#Beauty And the Beast

[theshadowsofevil]

I’m really glad they changed it because it really does make a lot of sense to have “be our guest” to be sung to Belle instead of Maurice and I can see where a lot of people are coming from where comes to those changes.

"Be Our Guest" original draft storyboards vs final film (💖)

The song was originally written by Ashman and Menken to be sung by the enchanted objects to Maurice instead of Belle. However, story artist Bruce Woodside felt that the song would make more sense if it was sung to Belle, the main character, as opposed to secondary character Maurice, and directors Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale agreed.

[lokihiddleston]

“Dieu de la forêt, laissez-moi retourner auprès de lui. God of the forest. Let me go back to him. C’est mon seul souhait, mon seul désir. It is my only wish. My only desire.” ─ LA BELLE ET LA BÊTE (2014)

[ninetiesfairydust]

“Oh, I just love happy endings…”

[didanagy]

LA BELLE ET LA BÊTE (2014)

dir. christophe gans

[frozenwolftemplar]

🤣🤣🤣

[perpetualtoysruskid]

[imhereformysciencefriends]

Gaston is honestly the easiest Disney villain to do a Wicked-style perspective retelling of, imho. Like,

You are stupid, and you are arrogant, but your arrogance is not necessarily ill-earned. Your town might be a pretty damn small pond, but you are undoubtedly the biggest fish in it. You excel at all the masculine pastimes you pursue, you are well renowned amongst your peers, and you have multiple examples of women fawning over you.

You are attracted to the most beautiful woman in town. Of course you are. You are a simple man of simple wants, and although she is weird and bookish, she is uncontestedly the most beautiful fish in your small, small pond.

So you attempt to woo her. You flatter her with compliments that would be well received by any woman in your town that was not weird and bookish. But she is, so she does not enjoy your compliments. You spin a tale of a future that all your contemporaries would consider simple and idyllic, well regarded amongst the values of your time period. But she is a strange and funny girl, that Belle, so she does not want what you have been raised to believe that all people would want for their futures. When she rejects you, your feelings, ego, and the bottom of your chin are all bruised. 

So you have a sulk in the tavern about it. Softer souls than yours have nursed a broken heart over some ale and a game of darts, and your companions, your peers, your friends, all remind you of how highly they regard you, of how you have a whole community of people who know you, love you, admire you, and while the most beautiful girl in town may have rejected you, there are still plenty of women who are quite beautiful in their own right who do share your values and aspirations for the future. You are roused by their affection, and your spirits are once again high.

A while later, the father of the woman who rejected you bursts into the tavern, clearly unwell. He’s babbling, out of breath and talking fast, spinning wild tales of cursed castles, demonic furniture that moves on its own, and a terrible, lumbering beast that took him prisoner and, as the cost for his release, now holds his daughter imprisoned.

So you get in contact with the best option for medical treatment of your era. Your era will not be remembered kindly for its treatment of mentally unwell patients, but that will be then, and this is now, and so you arrange the best medical care that you have access to for him, and then organize a rescue mission. She broke your heart, but she is still a member of your community, reclusive and strange as she is, and as a member of your community it is naturally the responsibility of you and the townsfolk to go save her. Whether or not the beast is real, her father’s fear for her safety certainly is, and the fact that she did not come home with him is evidence enough.

But then she’s there! And she is also raving, she pulls a mirror from her bag to show you that the beast is actually a good person, but what she shows you is no simple man. There really is a beast. It is horrible, groaning, roaring, with giant fangs, horns protruding from its fur, muscles on its torso well beyond what even you, with a lifetime of dedication, have built and what’s worst of all—its eyes. There is something intelligent in those eyes. Something that scares you.

Clearly, entering that castle drives folks mad, because the next thing she tells you is that this beast, this thing, is not only a good man, but a man she has fallen in love with. You are not a smart man. You do not even know where to begin with that. But you do know hunting. You do know your townsfolk. And you do know that that beast cannot be left alone to continue capturing and terrorizing members of your community. Two good people have already been driven mad by whatever conspires inside its haunted home, and that is two too many. You rally your people. You have a beast to hunt. 

Like, we dislike Gaston because he’s an asshole, but you can very easily make and follow a logic trail for him that paints him as mostly-average and entirely reasonable. 

[imagitory]

Not to call anyone out because everyone's entitled to their opinion and I don't want anyone getting attacked for theirs...but I saw a pro-Calypso post on an Epic the Musical community I can't reply to that kind of sent me spiraling that asked why Beast from Beauty and the Beast gets so much less hate than Calypso does when they "did the same thing."

Now I don't know if we're talking Disney's animated classic Beauty and the Beast specifically or the OG fairy tale or whatever, but um...have we forgotten the fact that Belle chose to stay with the Beast? And that Odysseus, in contrast, had no choice in whether to end up on or stay on Calypso's island? On the contrary -- Ody not only actively wants off, but he is so unhappy at the thought he'll never get home that he tries to unalive himself at one point. Then of course if we're talking Disney's Beauty and the Beast in particular, we can point out that Belle stays because she gave her word, not because she was physically unable to leave, and she leaves the castle out of fear for her own safety after going into the West Wing and enraging the Beast ("promise or no promise"), only to take the Beast back because he saves her life and is badly hurt in the process. Then the two nurture a real friendship -- something Odysseus and Calypso never did, in all their time together -- before Beast willingly lets Belle go with no expectation that she'd return, let alone break the spell on him and the castle servants. In contrast, in Not Sorry For Loving You, Calypso doubles down on how she treated Odysseus and turns everything into a pity-party for herself. She acts like she's sorry about how she treated him, but frames her disregard for his boundaries and freedom as her "coming on too strong" without ever acknowledging that she legitimately ignored Ody's feelings and wishes at the expense of her own. She uses the abusive-partner playbook to the nth degree, attempting to invalidate any hate Odysseus might legitimately feel toward her for what she did by passive-aggressively acting like it's his fault that he didn't accept her "love" for what it was ("and if you hate me, then I'm sorry my love's too much for you"). She even gets upset about why he "won't love her too" even though she knows full well he's a married man still very in love with his wife Penelope, who Calypso has been purposefully separating him from for years. Oh yeah, and on that note, Odysseus is already romantically committed to someone else, so Calypso has even less reason to presume Ody should return her feelings. Even Beast, who is in love with a single person and also has a ticking clock over him to fall in love quickly to break the curse on him and all of his servants, loves Belle sincerely enough that he didn't get angry or resentful at the thought that she might not love him back. He doesn't try to guilt-trip her into loving him. Even though in the original Beauty and the Beast fairy tale, there are a lot more toxic elements -- such as the Beast claiming he'll die if Belle doesn't return to him -- that doesn't change the fact that Belle has some agency in her situation, with the Beast connecting emotionally with this single woman over time in a way that she comes to see him as a dear friend despite his hideous appearance. And of course just about all adaptations of the story heavily lean away from or outright subvert the original's more problematic elements because they're rightly seen as toxic.

Look -- I don't see any problem with anyone feeling pity for Calypso. With her lonely backstory and lack of knowledge of how to interact with others, it's easy to. I could even see people arguing she cared for Odysseus in her own weird way. But that doesn't change how much she disrespected Odysseus's agency and used her goddess-y powers to keep him just as trapped on her island as she was, at the expense of his and his family's happiness. I personally view Calypso as a very well-developed anti-villain for this reason -- she can claim she loved Odysseus...but if she did, she didn't know what love really is, because love at its core is about selflessness, and Calypso at her core is incredibly selfish.

[stingrayextraordinaire]

Thank you so much for the tag, @valiantarcher! I'm posting a gif from each of my top 10 movies without saying what they are and then tagging 10 people.

I’m tagging @moonlightandstarshimmer, @daisyejones, @effulgentpoet, @amiablesummer, @cozy-possum, @ladyrock18, and anyone else who would like to participate! :)

[loudeaglecollective]

MEGA FANARTS!!! 💪💪💪💪 I'll pass them digitally to paint it! :)

[vgjustice]

Yeah, guess he's back in costume

[rapurplel]

One of my childhood favorite game ♥

[technovillain]

i come from the universe where everything is the same except disney heroines get like an ounce of their fathers' obviously dominant genes and their clothes are like 80% more historically accurate. it's beautiful here.

[2] [3]

[mostly-funnytwittertweets]

[jennyyyeeettt]

Some one tell Lumière his friend is here!!

The clock strikes off the hollow half-hours of all the life that is left to you, one by one.

-- Emily Brontë