I Like Monday 21
This Monday, I like... Disney's Beauty and the Beast:
Image taken from College Fashion. Copyright of the Walt Disney Company.
Beauty and the Beast was not a fairy tale I knew in my childhood. I remember vaguely hearing of it - I knew it involved roses somehow - but I don't think I actually read a version until my mid-to-late twenties. So the 1991 Disney classic was my first real exposure to this tale.
I first became aware of it during the televised opening ceremony of what was then Euro Disney, and is now Disneyland Paris. Angela Lansbury stood in front of the Sleeping Beauty castle and sang "Tale As Old As Time", intercut with the ballroom scene from the movie. I was amazed: the Disney princess was a brunette, not the standard-issue blonde! She wore glorious, sunflower yellow, not the expected girly pink! I was sold.
I didn't actually see the movie until my mid-teens. It didn't disappoint. It is funny, exciting, beautiful-looking. The pretty-boy Gaston as the villain chimed with my scorn for the manufactured boyband hunks and big-chinned American heartthrobs with which my peers seemed to be obsessed. The songs are wonderful. And maybe I'm biased by the fact that this movie was the first version of the story that I knew, but I also find the plot a lot stronger than in the original fairy tale. Making Beast a harsh, hot-tempered monster who has to learn how to be "human" makes more sense to me than the perfectly-genteel Beast of the version by Jeanne-Marie Beaumont (the most commonly retold one), or even the sex-obsessed-and-slow-but-otherwise-well-mannered Beast of the even earlier version by Madame Villeneuve.
Then there's the heroine. I identified so hard with Belle as a teen. A brown-haired bookworm, an outsider among her peers, whose interests don't chime with those of the 'normal' girls, a loner growing up on the outskirts of a small country town, a daydreamer who longs for real life to be like the stories she buries herself in - apart from being French and, you know, a fictitious animated character, Belle and I could have been twins. To see her get her "adventure in the great wide somewhere" was very satisfying.
People criticise Disney for their happy endings as inspiring unrealistic expectations or enforcing traditional gender roles blah blah blah. But the relationship between these two oddballs - the grouchy and socially awkward Beast, the lonely dreamer Belle - is wish-fulfillment at its best. I don't expect that the Beast-Prince has entirely lost that temper of his, or that Belle will be a conventional sit-on-the-throne-and-look-pretty queen. And honestly, what's wrong with a happy ending? People do get happy in real life too, you know, it's not always unending misery and unsatisfactory compromises!
Image taken from College Fashion. Copyright of the Walt Disney Company.
Beauty and the Beast was not a fairy tale I knew in my childhood. I remember vaguely hearing of it - I knew it involved roses somehow - but I don't think I actually read a version until my mid-to-late twenties. So the 1991 Disney classic was my first real exposure to this tale.
I first became aware of it during the televised opening ceremony of what was then Euro Disney, and is now Disneyland Paris. Angela Lansbury stood in front of the Sleeping Beauty castle and sang "Tale As Old As Time", intercut with the ballroom scene from the movie. I was amazed: the Disney princess was a brunette, not the standard-issue blonde! She wore glorious, sunflower yellow, not the expected girly pink! I was sold.
I didn't actually see the movie until my mid-teens. It didn't disappoint. It is funny, exciting, beautiful-looking. The pretty-boy Gaston as the villain chimed with my scorn for the manufactured boyband hunks and big-chinned American heartthrobs with which my peers seemed to be obsessed. The songs are wonderful. And maybe I'm biased by the fact that this movie was the first version of the story that I knew, but I also find the plot a lot stronger than in the original fairy tale. Making Beast a harsh, hot-tempered monster who has to learn how to be "human" makes more sense to me than the perfectly-genteel Beast of the version by Jeanne-Marie Beaumont (the most commonly retold one), or even the sex-obsessed-and-slow-but-otherwise-well-mannered Beast of the even earlier version by Madame Villeneuve.
Then there's the heroine. I identified so hard with Belle as a teen. A brown-haired bookworm, an outsider among her peers, whose interests don't chime with those of the 'normal' girls, a loner growing up on the outskirts of a small country town, a daydreamer who longs for real life to be like the stories she buries herself in - apart from being French and, you know, a fictitious animated character, Belle and I could have been twins. To see her get her "adventure in the great wide somewhere" was very satisfying.
People criticise Disney for their happy endings as inspiring unrealistic expectations or enforcing traditional gender roles blah blah blah. But the relationship between these two oddballs - the grouchy and socially awkward Beast, the lonely dreamer Belle - is wish-fulfillment at its best. I don't expect that the Beast-Prince has entirely lost that temper of his, or that Belle will be a conventional sit-on-the-throne-and-look-pretty queen. And honestly, what's wrong with a happy ending? People do get happy in real life too, you know, it's not always unending misery and unsatisfactory compromises!