Film
Rated among the highest peaks of Disney animation and still one of the most famous Classics, especially because it was able to make it to the Oscars in several categories, including Best Picture, coming home with two awards: the first for Best Soundtrack by Alan Menken and the second for the song Beauty and the Beast, signed by Céline Dion and Peabo Bryson. Based on the eponymous fairy tale by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, indebted to Jean Cocteau's 1946 masterpiece of the same name, the Disney classic succeeded in making the dark love story between a girl and a monster, locked up in a cursed castle, suitable for a younger audience thanks to the comic counterbalance of characters such as Lumiére, Tockins, Mrs. Bric and the other castle objects. It was such a success that it inspired a Broadway musical for the first time.
Art
With The Little Mermaid many things began to change. The Disney Renaissance had officially begun, and perhaps the Studios realised that art could be more than mere citationism and become a means of deepening the characters and their context. The following films are emblematic of this, starting with Beauty and the Beast.
In 1991, the story was released in the cinema of a girl who, bored by life in a provincial town, starts looking for adventure in books. Her fellow villagers gaze at her in amazement as she is always in the clouds, walking through the streets without ever taking her eyes off the pages she reads. We spectators begin to believe it too, and when a woman throws water into the gutter on Belle's path we also begin to worry that she might catch it. Here, however, Belle promptly takes cover with a shop sign.
Might she be not as distracted as we think?
On this sign is in fact depicted a pipe very similar to the one we see in René Magritte's famous painting, The Treachery of Images. "This is not a pipe" reads the inscription in the Belgian artist's work, and yet that is what it appears to be: what Magritte is in fact doing is inviting us to question what we see, to reflect on the deceptiveness of appearances because however it may actually look, that is not a pipe but a representation of one. Likewise Belle, who invites you to question what you expect from her, presented as a girl unlike any other in search of a husband. Or is she? After all, her favourite book is indeed about an adventure story, but her favourite part is about falling in love. Belle wants true love, but she wants to defy the role imposed on the housewives. This contradiction of hers is a symptom of a complex character that the art directors wanted to emphasise with the inclusion of Magritte's work, also anticipating the central theme of the whole film.
Belle is nobody's wife, nor does she want to be, but she fantasises about the different adventures one can have before falling in love. Thus begins her adventure once she arrives at the Beast's castle, where she finds on its walls two paintings that tell us something more about the personalities and desires of the two protagonists. One of these is The Girl with a Pearl Earring (1665) by Johannes Vermeer, a Dutch painter known for his meticulous detail and use of chiaroscuro. Regardless of what the novel and film of the same name suggest, nothing is known about the identity of the girl portrayed and we are left to fantasize as Belle. The headdress she wears and the pearl earring for which the painting is famous allude to the exotic, but the girl wearing them is white, probably of European origin. Her clothes are poor, even though pearls were a commodity accessible only to the richest families. We do not know her name, nor where she came from, but this woman represents in a way what Belle is looking for: adventure in the big world, an anonymous plea for a place other than provincial France, her need to escape to a different way of life.
This portrait of an anonymous European girl is a visual representation of what Belle will (unknowingly) become if her relationship with the Beast goes ahead: the lavish lifestyle of the castle, the fortunes of an aristocrat for travelling, the Prince Charming of her favourite part of the book she read sitting on the village fountain. A prince who, incidentally, is portrayed next to her on the same wall and in the style of Frank Hals' Laughing Knight (1582-1666). The portrait we see is that of a man dressed in a fine, nobleman's black suit, black hat and lace collar, according to the fashion reserved for men of good standing in the 17th century. A man who is still noble despite his decadent Beast appearance, an 'unfinished' man. His animator Glen Keane, in fact, claimed to have been inspired by Italian Renaissance art and in particular Michelangelo's non-finito (unfinished) man for the scene of his transformation into a human being. The telamons on the main staircase, depicting the Beast bearing the weight of his secret, also remind us a little of this.
The artistic references in this film are not finished. In the song 'Human Again' (included in the post-2003 DVD versions due to Broadway musical success but then removed shortly afterwards to revert to the original version) the castle staff transformed into furniture objects by the spell hope to break the curse and return to being human again and to their simpler way of life. At this juncture, we see two characters in a quick tableau vivant from a much-loved work, Grant Wood's American Gothic (1930), impersonated (so to speak) by Mrs. Bric and Tockins, now actors in the painting and domestic caretakers who solve the castle's problems. They are the embodiment of American growth and hope, a portrait of a heteronormative couple who encourage the Beast to become a better version of himself by marrying a woman, only to retire from their arduous careers as caretakers, like two jaded parents.
Finally, Gaston. If in the first draft of the story and in the storyboard the antagonist died mauled by wolves after surviving the fall from the castle, in the one we know we do not see the scene of his death, but directors Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wisea leave the deduction to us. Thanks to the skull that appears in Gaston's pupils for just a second we are able to understand his fate, based on the thought of the artist M.C. Escher, according to whom in the eyes is reflected the face of the one who looks at us, of the one who guides us. In this case it is the face of Fate, as in the Eye he painted in 1946. Man's fate, the tragic nature of human life. In Gaston's eyes we thus see the reflection of his destiny, that is, the now inevitable death.
External Links
Watch The Beauty and the Beast on Disney +
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