Beauty and the Beast

In Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise’s 1991 animation each song performs one job. The opening number installs the town’s verdict on Belle, Gaston’s installs the antagonist, and “Be Our Guest” stops the story outright for a floor show. Little is left for the romance itself: the turn runs through two stations, the wolf attack and the library. Eighty-four minutes is tight, so the Beast’s change of character is compressed and the songs absorb time the script does not spend. The structural invention is Gaston, a villain who is the town’s own definition of a hero, which turns the closing mob march into a scene about consensus rather than monsters. The film is a second attempt: work first went ahead on a version without songs, set in nineteenth-century France, before the whole thing was rebuilt. Lyricist Howard Ashman died on 14 March 1991, eight months before release, and the picture is dedicated to him. An unfinished cut, about seventy per cent animated with storyboards and pencil tests filling the rest, screened at the New York Film Festival on 29 September 1991. Three of the five best song nominees that year came from it. Go in accepting that the numbers carry the narrative and the romance gets few scenes. Avoid it if you want the film to interrogate how it starts.