If you’re familiar with several different adaptations of the Beauty and the Beast story, you’ll notice something they have in common rather quickly. Due to the constraints of live-action (heck, I’ve even seen this in a few book illustrations), the design of the Beast can often end up being a little…uninspired, shall we say. It’s common to just put the actor’s head and hands in cat makeup and leave it at that (unless you’re the CW, who is too lazy/stupid for even that). And since good ol’ Disney character designs are always so creativity-deprived, I’m sure they won’t do anything out of the ordinary for OH DEAR GOD WHAT IS THAT THING?!?
It may sound like I’m exaggerating, but the designers and animators really did pull out all their stops when it comes to the Beast. He’s huge. He’s covered in thick brown fur. He’s got Maleficent horns. He stomps around on all fours, and his movements are very dog-like. All he’s wearing is a cloak and some pants. His claws are long and black, he’s got big, sharp fangs and as he’s going to demonstrate for us, he’s very good at jump scares. “There’s a stranger here.” Did I mention that he sounds like a pissed off Optimus Prime?
The servants try to calm him down, but he roars them down Anthony Hopkins-as-Odin style. Maurice stays curled up in the chair, frozen with fear. He looks to one side, then looks to the other and finds himself face to face with the Beast. “Who are you!” the Beast snaps, crawling on the chair and forcing him out. “What are you doing here?”
“I was lost in the woods and…”
“You are not welcome here!” He assumes that Maurice has just come to gawk at him, and he isn’t taking it well.
“Please, I mean no harm!” Maurice tells him. “I just needed a place to stay.”
“I’ll give you a place to stay!” We get a shadow discretion shot of the Beast picking Maurice up and dragging him off to who knows where (but presumably the kitchen), slamming the door behind him. The servants are left cowering in the dark, and the scene fades to black.
I gotta say, this is the first scene in the film that I really got into. It’s atmospheric, intense, our deuteragonist made one hell of an entrance…so what happens next?
“Oh boy! Belle’s gonna get the surprise of her life, huh, Gaston?” AAAAARGGGHHH! Okay, deep breaths…
So Gaston and Le Fou have not gotten any less creepy since we last saw them. “I’d like to thank you all for coming to my wedding!” Gaston tells the crowd of villagers he’s assembled just outside Belle’s cottage. “But first, I better go in there and propose to the girl!” The crowd laughs, the Bimbettes cry, and Anakin Skywalker was never this messed up when it came to women. Although…no, no, we’re keeping the focus on Disney here. Non-acquired Disney.
Anyway, Gaston’s plan is to go in the house, tell Belle that she’s going to marry him and then take her out to walk her down the aisle then and there. Everyone is okay with this for some reason. Inside, Belle is reading when she hears him knock at the door, and she pulls down an overly fancy peephole to look through. If you’ve ever encountered Christmas carolers, late night trick-or-treaters or Jehovah’s Witnesses, you’ll understand how she feels when she sees what’s on the other side. “Gaston, what a pleasant…surprise.”
“Isn’t it, though? I’m just full of surprises.” If you thought Ursula was a misogynistic villain, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Gason basically stalks Belle around the house, pushing aside furniture and cornering her. There are comical moments like when he stops to pick his teeth and puts his muddy boots on her book, but I’m pretty sure they’re there to keep the scene from getting too disturbing. They don’t help much.
And that’s not even getting into the stuff he says. He imagines her pumping out his boys and massaging his feet every day for the rest of her miserable 18th century life, and he tells her that in only slightly nicer terms. Picture “Blurred Lines” set to a Mozart piece, and you get the tone of this whole thing.
“Gaston, I’m speechless,” Belle tells him, and so are we. “I don’t know what to say.”
He pins her against the door. “Say you’ll marry me!”
Belle gets her hand around the doorknob. “I’m sorry, Gaston, but I just…don’t…deserve you!” Opening the door, she ducks under Gaston and watches him tumble out into the mud. Then she throws his boots after him for good measure. Girl power!
Because Le Fou is incurably stupid, he asks how things went. It seems that mud triggers Gaston’s villain mode, because he makes a declaration: “I’ll have Belle for my wife, make no mistake about that!” Somewhere out there, there’s a fantasy AU for Fifty Shades of Grey which starts with that line.
Once the crowd has left, Belle pokes her head out the door. “Is he gone?” she asks the chickens. “Can you imagine? He asked me to marry him!” No, asking implies he cared about your opinion. “Me, the wife of that boorish, brainless…”
What’s that I hear? The tune of “Belle” coming back for another round? Brace yourselves!
It starts off cute and bouncy, with Belle mocking the idea of being “Madame Gaston,” then reiterates that she wants more than the small town life. The music starts to slow down and build up as she runs away from the cottage, towards a cliff overlooking a gorgeous valley. At last! Now we’re gonna hear about what she really wants! Sort of!
I’m gonna state an opinion that’s probably unpopular: I’m not a huge fan of this song. First off, it’s a reprise of the earlier chorus number. Belle doesn’t even get a big number to herself. Second off, I find it too vague. We know plenty about what she doesn’t want by now from what she’s said about the village, but I can’t pin down what she does want. Ariel wanted to explore the human world and discover its mysteries. Belle wants an adventure, and…that’s about it, really. We don’t know what kind of adventure. Does she want to find the Holy Grail? Does she want to go around the world in 80 days? What, Belle, what? Be specific, dammit!
Belle only gets about four lines in before she hears Philippe coming back from the woods alone. Rightfully assuming that he’s gotten himself into trouble, she knows that she needs to act fast. So she unhitches the cart and climbs on Philippe’s back, telling him to take her to her father.
Smash cut to the castle gate as Belle and Philippe ride up…hey, wait a minute! Philippe didn’t know where the castle was. He chickened out long before that point. Maybe this happens often enough that they installed a tracking device under Maurice’s skin.
Belle finds her father’s hat in the courtyard and goes inside. “Hello? Is anyone here? Papa, are you here?” Lumiere and Cogsworth are currently arguing about which of them is stupider and can’t be bothered to terrorize her. Chip the teacup sees her, though.
“Momma! There’s a girl in the castle!” His mother is Mrs. Potts, the aforementioned cockney Angela Lansbury. She tells him to stop talking nonsense and get in the tub, but a feather duster tells her that it’s real this time. “See, I told ya!”
Meanwhile, Belle passes Cogsworth and Lumiere. The former is concerned about two outsiders in as many days, but the latter is ecstatic. “Don’t you see? She’s the one. The one we have been waiting for. She has come to break the spell!” Using the light from his candles, he lures Belle up a staircase into the castle tower. There, she finds her father locked in a cell. She picks a torch off the wall and hurries to his side. “We have to get you out of here!”
“Belle, I want you to leave this place.”
“Who’s done this to you?”
“No time to explain. You must go…now!”
“I won’t leave you!”
Too late. The Beast comes out of nowhere, grabs her shoulder and pulls her around. The torch lands in a puddle of water and goes bye-bye. Now all we’ve got left is a skylight. The Beast darts around it throughout the next scene, staying just out of sight. “Who’s there? Who are you?” Belle asks.
“The master of this castle.”
“I’ve come for my father. Please let him out! Can’t you see he’s sick?”
“Then he shouldn’t have trespassed here!”
They go back and forth like this for a few seconds. Belle says she’ll do anything to save her dad, but the Beast is having none of it. Maurice is his prisoner, and that’s the end of that. “Oh, there must be some way I can…wait!” She’s got an idea, and she knows it’s a bad one. “Take me instead.”
“You would take his place?”
I don’t know how she expects her dad to survive on his own after all this, but I’m all for this plan if it gets us away from that town. “If I did, would you let him go?”
“Yes. But you must promise to stay here forever.”
“…Come into the light,” Belle tells him. He does, and she can only stand to look at him for a few seconds before freaking out. Impressively, she calms down pretty quickly and stands up. “You have my word.”
“Done!” The Beast releases Maurice, who’s been protesting this the whole time, and drags him away before he can get another sentence in. “Please, spare my daughter!”
“She’s no longer your concern.” The Beast takes him outside and throws him in the back of an abandoned palanquin lying in the courtyard. “Take him to the village.” The palanquin promptly bends its poles down like feet, breaks out of the vines holding it out and goes crawling off like it’s escaping a Studio Ghibli film. Belle watches it leave. You’d think this would creep her out some, but no.
Elsewhere, Lumiere keeps playing Operation Matchmaker. “Since the girl is going to be with us for quite some time, I was thinking that you might want to offer her a more comfortable room.” The Beast just growls, but he goes up to Belle’s cell anyway.
“You didn’t even let me say goodbye. I’ll never see him again. I didn’t get to say goodbye…”
Luckily, the Beast is still familiar with this human emotion called guilt. “I’ll show you to your room.”
“My room?”
“You wanna stay in the tower?”
“No…”
“Then follow me.”
I should mention here that this castle is among some of Disney’s best artwork. You can really feel the size and elegance of this thing. It’s a glorious ruin, filled with gnarled old Gothic statues that line the walls and cast shadows everywhere. Belle doesn’t think it’s so cool and runs to catch up with the Beast. He looks back and sees her starting to cry.
“Say something to her,” says Lumiere, who’s being used as a light source.
The Beast may still have a grip on human emotion, but social skills are another matter entirely. I can relate. His first attempt? “I…um…hope you like it here.” When that doesn’t work, he goes with “The castle is your home now, so you can go anywhere you wish. Except the West Wing.”
“What’s in the West Wing?”
“It’s forbidden!” Must be where he keeps his copy of Song of the South and all the wartime cartoons.
They get to Belle’s room, which does indeed look pretty nice. “If there’s anything you need,” the Beast tells Belle, “my servants will attend you.”
Lumiere isn’t done yet, though. “Dinner! Invite her to dinner!”
I think the Beast has had it with Lumiere, and he takes it out on Belle. “You…will join me for dinner. That’s not a request!” He slams the door, and Belle collapses on the bed sobbing as it starts to snow outside.
Alright, so Belle’s finally gotten to the castle. Now we can get this story started! Wait…wait, why are we going back to the village? Why are we at the tavern? Oh, no…
Inside, everyone is getting drunk except Gaston, who is sitting in a chair by the fire and being emo. “Who does she think she is? That girl has tangled with the wrong man! No one says no to Gaston!” He’s so disgraced that not even beer will help.
But Le Fou is having none of this. “Gaston, you’ve got to pull yourself together! Gosh, it disturbs me to see you, Gaston, looking so down in the dumps…!”
“Gaston” is the kind of song we don’t get very often in Disney films. It’s the Villain Who Thinks He’s The Hero Song. This is not the same as the Villain Song, believe me. To demonstrate, let’s contrast it with a straight-up Villain Song, “Poor Unfortunate Souls.” Ursula knew she was bad, and she reveled in it. When she professed to having had a change of heart, her voice was dripping with sarcasm and the lyrics were full of double meanings. She never believed a word of what she was saying. When Gaston and his friends sing about how awesome he is, though, they’re being sincere. It’s all in good fun, like if people were telling Chuck Norris memes while Chuck Norris was in the room. At the same time, there are some dark undertones involved. Gaston is more or less abusing the rest of the tavern goers throughout the whole thing, but they don’t seem to mind. He thinks he’s nothing less than the best there is, and no one even tries to dissuade him from this. Everything here is feeding his ego, and it’s inflating to dangerous levels.
The song ends just in time for Maurice to come crashing in. I assume that either the palanquin dropped him just outside of town or that no one was around to see it crawling through the streets. “Please! Please, I need your help! He’s got her. He’s got her locked in the dungeon!” He sounds like a 49er here for some reason. Maybe it’s just me.
“Woah, slow down, Maurice!” says Gaston. “Who’s got Belle locked in a dungeon?”
“A beast! A horrible, monstrous beast!” It’s huge, with a long ugly snout and sharp, cruel fangs. The townsfolk laugh but decide to humor Maurice long enough to get rid of him. “Alright, old man. We’ll help you out!”
“You will? Oh, thank you! Thank you!” Several of Gaston’s flunkies pick up Maurice and throw him out into the snow. And because we’re at the thirty minute mark, it’s time to take another break. I’ve got important things to do! And by important, I mean more obsessing over kids’ movies. Bye.
