Talk:Beauty and the Beast (1991 film)/@comment-25097798-20140920150531/@comment-1672596-20140920155929

I'm not even sure I can call it "the best." True, it did get a lot of revenue (though unlike The Little Mermaid, it didn't actually save Disney from going bankrupt), but there were plenty of flaws in the film.

For starters, the choice of a villain was terribly done. We actually had the Enchantress curse not only the Beast, but also his entire staff and castle, including especially the ones who were completely innocent of the prince's behavior or the actions against her, and she made it virtually, if not completely impossible for the spell to ever be broken, yet she's pretty much a non-entity. Instead, we get a villain who was, one-liners aside, poorly written and the kind of guy you would expect from a Women's Studies course. I mean, come on, the reprise for his villain song alone proved just how unrealistic the guy was. For starters, if someone like Gaston in real life actually tried to openly gloat enough details of their evil plan in public for everyone to not only get what he was planning, but also showcase just how much a scumbag they actually were as soon as they came up with it like he did in the reprise, they would be thrown in Jail, and their reputation would be shattered beyond repair. His motives for wanting Belle were also poorly written, especially considering we already have at least three unmarried virgin women who far outrank Belle in terms of physical beauty at least (and believe me, when the triplets, both together and even individually, have more chnaces of appearing in something like Dead or Alive than Belle, and the latter is called the most beautiful woman in the village, especially regarding physical beauty, we've got problems).

Second of all, a lot of Belle's character was not done right especially regarding being an implied internal beauty from her actions. The opening song basically had her cursing her entire village for being provincial, then she basically threw Gaston into the mud, deliberately and pre-meditatively, and apparently taking amusement in his humiliation, then she basically disobeyed a direct stipulation towards her stay in the castle, nearly destroying the host's lifeline, then she broke her end of the deal SHE came up with by trying to flee from the castle when she got caught and nearly got herself and the host killed, then lastly, when she did get her freedom, she basically, STUPIDLY I should tell you, stabbed Beast and his servants in the back by exposing his existence to a blood-thirsty mob unwilling to listen to reason, all for the extremely short-sighted goal of saving her father from the loony farm. It also doesn't help that the closest things to her foils, the Bimbettes, came across from their actions as being closer to the mark of actually being internally beautiful than Belle did, even with their crush on Gaston. Probably the only time they actually GOT the moral right was between Gaston and Beast. Worse, because this leads up to the French Revolution, and we never got any sense that Belle was as discerning regarding which books are good and which books are bad, we are also left with the possible implication that Belle may betray Adam again, and this time deliberately, to enact those stupid Philosophe teachings that doomed France to the French Revolution and the Jacobins' reign of terror.

Also, the reason why Belle was unpopular in the village is simply because she can read? That sounds too much like something being pushed in a Women's Studies course (specifically, that feminist lie that women weren't even literate or educated until the 1960s), despite the fact that in the film itself it is contradicted by the fact that there was a bookstore that was strongly implied to not be going out of business any time soon, or the fact that there was a priest with a bible, which even in late 18th century France, Catholics were encouraged to read the bible, at least during mass, if not on their own time. Honestly, I had to be told for several painful semesters at College this tripe starting with Spring 2011 as a Sophomore, and it wasn't even a Women's Studies course, it was World History Up To The 1500s helmed by a radical feminist leftist man-hating professor, and I also had similar issues with American Literature and Chaucer where many of the professors there pushed leftist talking points, including how Christianity was bad and how it harmed women. Even without that, I also know from my reading of history that it was people who were smart that were the reason for various bad things occurring (like Rousseau, Marx, Engels, Sartre, Foucault, Voltaire, Diderot, all those guys), and I know one of them in particular fawned over a certain Argentinan Marxist revolutionary as being "the most complete human being of the century" even though the guy was a huge unrepentant mass murderer and psychopath whose policies ruined Cuba. And that's not getting into Sartre's personal life, where despite his extremely ugly appearance and a similarly ugly nature to him to boot, he still managed to seduce lots of women into sleeping with him, and cruelly throwing them away and disparaging them as well with graphic written notes about the sexual experience.

I'm sorry for the rant, and I honestly don't want to talk bad about Belle, I actually like her better than the triplets, but recent events made me distrust her very much.

I also disliked the fact that the film omitted a wedding between Belle and Adam in the ending, and in fact, the only wedding that appeared was the one she ruined near the beginning, which doesn't paint a very good light at weddings, heck, even Christianity for that matter. Yeah, they don't show Snow White or Aurora's weddings either, but at least they were mentioned in the storybook endings. Heck, Belle's wedding didn't even get an appearance or mention at all until, what, Wedding Wishes?

And honestly, all of this was entirely Jeffrey Katzenberg's fault, because the Beauty and the Beast Original Screenplay, which was not only much closer to the original tale, but Belle actually was shown to be a near angel in that screenplay, and we actually get a showcasing of foils regarding internal beauty vs. internal ugliness between her and her aunt, ended up cut and rewritten just because for some reason, Katzenberg felt it was too dark and dramatic. The final film actually came across as being very cynical, almost to Black Friday Toy Story levels, despite it being lighter and softer.