Zombie Will Think for Food

Ever since my mom forced me to download this episode of the Magical Definitions Podcast in which Don Hahn, the animating/directing/producing mind behind such Disney classics as The Fox and the Hound, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and Beauty and the Beast, I haven’t been able to get that last one out of my head. There are a few things I’d like to address about this timeless classic of our times.

So, I was in first grade when Beauty and the Beast came out and I vividly remember seeing it in the theaters more than once. I remember Belle being the first Disney princess that I could recognize in myself.

Well, maybe not exactly. But she had messy hair! And I had very messy hair as a first grader.

The real reason why I thought that Beauty and the Beast was made for me was this:

I pretty much felt like this on the inside constantly from age six through age fourteen. Hell, I still feel like that. “Oh, I’ll pick…that one.” “That one? But you’ve read it twice!” “But it’s my favorite!”

Yeah, this was a heroine I could rally behind. Someone who liked stories and thought everyone in her city were a bunch of slack-jawed, illiterate yokels.

One of my favorite things that I’ve learned to love about Beauty and the Beast is the following shot. The music swells in the song Something There as Belle ponders, “New and a bit alarming…who’d have ever thought that this could beeeee? True! He’s no…prince charming. But there’s something in him that I simply didn’t see…”

Here, Disney bravely strides forth where pitifully few children’s movies wandered in 1991: bestiality. Do you see how mildly concerned she looks there? She is falling in love with a hairy animal of indiscriminate taxonomic classification and looks like she thinks she might have forgotten to pay the gas bill. I can’t decide if I think she’s plucky and flexible (“Well, at least he’s paper-trained!”) or completely deranged.

So, remember how the movie ends? No? Happily, I do.

And they all lived happily ever after!

What I don’t understand is…how did the village react to this marriage? Did those angry Frenchmen just head back home? “Yeah, we had this blood lust to kill this monster that lives in that castle up there that we’d been ignoring all these years, but he had all kind of enchanted crap that threw itselves at us, so we got bored and went home. Oh yeah, and the monster probably kidnapped that weird girl who reads all the time. They’re totally prince and princess of France or something, btw. I know, crazy, right?”

Did they all just stop caring about the fact that there was a monster and enchanted castle? I give Belle and the Beast a good week of marital bliss before the hillbillies and hoi polloi gather up their torches and pitchforks and kill them in their sleep for taking out Gaston. Oh yeah, and for probably being witches who own sexually ambiguous candelabras and clocks.

I think Orson Welles (drunkenly) said it best in take three of the following commercial, when he finally seems to snap to attention: “Mwaahaa the French…”

EDIT: So, I was just listening to the soundtrack and had to share this. The movie opens with this line: “Once upon a time, in a faraway land, a prince lived in a shining castle.” Evocative though that fairy tale beginning may be…”a faraway land?” It’s France. I guess I didn’t realize how much globalization has changed our world view since 1991—apparently, back then, France was merely one of many pipe dreams Disney had, where everyone acted more or less like this.