We would recommend Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale’s animated musical to anyone, not just families. The comic bustle occasionally crowds the romance, but its songs and voice performances make the tenderness feel earned.
Beauty and the Beast takes the business of a musical seriously: the songs have to tell us who these people are, then give them something to do. Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale make that look straightforward, and their film is funny and moving enough for us to recommend it without asking whether there are children in the house. There is room for spectacle without losing sight of Belle, the bookish woman at its centre. At 84 minutes, it also knows how much evening it needs.
Linda Woolverton’s screenplay gives Belle a useful quality for a fairy-tale heroine: she is prepared to be unimpressed. Paige O’Hara makes that independence audible without making her sound pleased with herself. Richard White’s Gaston has enough self-satisfaction for both of them, and his vocal certainty makes Belle’s resistance all the more enjoyable. The song ‘Gaston’ gives his vanity an absurdly generous amount of musical encouragement. We laughed at how thoroughly the tune appeared to agree with him.
Alan Menken’s music gives each number a dramatic job. ‘Be Our Guest’ turns hospitality into an extravagantly organised production, with patterned choreography that makes the welcome almost overwhelming. It is excessive in exactly the right way. Editors Bill Wilner and John Carnochan keep the musical passages connected to the surrounding comedy and romance. The pace is brisk, but the numbers still have time to develop their own jokes.
That confidence carries into the ballroom sequence, where computer animation gives the space a depth that makes the dance feel physically possible. All that technical effort could have made the couple seem incidental. Instead, the scale makes their closeness more affecting, because we keep attending to two figures within it. We were moved more than we expected by Belle and the Beast dancing together. The animation gives them room, and the music does not make their tentative intimacy feel foolish.
Robby Benson’s Beast matters just as much as the space around him. There is awkwardness in the voice that makes the romance worth following; a more assured performance would have made it less touching. Jerry Orbach’s Lumiere and David Ogden Stiers’s Cogsworth give the comedy contrasting rhythms, one expansive and the other exact. Angela Lansbury’s Mrs. Potts supplies warmth without sounding as though she is instructing us to feel it. The voices make the enchanted castle companionable.
Our small reservation is that the castle can become too busy keeping us entertained. The comic business occasionally interrupts a feeling that could have been allowed to last a little longer. Wise and Trousdale are so capable of filling the screen that we sometimes wished they would leave the romance alone for another moment. A little less comic fuss would give O’Hara and Benson more room.
Family musicals can exhaust themselves trying to keep every age group separately occupied. Here the same songs, jokes and hesitations do the work for everyone, and the film lets the romance matter without making fun of anyone for believing in it. The comedy never depends on our feeling cleverer than the story. If animation usually sends you looking for something else, make an exception for this one.
