of them. Belle is beautiful both within and without, while the Beast is ugly because he has had an ugly soul. However, ultimately the Beast is good and not ugly at all, while Gaston is outwardly beautiful and yet ugly through and through. More than most fairy tales, the story of "Beauty and the Beast" is a story where appearances are deceiving. In the film version, the seemingly animated household utensi...