La Belle et la Bête

And another piece inspired by a fairy tale! This time, it's inspired more directly by a story and its characters as opposed to being a satire incidentally using elements of a traditional tale.

In the light of Disney's Beauty and the Beast appearing on Blu-Ray and again on DVD after an extended sojourn of nearly a decade in the infamous Disney Vault, I've been thinking of both the 1991 animated film and the original story. Though I wouldn't consider it the absolute best Disney film like some people, I still do really like it. It was one of the Disney films that I watched a lot on VHS when I was younger, so it has a lot of childhood memories attached (I also saw the film at the age of four when it was originally released). It has a great score, and I'd single at least two or three of the songs out as some of cinema's best tunes. It doesn't have the best animation and art direction of a Disney film, but there are some lovely touches, especially the exterior of the castle, a French château built in the dreamy, high turreted style of Schloss Neuschwanstein. The first shot of the film, a Multiplane close-in on the said edifice through the forest, is beautiful, and the film's introduction told through the castle's stained glass windows is very effective.

Ultimately, a lot of the film's lure quite simply derives from the story's basic backbone, and the film's creators' wise thinking in keeping that intact, regardless of the addition of singing tea pots and saucy French candelabras. Underneath its fantastic exterior, the tale is essentially a story about human perception and love, touches upon primeval nerves. The story is versatile; it can be stripped to its skeleton and completely retold potentially as effectively as before, as Disney's, Cocteau's and many others' versions all have.

This little drawing, done in pen and ink, was my attempt at rendering the protagonists, be they from the standard Madame Le Prince de Beaumont narrative or a potential new version of it (I have a new idea in my head based around the Beauty and the Beast story). As with any tale already done by somebody else (read: Disney, and with this case, Jean Cocteau as well), it was somewhat difficult to come up with something that was different yet familiar. Beauty/Belle wasn't too difficult to draw anew, but every image I had of the Beast screamed either Cocteau or Disney; I therefore hope that nobody imagines this Beast as having the voice of Robby Benson or being Jean Marais in a mask. What I did try to do was to dress them as characters of the eighteenth century, for that was when the standard version of the story (the one written by Madame Le Prince de Beaumont) was penned, and it seems to me the perfect epoch to set the story. Beauty's dress was inspired by one that I saw at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (it was part of an exhibit on 18th century life in British India), and I looked at paintings of French kings for the Beast's costume.