Beauty and the Beast Trivia

I may have forgotten that the Belle event started today. I may have thought it began on the 15th, but I still have a post for you! Some movie trivia, I love useless random facts!

Head over to http://spacious-soul.livejournal.com/55065.html to see the other entries!=)

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Chip originally had only one line, but the producers liked Bradley Pierce's voice so much that extra dialogue and business was written and storyboarded for the character.

The original "cute" character of the movie was a music box, which was supposed to be a musical version of Dopey from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). But when the character Chip's role was expanded, the music box idea was scrapped. However the music box can be seen for a brief moment on a table next to Lumière just before the fight between the enchanted objects and the villagers in the Beast's castle.

The last phrase of Cogsworth's line "Flowers, chocolates, promises you don't intend to keep... " was ad-libbed by David Ogden Stiers.

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture, losing to The Silence of the Lambs (1991). It was, however, the first full length animated feature to win the Golden Globe for Best Picture (Musical or Comedy).

The first animated movie to win the Annie Award for Best Animated Film.

A song sung by the enchanted objects entitled "Human Again" was cut before production started. The song was later added to the Disney on Ice and theatrical productions and was recorded and animated for the 2001 Imax re-release. It was also added to the special edition released in October 8th 2002, making the movie a bit longer.

Art director Brian McEntee color keyed Belle so that she is the only person in her town who wears blue. This is symbolic of how different she is from everyone else around. Later, she encounters the Beast, another misfit, also wearing blue.

While songwriters are writing the melody to a song they often use dummy lyrics to help with writing the melody. In the song "Gaston" the writers liked the dummy lyrics so much that they used those in the final production.

Computer technology was considered for the rooftop fight and the forest chase, but the primitive state of the technology only allowed time to use it for the ballroom scene. Even for that scene, they had a fallback strategy: what they called the "Ice Capades" version, with just a spotlight on the two characters against a black background.

In the French release, Cogsworth's name is Big Ben, after the famous clock in London (extra, completely irrelevant, detail for trivia fans: the landmark's real name is "The Clock Tower of the New Palace of Westminster", while Big Ben is actually the name of the large bell that strikes the hours - nevertheless, the clock is seldom referred to by any name other than Big Ben).

When Beast and Gaston are having their life-or-death struggle on the castle, Gaston yells, "Belle is mine!" Originally he was supposed to say, "Time to die!" but the writer changed it to fit Belle back in the scene.

This was the first Disney animated movie to use a fully developed script prior to animation. In previous films, story was developed through the use of storyboards only, and was further developed during animation. Several previous films had gone way over budget when the animators spent time and effort animating scenes that, it was eventually decided, did not fit the movie, and producers realized that they could save money by having a script written first.

The dance between Belle and her Prince in the finale is actually reused animation of the dance between Princess Aurora and Prince Phillip in Sleeping Beauty (1959). The original Sleeping Beauty (1959) pair had been drawn over to become the new Beauty and the Beast (1991) pair, and this was done because they were running out of time during the production of the movie.

In the 1930s and again in the 1950s, Walt Disney attempted to adapt Beauty and the Beast (1991) into a feature but could not come up with a suitable treatment, so the project was shelved. It wasn't until The Little Mermaid (1989) became hugely successful that they decided to try it a third time.