What is Beauty and The Beast really about?
I want to start off by saying that this blog is not about absolutely demolishing Beauty and The Beast, it is a movie that even I watched as a kid. Though it was not my favorite when it came on the tv I didn’t turn the channel to something else. This instead, is about shedding light on certain messages that Disney doesn’t know they’re conveying, and in this movie it is all about how Belle is characterized in one way but then almost completely different towards the end of the movie.
Belle is a independent, headstrong, and stubborn women from a French village. She lives with her father and reads as she does chores around the town. The village people ridicule her as she refuses to marry or to stop reading the books she holds so dearly. In fact, Gaston, a man who has been trying to win her favor for what seems like a while proposes to her and she laughs in his face saying she would never marry him.
reallllyyyy, she falls in love with this man?
As the movie progresses we see Belle go to great lengths to save her father who had been captured by the Beast just for trying to grab a flower for Belle. She stands up to the Beast, trading places with her father and gets throw into a prison. The Beast essentially becomes her capturer, and makes sure she knows she is not going anywhere. Disney wants the story to be one of great love like all the rest of their movies but as the story unfolds it becomes more and more apparent that the way the Beast treats Belle she should never according to her character fall in love with him. In fact for more than half the movie Belle hates the Beast refusing to eat at dinners with him until he forces her, and doesn’t even speak to him for a lot of it.
This is how how Belle is portrayed and this is how children view her until she starts to fall in love with the Beast. Suddenly it seems like the Belle we’ve known throughout the movie transitions into someone different, a women that now that she is in love looses that part of herself because Disney needs the love story to be a certain way.
Belle herself will always be an icon for the way she stands up for herself and works against the societal pressures she faces for her time. I just wish Disney could have kept that fire alive even while she fell in love.
I love this blog! Growing up I never thought much about the disney movies I watched and I never once went back to think about them so I love reading these posts and hearing what Disney did wrong. I like how you present your ideas in the post by giving a plot summary and stopping to discuss issues in the story as it comes up through the plot.
You’ve made such a good point about the lack of character fidelity in Beauty and the Beast. It’s also interesting how she’s described as “Beauty”, as if that’s her main character trait, and not like “Genius” or something. I really do hate that almost all Disney princess movies are centered around romance and the protagonist has to be beautiful.
Although I have a very vague memory of Beauty and the Beast, I didn’t really catch on to how much hr personality changed throughout; I just figured she changed her mind about the beast. Your blog made me think about the change, and perhaps Belle was dealing with Stockholm syndrome by falling in love with her captor. You’re right in Disney should have kept her “fire” going.