Kirk Wise’s strength is making animated characters worth caring about through songs and voice performances. Beauty and the Beast, co-directed with Gary Trousdale, is reason enough to value him, despite a habit of letting comedy interrupt the tenderness.
Fi1m perspective
In Beauty and the Beast (1991), Belle remains the person we follow even when the castle is busy entertaining us. Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale give the songs a practical job: each must tell us something about a character and give that character something to do. We would recommend the film to anyone, not merely to households with children. We were moved by the tenderness of O’Hara and Benson’s performances; their voices make the romance convincing even when the comic business threatens to crowd it.
Wise worked in animation before moving into storyboarding. His directing partnership with Trousdale continued through The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) and Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001). The former brought prejudice and redemption into the Disney format; the latter shifted towards action-adventure. The critical response to the later features was more mixed, and we would not pretend that these were equally successful undertakings. His subsequent supervision of the English-language version of Spirited Away (2002) gave his attention to vocal performance a different application.
Wise’s emphasis on storyboarding helps explain the clarity of the musical storytelling: he is attentive to how scenes are planned and how we see them. Beauty and the Beast combines traditional animation with computer-assisted sequences, but the spectacle never makes Belle seem incidental. The bookish woman remains at the centre, however much there is to look at around her. His care with voice performances matters just as much as the planning, because the songs need characters whose feelings we believe, not simply accomplished singing.
The castle’s comic business is our small reservation: it sometimes interrupts a feeling that deserved another moment. Wise and Trousdale are good enough at keeping us entertained that they can seem reluctant to stop, even when O’Hara and Benson have earned the space. We wanted a little less fuss, not a different film. Start with Beauty and the Beast, and do not wait for a child to provide the excuse.
Biography
Kirk Wise is an American film director, animator and screenwriter. He was born on 24 August 1963 in San Francisco, California. He graduated from Palo Alto High School and studied character animation at the California Institute of the Arts.
Wise began his career as an assistant animator on The Great Mouse Detective (1986) and worked on Oliver & Company (1988). He collaborated frequently with Gary Trousdale, co-directing Beauty and the Beast (1991), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) and Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001). He also directed the English-language version of Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away (2001).
