MOVIES : Building a Magical ‘Beast’ : Once Disney decided to make an animated musical of ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ it was up to the artists to really make it sing

“The fairy tale of film--created with the magic of animation--is the modern equivalent of the great parables of the Middle Ages. Creation is the word. Not adaptation. Not version. We can translate the ancient fairy tale into its modern equivalent without losing the lovely patina and the savor of its once-upon-a-time quality. We have proved that the age-old kind of entertainment based on the classic fairy tale recognizes no young, no old.” --Walt Disney

An animated fairy tale about a determined young woman, singing songs by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken who finds happiness with a prince, despite her father’s initial objections. Sound familiar?

The artists at Walt Disney Studios realize that superficially, their “Beauty and the Beast,” which opens Friday at the El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles, bears more than a passing resemblance to “The Little Mermaid,” Disney’s record-breaking 1989 hit, which broke the “animation barrier” and attracted not only children, but large, general audiences on the way to earning a record-breaking $84 million at the domestic box office.

But Disney’s hopes for “Beauty and the Beast” surpass even the success of “The Little Mermaid.” “Beauty and the Beast” was presented as a work-in-progress at the New York Film Festival in September, where it received strong reviews, and was screened for Academy members last month in New York and Los Angeles, in hopes of making the picture the first animated feature to receive an Oscar nomination for best picture.

But when pre-production work began on the “Beauty and the Beast” four years ago, the Disney artists involved envisioned something very different from the upbeat musical they eventually created. The film was originally planned as an animated period piece: an elegant, straightforward version of the fairy tale set in pre-revolutionary France. The award-winning British commercial animators, Richard and Jill Purdom, were slated to direct it.

“What interests me about this story is that it really is a ‘tale as old as time,’ ” says producer Don Hahn. “Scholars trace it back to the legend of Cupid and Psyche: It’s the frog prince, it’s ‘The Phantom of the Opera,’ it’s the monkey son-in-law. It’s a story that exists in every culture, from Japan to the American Indians. It deals with concerns that are universal: transitions, journeys in life, a woman leaving her father and home to marry her big, hairy guy. The story exists in many forms, as each generation tells the tale in its own way.”

The success of “The Little Mermaid” caused the studio to take “Beauty” in another direction. “Jill and Dick are very talented artists, and they had in mind a serious, classical retelling of the story,” said Peter Schneider, Disney senior vice-president of feature animation. “We wrote the script and were very excited, but when we got about three minutes of it on story reels, it wasn’t as entertaining or as much fun as we wanted the film to be.

“ ‘Little Mermaid’ had just come out, and we realized that making it into a musical was the right approach. Dick and Jill didn’t feel comfortable going in that direction, so they bowed out gracefully. “

Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, two young studio artists, were put in charge of developing the story, and after three months as acting directors in charge of story development, were chosen to direct the film.

Menken and the late Ashman, who won Oscars for Best Song and Best Original Score for “Little Mermaid,” came aboard and contributed six original songs, ranging from the romantic ballads “Something There” and “Beauty and the Beast” to “Be Our Guest,” a show-stopping production number for a corps de ballet of animated crockery that producer Hahn describes as “Busby Berkeley, Esther Williams and Maurice Chevalier colliding in the kitchen.”

“Howard (Ashman) felt very passionately that the American musical theatre was sort of the spiritual ancestor of the animated feature--and that the animated feature had become last refuge of musical theatre,” says Wise. “It’s the only place where you can still get away with a character bursting into song. Howard helped us structure the story so that the songs support it and grow of it, rather than feeling tacked on.”

The musical format enabled the artists to alter and embellish the original fairy tale more freely. The traditionally passive, modest Beauty was transformed into an independent and resourceful young woman, Belle; her merchant father was turned into a befuddled old inventor. The Beast became the master of a truly enchanted castle, attended by a troupe of ordinarily inanimate objects, including a fussy mantle clock, a suave candelabra, a motherly teapot and a daffy wardrobe.

“Howard, who served as executive producer and lyricist for the film, insisted--and Linda Woolverton, who wrote the screenplay agreed--that our version should be Beast’s story,” says Hahn. “He’s the guy trapped in the monkey suit who has to redeem himself during the course of the movie. The meter’s ticking for him. Instead of having Belle be a passive heroine who just goes along for the ride, we have her bargain for her father’s life, which makes her a more active participant in the story. This Beauty helps redeem the Beast.”

Ultimately, the success of any animated feature rests on the ability of the artists to act through their drawings. The most beautiful colors and the flashiest special effects can’t redeem a film if the audience doesn’t believe in the characters.

A supervising animator on a feature is basically in charge of a specific character: He helps develop the final design and oversees the work of other artists drawing that character. In addition to animating many of the key scenes, the supervising animator has the responsibility of making sure his character moves and acts consistently throughout the film: The audience shouldn’t be able to tell if more than one artist worked on that character.

Animators, like actors, are “cast” for their abilities to handle certain kinds of characters, scenes and movements.

Since “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” the animation of the heroine has ranked among the most difficult tasks on a Disney feature. Marc Davis, one of the studio’s celebrated “Nine Old Men,” helped to bring to life such memorable characters as Snow White, Alice in “Alice in Wonderland,” Cinderella, and Briar Rose in “Sleeping Beauty.” He explains that although they’re not as much fun to animate as the comic figures, “The straight characters are the spine of the film. If the audience doesn’t believe in them, it doesn’t matter how funny the clowns are. But if the humans are believable, the clowns somehow become believable--and funnier.”

First, the animators decided how to establish Belle as a distinct character.

“We were absolutely aware that comparisons to ‘Little Mermaid’ would be inevitable, because we were working the same realm: A Disney fairy tale with a strong female lead,” says “Beauty and the Beast” co-director Wise. “We didn’t want Belle’s characterization to go in the same direction as Ariel’s. Ariel was definitely the All-American teen-ager, while we pictured Belle as a little older, a little bit wiser and a little more sophisticated. In addition, Belle is very protective of her father--unlike Ariel. Triton was a strict, overbearing father who was always in conflict with Ariel; Maurice is a sort of goofy dad . . . “

” . . . who’d walk into town in his pajamas if Belle didn’t keep an eye on him,” finishes co-director Trousdale. “Ariel is more naive and impulsive; Belle is smarter and a little more mature.”

James Baxter, a 24-year-old British artist who joined the studio during the production of “Roger Rabbit,” was chosen to head the eight-person group animating Belle because, according to Wise, “his work has this graceful effortlessness to it.”

“Animating a pretty character can be a problem, because she can become very ugly very quickly--all it takes is a few misplaced lines,” says Baxter. “We tried to give her a lot of ballerina movements: Her walk is very much a ballet dancer’s walk. But if you carry that style of movement too far and always keep her little finger extended, she gets prissy and overly feminine: She starts to look like a silent movie star and stops being believable.”

Adds Trousdale: “You can get away with more, animating an imaginary character like Ariel. Nobody really knows how a mermaid swims; they’ve got a little bit of an idea, but there are liberties you can take. Everybody knows how a pretty girl looks and walks.”

In her movements, Belle must appear not only pretty and graceful, but self-reliant and capable. Baxter describes her as “a go-getter who instigates the action--she doesn’t just sit back and let things happen to her.” Although she longs passionately for broader horizons than her small provincial town can offer, Belle is a practical young woman, able to cope with the heavy-handed advances of Gaston, the local Romeo, or the magical servants in the enchanted castle of the Beast.

The writers and directors agreed that the film would basically be Beast’s story, and put Glen Keane in charge of the character. Keane joined the studio during the production of “The Rescuers,” when he worked as an assistant to Ollie Johnston, another of the Nine Old Men. Since then, he’s created some of the studio’s most powerful animated sequences, including the bear fight in “The Fox and the Hound” and the soaring eagle in “The Rescuers Down Under.”

Traditionally, illustrators have depicted the Beast as either a lion or a bear. As there had never been a similar character in a Disney film, Keane says his first thought was that “anything would go” for the design. But some initial experiments with funny horns and ears proved unsuccessful; they made the character look like an alien, who didn’t fit into the realistic look of the picture.

During the pre-production work in England, Keane had to walk through the London Zoo every day on his way to the studio; he began sketching the animals there for inspiration.

“After seeing the way the wolves in the zoo walked and moved, I immediately wanted Beast to be comfortable on all fours, which was a big statement,” he explains. “This guy is not just a man with a beast’s head on: He is actually, physically, bone structure-wise, an animal. I wanted him to be so believable and realistic that I could explain his physical anatomy to each of the animators.”

Keane’s initial designs were based on Boris, a large mandrill in the London Zoo. But when he went back to work on the film in California, he discarded that design as too literal, and began drawing at the Los Angeles Zoo. A large male gorilla gave Keane a sense of the intimidating presence Beast should command. He found further inspiration at a display of stuffed animals.

“I saw a buffalo head in a taxidermist’s shop near the studio and realized there’s a sadness and a weight to the way a buffalo hangs his head that I thought Beast should have,” he continues. “Don Hahn bought that buffalo head, and I kept it on my wall as a constant reminder to me that we weren’t just drawing a cartoon character, that this was a real beast. I took the beard of the buffalo as well as the massive head, the mane of a lion, a bear-like body, the brow of a gorilla--the massive strength of that brow with the eyes hidden beneath it--the tusks of a boar, and the tail and hind legs of a wolf. That’s pretty much his genesis.”

In Jean Cocteau’s critically acclaimed film of the fairy tale, Jean Marais portrayed the Beast as the aristocratic lord of a dreamily surreal castle; in the recent television series, Ron Perlman played an empathetic guardian angel who suggested Kahlil Gibran in a cat suit. The Disney Beast is a creature of almost operatic grandeur, capable of towering rages that dissipate like thunderstorms, leaving him burdened by profound melancholy. Yet he can also express a touchingly awkward shyness when he tries to please Belle by feeding a tiny bird from his monstrous paw.

Animators generally try to simplify the emotions within a scene in the interests of clarity. Very few animated characters have had to express the complex, often conflicting emotions Beast experiences. Keane and his crew rose to the challenge and created some of the subtlest and most dramatic animation the studio has produced in the last 25 years.

“I don’t think we’ve ever done a hero as complex as Beast,” says Keane. “In a Disney picture, the hero usually has to battle the villain, and it’s an outside battle--he has to overcome the witch or the dragon or somebody. With Beast, the enemy is his own beastly nature and he has to learn to control it: The real battle is within himself.”

Animating that inner process proved to be a major challenge, especially in the crucial sequence when Beast allows Belle to leave him and return to her ailing father.

“It was frustrating, because I wanted to animate the incredible turmoil that was going on inside the character, and there was no action,” says Keane. “All I could do was press harder on the pencil. It was one of those times when you want to crawl in there and be that character, but the only way you can express those intense emotions is by subtly tilting an eyebrow or changing the shape of the corners of the mouth. It’s very delicate work--completely the opposite of what you’re feeling inside.”

For the final sequence when Beast is transformed into the Prince, Keane studied the sculptures of Michelangelo and Rodin for inspiration. He also looked to more mundane sources for details, with inadvertently comic repercussions.

“I made reams of sketches, trying to find the best way of showing a beast’s foot transforming into a human foot,” recalls Keane. “I studied the back paws of my family’s basset hound--it was the first time I’d really looked at the way a dog’s toes are shaped. I thought it was fascinating, but she lay on her back yelping.

“One day at work, I was busy trying to draw my own feet,” he continues with a chuckle. “I had my shoes and socks off and a mirror on the floor, and I was holding up my foot as I was sketching it. There was a knock at my door, and Roy Disney (vice-chairman of the Walt Disney Co.) and Jeffrey Katzenberg (chairman of Walt Disney Studios) walked in. Roy looked at me and said, ‘Boy, I wish I was in animation--to be able to dress like that at work would be great.’ ”

Animating a handsome young man can be an even more difficult and thankless task than animating the pretty heroine: Who remembers the wooden Princess in “Snow White” and “Cinderella?”

Andreas Deja, who drew Triton in “Little Mermaid” and Mickey Mouse in “The Prince and the Pauper,” had originally planned to animate Belle. Because he’s one of the studio’s most accomplished draftsmen, Trousdale and Wise persuaded him to switch duties and tackle the handsome, vain Gaston.

“I don’t think any of the handsome males in the earlier Disney films have been handled as very good actors,” says Deja. “Some of them were nicely drawn, but most of them were pretty stiff-looking--they never really did much acting. The chance to try and do something with that kind of character that really hadn’t been done before was too good to pass up.

“The interesting thing about Gaston is that you don’t realize he’s the villain when you see him. When Captain Hook or Shere Khan (the tiger in “The Jungle Book”) come on the screen, you know they’re bad guys--they’re designed to look that way. Gaston’s design is just the opposite. Because he’s handsome, you think he’s the good guy: It’s only as the story progresses that you realize what a jerk he is, so there’s an arc to the character.”

Deja and his fellow artists had to deal with many of the same problems Baxter and his crew faced. Gaston, who is beautiful on the outside and ugly within, represents the mirror-image of Beast, who develops a gentle heart beneath his ugly exterior. It was essential that Gaston appear attractive, even when behaving outrageously.

“The decision to make Gaston so handsome made the whole assignment a lot more difficult,” concedes Deja. “We had to find expressions that were very rich when he was scheming or being sarcastic--when he had a definite thought process going through his mind. He had to look like an animated character, not a moving photograph, so I told the animators who were working with me, ‘If you worry about making him look just right in every drawing, you’ll be inhibited and it’ll keep you from doing fluid animation. Work as rough as you want and get the animation to bring across the personality and the story points. When the animation works, we’ll worry about the fine points of the individual drawings, like the size of the nose and the eyes.’ ”

Rendering Gaston’s physical beauty proved difficult, but Deja discovered that there was no shortage of models for his character’s egotistical personality.

“When you begin working with a character, you don’t quite know what he’s all about and you have to find the hook, the thing that drives him,” Deja said. “For Gaston, the answer is that he’s completely in love with himself: He talks about how beautiful he is without even knowing he’s offending people. Then I realized there are guys like this all around.

“You see them in restaurants, you see them in clubs--I can’t imagine a richer place than Los Angeles to research a character like Gaston.”

In addition to ordinary difficulties involved in producing an animated feature on an extremely tight schedule, Trousdale and Wise had to cope with the additional problems of having part of their staff more than 3,000 miles away in Orlando, Fla. Disney maintains a second animation facility there as part of the Disney/MGM Studio Tour.

The artists and executives at Disney are reluctant to talk about the studio’s use of computer technology: They’re afraid people will assume the studio has started using machines to make the movies. (The animators still grumble about the review of “The Rescuers Down Under” that praised the eagle Keane had animated by hand as an example of state-of-the-art computer graphics.)

But computers have helped restore much of the opulent look of the ‘40s Disney features to “Beauty.” It’s no longer economically feasible to have ink-and-paint artists add such details as colored lines and the rouge on Belle’s cheeks by hand, but these effects can easily be achieved electronically.

Tone mattes similar to the ones used to create shadows on the characters in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” give the inhabitants of the film a three-dimensional believability otherwise impossible to achieve. One animator remarked that the shading on the characters in “Beauty” was so sophisticated, it made “Little Mermaid” “look like it was done using poster paints.” The computer graphics system also enables the directors to simulate camera movements through complex environments, including the marble ballroom where Belle waltzes with Beast to the title song.

Although post-production work only recently ended on “Beauty and the Beast,” the animators completed their assignments late this summer. After finishing his work with Belle, Baxter got married and is taking a year off. Deja and Keane are already at work on “Aladdin,” Disney’s next feature, scheduled for release in fall, 1992. A broader, more cartoon-like treatment of the old fable, “Aladdin” contains the last songs Ashman wrote before his death.

Keane is animating the title character, although the buffalo head still hangs in his room. Deja is working on a new villain, the evil vizier Jafar, whom he describes as “a straightforwardly evil, almost slimy character. He’s very interesting graphically--and not nearly as difficult to draw as Gaston.”

When the inevitable questions arise about how “Beauty and the Beast” compares with the studio’s earlier features that remain the standard of excellence in animation, Roy Disney replies thoughtfully:

“It’s terribly hard to put your finger on that sort of thing--which film rates a 9 and which film gets an 8. It certainly ranks at the top of what we’ve done in the last six or seven years. People compared ‘Little Mermaid’ to ‘Cinderella’; I would say ‘Beauty’ is as good as ‘Mermaid’ or ‘Cinderella’ and in many ways better than ‘Sleeping Beauty.’ ”

“I gave the introduction when the film screened at the New York Film Festival, and the experience there was almost weird,” he continues. “There was a laugh every place there ought to be a laugh, applause every place there ought to be applause and a standing ovation at the end. Boy, I hope every audience has the same reaction!”

His mixture of enthusiasm and guarded optimism recalls his uncle Walt Disney’s statement that the reason he enjoyed animation was “the knowledge that there’s always something new and exciting just around the corner--and the uncertainty of everything else.”