Thursday, May 29, 2014

Beauty and the Beast: Belle's Magical World

Belle's Magical World VHS.jpgDisney made another direct to video midquel to Beauty and the Beast in 1998. Set after Christmas but before the fight against Gaston, Angela Lansbury and Haley Joel Osment were replaced by Anne Rogers and Gregory Grudt. As with The Enchanted Christmas, it also was received poorly.

The film consists of four episodes to an unreleased television show loosely woven together in a feature length story.

In the first, Belle (Paige O’Hara) and Beast (Robby Benson) stop speaking to each other after a fight. But the dictionary Webster (Jim Cummings) forges a letter of apology with a pile of papers named Crane (Jeff Bennett) and a quill named LePlume (Rob Paulsen).
The second has Fifi (Kimmy Robertson) believe Lumiere (Jerry Orbach) is cheating on her with Belle.
The third features Belle throwing a surprise party for Mrs. Potts (Rogers).
The fourth consists of Beast learning to overcome his hatred of birds.

Every criticism I had with The Enchanted Christmas rears its head again here. The old characters continue to be derailed and the new characters aren’t enjoyable. Plus, any semblance of an actual consistent story is thrown out the window in favor of telling it in the form of episodes.
If Disney couldn’t get a Beauty and the Beast animated television series up and running, why did they think it would do well as a film? This would have been one of the better times where Disney should have left well enough alone.
But there’d be another sequel in 1999.

#53

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