Seeing Through Things
So I went and saw the 3D re-release of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast earlier this week. Mostly it was for the nostalgic novelty of it; the film was the first one I had ever seen at a theatre, at age 5 (I was told that I was initially too terrified to go in the big, dark room full of loud noises at first), and it would be amusing to see the film again, twenty years on. I didn’t expect the experience to be much different from when I watched the film ad-nausem during my childhood (I think I was 12 the last time I saw it), but a few new things emerged from this new viewing.
To begin with, the movie is a bit more insubstantial than I remembered it. It’s a simpler story than I remembered it being when I was a kid, maybe because children can’t tell the difference between a simple story and a complex one as easily as adults can, but it was still a revelation I didn’t see coming. I’m not sure why I suddenly noticed this; maybe it’s because the pacing felt more brisk now than it did then (or maybe it’s because, since I can practically recite the film line for line, my brain kept jumping ahead). Movies have been getting longer than they were twenty years ago, and they feel the need to have more complicated plots. Take, for instance, a more contemporary Disney film, Tangled.
They still have a long way to go.
Sure, it was a Dreamworks film in denial, but the plot had meat. If you’re not familiar with it, this witch named Lady Gothel kidnaps Rapunzel there because her long hair has the power of eternal youth. She keeps Rapunzel in her big tower and has convinced her that she’s her mother and that she’s kept in the tower so that bad people don’t exploit her magic hair, but she’s curious about this event that occurs every year on her birthday where somewhere off in the distance, thousands of flying lanterns are released into the sky. Lady Gothel probably could have easily taken care of this by telling Rapunzel that she was born on a different day, and those lanterns are for an unrelated event, but whatever.
The story mostly concerns her escaping from her tower and going off into the world and seeing it’s not as bad and dangerous as her “mother” claimed. The movie’s a lot more fun if you think that Rapunzel has deep behavioural problems; she’s lived in a tower for her whole life and passes the time by singing, dancing, and painting. She’s so incredibly naïve, she doesn’t even wear shoes at any point in the movie. She reacts to almost every problem she faces in the world by singing at it.
- Good thing they happened to stumble upon a tavern where everyone has the same musical psychosis.
Anyway, after they have a few adventures and Rapunzel gets to go to the lantern ceremony, Lady Gothel catches her and puts her back in the tower, not unreasonably assuming that she’s too much of a flake to see much of a problem with this. This leads, though to my favourite scene in the whole movie. Possible spoilers ahead:
Rapunzel had encoded a repeating symbol from latent memories in her paintings, and when she sees them, she has a sudden flashback about her real parents, which is so startling it literally knocks her over. She does not react to this sudden epiphany by singing about it, as one might expect, but by confronting this insane kidnapper who’s been pretending to be her mother, in a case of reverse Stockholm syndrome:
Though to be perfectly frank, "Did I mumble?" is not the best badass one-liner they could have come up with.
This made her emerge to me quite suddenly as a character, to show that kind of spontaneous courage that didn’t feel so much like it came out of nowhere, but that it was held down, and finally had a way to burst out, even to Rapunzel’s own shock.
Though it was dramatic and startling, it was also quite overt. Beauty and the Beast, and probably most animated films at that time, didn’t have quite such explosive moments, which is probably why the movie felt more insubstantial by comparison. The story and characterization was much more basic, more whimsical; Belle accepts the whole “enchanted castle” thing pretty quickly, between having girl talk with her wardrobe, and smiling and waving her arms during the “Be Our Guest” number. It must be the way fairy tale characters work; they must not take their fanciful situation too seriously, or else their walk in life is going to be a lot harder. Or maybe it’s a French thing.
Not to say Beauty and the Beast is a lesser film because of this; far from it. This kind of plot pacing and characterization make the film more timeless, it was more about the emotion between the characters than just hurling them on a bunch of adventures, and it easily makes for a stronger story. This is something that Disney really should relearn in a big hurry (they’ve had a problem with quickly dated films before; remember 1988′s Oliver & Company?)
In fact, another new thing I saw in the film upon this new viewing, something that I hadn’t noticed when seeing it repeatedly during my childhood, gave me a similar epiphany that Rapunzel had. It was a small detail with the Beast’s character design that really jumped out at me when I saw it again:
This detail may be hard to notice at first, especially because the entire point of his character is that he’s initially terrifying and intimidating, and people want to flee from him. It also may be hard to keep in mind, since we in the audience know already, that the characters in the movie have no reason to assume that the Beast was ever human before; they come across him in the forest, didn’t know anything about him, and it’s just natural to assume he was always like this.
Belle assumes this too, until she sees something:
This shredded portrait in the forbidden west wing is unrecognizable, except for the eyes. Belle looks closely at them, and they plant a curious idea in her mind… one that’s interrupted by the Beast storming in and driving her out into the woods, where this happens:
You may notice a difference between these two creatures. They’re both animalistic in appearance, but the one on the left attacked Belle out of opportunity; she was helpless in the woods, and probably delicious. The “animal” on the right came to her rescue, for no other reason than it was the right thing to do. But how could you tell that just by looking at this still frame?
This is right around the point of the movie where Belle and the Beast start to come around about each other, and start to forge their relationship. Belle might not have entertained the idea at first, but she’s seen something in the Beast that suggests there’s more to him than what’s initially obvious.
“The eyes are the windows to the soul” is not something I was familiar with as a kid, but now that I’m older and wiser, it’s a sudden, vital detail about the Beast’s character that really helps show what he’s about. Belle recognized the eyes from the portraits as the Beast’s eyes, which suggested to her that he may not have always been a monster. Even with the enchantress’ punishment, her transformation wasn’t total: the Beast’s soul was spared.
Even at the end when he turns back, Belle has a hard time accepting it; she loved the Beast, who’s this weird guy that’s suddenly standing in his place? But she sees its him when she sees those same blue eyes; the same ones he had as a selfish prince, as a loathsome monster, and now as a noble prince. One must wonder, if the movie didn’t work out and she didn’t fall in love with him (and he didn’t get stabbed to death), would the Beast’s eyes have turned yellow or red or some other more animalistic colour, to see he was beyond help?
These are the things I see in movies and stories these days now, I guess. I’m better at reading between the lines and seeing what can’t be seen in a movie. This may be why I enjoy them more than one might expect, and also why there’s certain movies that I just can’t see the value in. I don’t care a whole lot for pointless “explosion” movies like, say, Transformers or 2012, something that many of my friends find strange, possibly even snobby. But I don’t look at a movie, I look through it, and I can see there’s nothing but a lot of hot air behind that Los Angeles-sized inferno.
How dare I be so snobbish?
Maybe that’s why Beauty and the Beast and other older films in Disney’s library have worked better than the animated films being made nowadays. An animated movie used to be for “all ages” because they were made with stories that kids could relate to, but there were little touches just past the screen that an adult, or even a pretty bright kid, could spot and get a sense of emotional fulfillment out of. Roger Ebert theorizes that these kind of family movies are enjoyable for older audiences because they can appreciate the technical and creative skill that went into it, that if a film is robust enough, everyone can enjoy it.
These days, in an animated film environment plagued by Dreamworks, they’re making movies “for kids and adults”. That doesn’t sound much different; but here’s how they do that: they make a movie with a premise that a child would probably be entertained by (like, say, a panda that wants to learn kung fu) and then throw stuff in it that would appeal to the adults (like, say, getting Jack Black to voice the panda). This isn’t stuff that appeals to everyone simultaneously; it’s just they put things in the movie that would sail over the kid’s heads, and meanwhile, the adults are left with a childish movie where Jack Black occasionally warns us to “feel the thunder.” They could make a movie with themes, characters and concepts that appeal to everyone at once (and they did, with How to Train Your Dragon), but it’s a lot easier to just write a kid’s film and hide adult stuff in it. They’re both insulting the intelligence of children, and leaving us with an innocuous kid’s film that occasionally references something we’d rather be watching.
Though I find it hard to believe that they expected anyone at all to find this entertaining.
The annoying thing about it is that Disney, and similar studios, rarely decide to change their tactics for critical acclaim and a more permanent place in film history; they change their tactics when they start losing money. The Disney Renaissance of the ’90s rose from a persistently unsuccessful run in the ’70s and ’80s, and when it was on the slip again in the early ’00s, they tried again, and it worked okay at first, but instead of being ambitious, they just decided to copy Dreamworks and Pixar. Imagine that; copying a company that split off because one of your old executives was so butthurt, and another company that you own, but constantly outclasses you. And unfortunately, this seems to be working out for them (probably because now the company is headed by a Pixar exec).
But I have an optimistic feeling that Disney needs time to adjust to the market before they can really re-emerge, to get people excited about the name again, and then really bring the house down. It looks like they’re still in that transitionary phase, between a CG movie about a video game character in 2012, and Frozen, another kick at the Tangled can in 2013 (and its title will probably elicit giggles about that old urban legend about Walt Disney’s frozen body). King of the Elves remains an unknown at the moment (along with a Mickey Mouse feature,) but if any film would be able to rise to traditional 2D glory, it would be that one.
Concept art for King of the Elves
I hope they’re back in prominence soon, though. I like being able to see a movie all the way through to its back wall, and its a lot easier to see through ink and paint than through glossy computer code.
Also, another neat thing about Beauty and the Beast after this revisiting; Tony Jay (the voice of Judge Claude Frollo) was in the movie for two scenes, as an owner of an insane asylum. I completely forgot he was in it, so that was a nice surprise.
