MOVIES : FILM COMMENT : Disney’s ‘Beauty’ Revives Classic Flair in Story, Style

Disney’s animated musical “Beauty and the Beast” is one of the few holiday releases to achieve both critical and box-office success. At more than $63 million, it is currently the second-highest-grossing movie of the season, and it received four Golden Globe nominations, including best picture (musical or comedy). The Los Angeles Film Critics’ Assn. voted it best animated film of 1991.

But the question that’s invariably asked about any animated feature is how it compares with the Disney classics. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, the so-called Big Five (“Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” “Pinocchio,” “Fantasia,” “Dumbo” and “Bambi”) set a standard of excellence that’s been used as a yardstick for subsequent animated films. During the past 15 years, press agents have proclaimed that various films would restore “the classic look of ‘Pinocchio,’ ” but critics, artists and audiences all agreed that none of them really matched the classics.

An animated feature is a communal work of art, and some aspects invariably work better than others. A well-animated sequence can electrify an otherwise ordinary film: The bear fight eclipses everything else in the stolid “The Fox and the Hound” (1981). Bad animation can undermine good writing and lively vocal performances, as Martin Rosen’s maladroit “Watership Down” (1978) demonstrated, but even the most polished animation can’t save a bad story. Although the characters of King John and Sir Hiss are handled with unusual subtlety in Disney’s “Robin Hood” (1973), the story is so ineptly told that the viewer doesn’t really care what happens to the sulky lion and his sibilant sidekick.

The general excellence of “Beauty and the Beast” indicates that the young Disney artists are beginning to challenge the work of their predecessors. They haven’t yet achieved the uniform visual richness of “Pinocchio” or mastered the creation of a heroine as appealing as Snow White, but there is much to celebrate.

The enchanted objects who function as the Beast’s servants continue the Disney tradition of animating the ordinarily inanimate, from the dancing diaper pins in the Silly Symphony “Lullabye Land” to Merlin’s recalcitrant sugar bowl in “The Sword in the Stone” (1963). Cogsworth, the prissy clock / butler (David Ogden Stiers) in “Beauty and the Beast,” oozes self-importance as he fusses, while the suave Lumiere (Jerry Orbach) moves with the practiced grace of a man (or candlestick) of the world. An even greater challenge to animate is Mrs. Potts, the teapot/housekeeper (Angela Lansbury): She’s little more than a disembodied head, but the artists manage to communicate her thoughts and feelings.

Like Gus and Jaq, the mice who assist Cinderella, the endearing trio of clock, candlestick and teapot enables the directors to comment on the action without giving the main characters dull, pointed speeches.

Probably the most underappreciated character in the film is Philippe, the draft horse who carries both Belle (Paige O’Hara) her father, Maurice (Rex Everhart), to the Beast’s castle. He moves with the ponderous weight and gait of a Clydesdale. Rendering this kind of realism has always been a frustrating assignment for an animator: If the character is done right, he’s taken for granted--he’s just a horse. But if he doesn’t move properly, the audience notices and he ceases to be believable. Philippe joins the stable of solidly animated and overlooked Disney horses that includes Cyril in “The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad,” Major in “Cinderella” and Samson in “Sleeping Beauty.”

If the supporting characters draw on well-established studio antecedents, the three main characters all represent varying degrees of innovation:.

Beast (Robby Benson) is the studio’s most extraordinary creation since Walt’s death. His anatomically complex design is extremely difficult to draw, yet the animators make him move with believable strength and weight. Few animated characters have had to express such a complex range of emotions: He smashes furniture in a thunderous rage but timidly tries to conceal his monstrous bulk when he woos Belle by feeding a tiny bird. Beast’s expressions and body language mirror his anguish when he frees Belle, as he conquers by conquering himself in a tour de force of character animation that can stand alongside the studio’s best work.

Physical beauty has traditionally been equated with virtue in animated films, and making Gaston (Richard White), Belle’s would-be suitor, both handsome and villainous marks a real break with the past. His only “ancestor” is Brom Bones, the burly lout who terrorizes Ichabod Crane with tales of the Headless Horseman in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Gaston steals virtually every scene he’s in with his swaggering arrogance, but his relationship with his fawning sidekick, Le Fou is too one-note; the audience looks in vain for the kind of nuanced interplay that delineates the characters of Captain Hook and Mr. Smee in “Peter Pan” or Dishonest John and Gideon in “Pinocchio.”

“What a puzzle to the rest of us is Belle,” sings the chorus in the opening song, and the heroine is the most problematic of the main characters. Although she’s more independent, mature and self-reliant than previous Disney heroines, Belle looks a bit too much like Ariel in “The Little Mermaid,” with the same overly large eyes and thin arms. She lacks the accurately observed anatomy and assured animation that make Cinderella or Briar Rose in “Sleeping Beauty” so appealing.

Her animated performance is the most uneven, and there sometimes seem to be three or four different versions of her. The prettiest and most vivid Belle waltzes with Beast in his enchanted ballroom and weeps over his body before he’s transformed into the Prince. The Belle who talks to her father in his workshop near the beginning of the film has wider eyes, a more prominent mouth and a more stolid demeanor than the fragile-looking Belle who sings “Something There” as she falls in love with her shaggy host. She’s not the first inconsistent Disney character: One old animator remembers that after Walt screened “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” he remarked, “I didn’t realize there were going to be so many Ichabods in the picture.”

There’s a noticeable gap in quality between the major and minor characters in “Beauty,” a problem that’s been evident in the Disney films since the new crew began to assert their artistic identity in “The Great Mouse Detective” (1986). The minor figures, including the little, round-nosed village people who sing about Belle in the opening production number, aren’t very interesting in design or execution. Cogsworth, Lumiere and Mrs. Potts are much more entertaining as objects--the flattened appearance and often uninspired movements of their human forms don’t fit into the polished, three-dimensional world of Belle, Gaston and Beast, and the viewer longs to re-enchant them.

In “Sleeping Beauty,” all the background figures (including some who don’t even move) are as intricately detailed as the lead characters, to create a unified vision of a fairy-tale world. For sheer visual richness, no film has ever matched “Pinocchio,” in which everyone and everything, from the title puppet to the clocks in Geppetto’s shop and the fish Jiminy Cricket encounters under the sea, are designed and animated with the same exquisite care.

“Beauty and the Beast” is clearly the best animated feature to be produced by Disney--or anyone else--in decades, and its overall excellence seems doubly impressive when the viewer recalls the artists only had about a year to do the animation. It took a more experienced crew five years to make “Sleeping Beauty.”

The late Grim Natwick, who animated the heroine in “Snow White,” had six months to do experimental animation of the character before he was expected to do any footage that appeared in the film. Walt Disney scrapped the first six months of production on both “Snow White” and “Pinocchio” because it wasn’t up to the standard he wanted to set. “In those days, the only standard at the Disney studio was whatever you did had to be better than what anyone could do anywhere else, even if it meant animating a scene 12 times--which I did once,” Natwick once recalled in an interview.

In his pursuit of excellence, Walt Disney gambled everything on the success of a film more than once. He sold his car and cut his own salary to complete “Steamboat Willie.” He put every cent he had (and could borrow from the Bank of America) into “Snow White,” and staked his studio on “Cinderella.” Had any of those films failed, it probably would have meant the end of his career. Today, animators have to meet rigid deadlines that don’t allow for extensive experimentation or reworking.

But the great Disney features were always more than showcases for high-quality animation: They were comparable as films to the best work done at the Hollywood live action studios. A contemporary critic noted that “ ‘Dumbo’ has more camera angles than ‘Citizen Kane’ ”; the swooping, computer-assisted pan through a glittering chandelier as Beast and Belle waltz to the title song elicits admiring gasps from audiences as did Scorsese’s celebrated tracking shot in “GoodFellas.”

“Beauty and the Beast” boasts writing, direction, editing and cinematography as sophisticated as any major studio release. Directors Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise use all the tools and tricks available to conventional filmmakers (and a few that aren’t) to present their story in a way that appeals to both children and adults.

Fifty years after their initial releases, “Snow White,” “Pinocchio,” “Fantasia,” “Dumbo” and “Bambi” are entertaining a third generation of viewers. Audiences will be enjoying “Beauty and the Beast” decades from now, when most of the year’s live-action features will have been consigned to the back shelf of the video store.