Gaston

Gaston is the primary villain of the 1991 animated feature Beauty and the Beast. He was voiced by Richard White.

Character Story
Plot Spoilers

Gaston starts off as the local hero of a small French village, whom Belle considers intolerably vain and arrogant, with a bumbling companion, LeFou, pursuing Belle through the village as she borrows a book from the local bookstore. Their meeting starts off pretty well, but Gaston's sexist remarks about women drive Belle away from him and she goes home, leaving him disappointed. The next day, Gaston organizes a wedding outside Belle's garden in an attempt to "surprise" her. He forces his way into Belle's house and attempts to strongarm her into marrying him. While he attempts to corner Belle, she manages to open the door that he has pinned her against. This causes him to lose his balance and fly headfirst into a mud puddle that lies in front of Belle's house. Furious and humiliated, Gaston storms off.

Gaston doesn't stop there, however, as the villagers in a local pub, along with Lefou, sing a song about Gaston's greatness to cheer him up after being rejected by Belle, when Maurice storms in and warns the villagers about a monstrous Beast who has locked Belle as a prisoner in the tower of his castle. Thinking he is insane, Gaston orders the villagers to throw him out of the bar. In a surprising display of animalistic cunning, he takes advantage of the village's dislike of Belle's father, Maurice, to organize a lynch mob and threaten the old man with imprisonment in order to pressure Belle into marrying him. Belle, however, manages to prove her father's apparently insane claims about a Beast inhabiting the huge castle in the woods to be true by using a magic mirror the Beast had given her. Gaston grows even more frustrated after his plan fails, but becomes insanely jealous upon learning that Belle has fallen for the Beast and not him.

Completely berserk, Gaston convinces the villagers that the Beast is a man-eating monster that has to be brought down immediately, and after locking Belle and Maurice in the cellar of their home, Gaston leads the lynch mob to storm Beast's castle and leave no one alive. In the ensuing battle between the rioters and castle servants, Gaston confronts the Beast alone. He fires an arrow into him, tosses him onto a lower section of the roof and taunts him. When Beast doesn't respond, having lost his will to live since Belle's departure (to rescue her lost father, who was searching for her), Gaston uses a makeshift club to try and kill the Beast. The Beast, however, regains his strength when he sees Belle return, and viciously fights back. He soon has Gaston at his mercy by holding him above a chasm by the throat, and the evil hunter pathetically begs for his life. The Beast almost drops Gaston, but decides to spare him on the basis that he isn't a killer like Gaston, and merely tells him to leave and never return. In spite of this, Gaston refuses to give up. Determined to finish what he started, Gaston literally stabs Beast in the back with a dagger while dangling precariously from the balcony, but gets his comeuppance when he loses his footing and falls into the deep chasm far below.

On an interesting note, most of Gaston's actions were edited out of the final cut of the film: during his battle with the Beast, Gaston was originally intended to shout "Time to die!", but it was changed to "Belle is MINE!" in order to edit violence and fit Belle back in the sequence; moments prior to his plunge from the castle, Gaston was supposed to stab the Beast in the back, and later in the leg, but the second injury was cut from the final script; it was also originally intended for Gaston to commit suicide after stabbing the Beast in the back and laugh madly as he fell from the tower, believing that if he could not win Belle, nobody else would (which might explain why Gaston chose such a dangerous position to stab the Beast from behind, despite knowing that he would never win Belle's heart).

Spoiler End

Other Appearances

 * House of Mouse
 * Kingdom Hearts II