tbh (because i am still thinking about this) my fave thing about the romance in beauty and the beast is that the beast recognizes belle as the first and last authority on how he should behave and what he should do
like these are the clothes you should wear, this is how you speak to me, this is how we dance together, this is how you can touch me
before she takes over he is basically a roiling mass of fur and hurt and anger— which is not to deny his own character, his own goodness and will in all of this, but the whole point is that belle turns him into a man
and she turns him into the kind of man she wants him to be
It’s amazing… Do you know that, for this scene, the animator had to go to museums to study early drawings and sculptures from Michelangelo or Rodin? He just felt the need to explore those artists, and you can feel in the drawings that inspiration.
Next, I’m copying an article I found on the internet that explains all about it. Keep reading. It’s VERY interesting!!!
Roundtable Interviewer: Another magical moment is the transformation of the Beast into a human being.
Glen Keane: It was the last scene that I had to do on the film, kind of the one that I’d been waiting for through the whole movie, to animate this transformation. Well, we finally got down to the end, and there was no time left. I had one week left to animate this whole wonderful sequence that I felt like I was born to do, but now there was no time. And Don Hahn came into my office, and I expressed to him my frustration.
I said, “Don, I can’t do this in one week.” And he could see, like, the panic in my eyes, and he said, “Glen, look, just take whatever time you need. I will push back the deadline in whatever way we can to give you the time to do this.”
So I took a sigh of relief and left work and drove down to the Norton Simon Museum, which is where this sculpture is, the Burghers of Calais, by Rodin. And as I walked around, I started doing drawings of these figures, and particularly it was the back, the way that he sculpted the form of the back. There was such power in that.
And you don’t know how you’re going to unlock a sequence, but to me, it was the back of the Beast that I wanted to see transformed, but to do it in space like I was walking around the sculpture there, doing these drawings of Rodin’s. And as I did that, I realized this is what I want to see happen. I want to rotate the Beast in the air. I want to see, like, the back changing, and it will move up and slowly see his arms and his hands and his feet, and finally his head. And that’s what inspired this sequence here.
To me, animation, I think of it as sculptural drawing. I shade all of my drawings. Animators say to me, “Why are you shading your drawings? No one’s going to see the shading.” It’s like, you could get that done so much quicker if you didn’t do the shading, but I would never do the drawing like this, so I didn’t do the shading. It’s all about light and form and space.
As the Beast turns, we see his head up in the shadow, come out of the shadow. Now I’ve staged it and set it up so that there’s something delicate can happen, and it was the wind. To me, the wind is like the spirit of God that does this transformation in our lives. I’d always related to the Beast very much like in my own life spiritually, a transformation, that my faith in God and feeling like there was a lot of things in my own life that I could look and say that I’ve matured from.
And so, this is this moment where this spirit, this wind starts to blow on the Beast’s face. I don’t know if how far we go with that, and that all goes by amazingly fast, ridiculously fast, and you look at it and you go, “So what’s the big deal about all this?” Well, it’s all – everything that happened before that – it’s all the setup that you spent an hour and a half building for this moment where you could really satisfy the audience’s thirst to see this transformation.
And it was – you were setting it up for actually when Belle looks into his eyes. That’s where you wanted to take the time. I mean, you could take, I don’t know, a half-hour on any one of these sequences and just watch that transformation, but we really wanted to play the time for Belle to be looking into his eyes.
Hellfire is, to put it simply, a masterpiece. We don’t even need to look at the main lyrics to get an understanding of the genius put into this work. Listen to the Latin Chanting as Frollo sings. It is a prayer Catholics recite during mass that is an admission of guilt… so we have Frollo singing how the current situation isn’t his fault, whilst our red hooded friends are chanting ‘mea culpa’ and ‘mea maxima culpa’ (through my fault, through my most grievous fault) - showing the dual natures of humankind, religion etc… it also shows us Frollo’s mental state, obviously a precarious one as he fights his inner demons. This song is also a parallel to Quasimodo’s earlier song Out There - both start begging for forgiveness, then grow into revealing the performers true feelings (Wanting to go to the festival and wanting Esmeralda respectively) which shows a similarity between the two which in turn shows that despite differences in appearance, status etc they are the same - which the film is showing. Regardless of appearance, if you are considered ‘normal’ or not, we are all the same. By having this technique, it also sets the stage for Frollo v Quasimodo in their views of Esmeralda, this is emphasized by having Heaven’s Light sung and leading into Hellfire, creating another paradox of human nature and how appearance can be misleading (Quasi thinks she is angelic, Frollo thinks she is a witch… both don’t fit and are extremely exaggerated viewpoints, once again fitting the theme of appearances being a mask worn and you shouldn’t be judged on that). On a totally separate note, another piece of genius from the music score of this film comes in the shape of ‘dies irae’ that plays whilst Frollo chases Quasimodo and Esmeralda. This translates as ‘Day of Wrath’ which is how the wicked shall be punished in eternal fire… this piece was also used whilst Frollo chased down Quasimodo’s mother. Both times he was using religion to justify his actions. Additionally, the inclusion of this results in Hellfire not just foreshadowing Esmeralda’s brush with death, but Frollo’s actual death.
He shall smite the wicked and plunge them into the fiery pit…
