The best scene in Beauty and the Beast (1991) is the prologue. Storyboarded with stained glass window panels, it introduces the spell that constitutes the premise of the movie. Watch:
Like Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the source of many of Disney’s story concepts, this scene is legitimately disturbing and weird. It’s totally at odds with contemporary notions of fairness or morality, and it therefore pushes us to think a little about those notions.
For instance, it seems grossly unjust that the Prince’s servants have to share in his ghastly punishment. They have none of his flaws—one of them is only a toddler—yet arguably, their fate is even worse than his: I doubt even Belle could fall in love with a candlestick. Why have the servants been included in the spell?
It seems to me that the Enchantress wants to increase the Prince’s suffering by haunting him with poetic sensibility. We can infer that the servants’ new forms reflect how the Prince had viewed them: as mere objects for his personal use. This dark reasoning for the servants’ fate isn’t highlighted in the movie, but it almost certainly torments the Beast, who, remember, prefers to spend his time secluded in the West Wing.
It’s also possible that the Enchantress blames the servants for the Prince’s spoiling. After all, they were in a position to correct his behavior, and they failed to do so. Perhaps she aims to serve poetic justice to them: they witnessed their master’s moral defects but remained quiet, like mere furniture of the castle.
Another strange aspect of the Enchantress’s actions is that she warns the Prince that “beauty is found within” but then reveals that she is, in fact, outwardly beautiful. This only seems to reinforce that beauty is a reliable indicator of value. At most, it teaches that beauty may be initially hidden from view. So it’s not exactly surprising that the Beast later falls in love with the town’s most beautiful woman, whose name literally means “beauty:” the enchantress hasn’t really encouraged him to look beyond the surface. (She may actually value beauty quite highly, possessing it herself.)
Instead, she has used ugliness as a weapon against the Prince. Upon discovering while disguised that it particularly repulses him, she confers it on him as a curse for having “no love in his heart.” Rather than teach him to overcome his superficiality, she uses his prejudice to inflict maximum punishment for his other offenses.
Poetic justice over compassion. Humiliation over education. Dante would approve of this Enchantress.
A final curiosity of the prologue is why the Enchantress intervenes at all. This becomes especially puzzling when the film’s primary antagonist, Gaston, displays the very same characteristics as the flawed Prince but incurs no punishment whatsoever. In fact, Gaston is without a doubt the more egregious offender: whereas the conceited Prince only refuses shelter for a beggar, Gaston is so egotistical that he tries to murder the Beast and force Belle into, essentially, domestic servitude. Why no spell for Gaston?
Perhaps the Enchantress perceives that Gaston is too far gone to be worth an effort to restore his humility. Indeed, after the Beast overcomes Gaston on the roof, leaving him begging for mercy (“I’ll do anything!”), the humbling doesn’t stick: Gaston immediately changes his mind and returns with a dagger. Thus, the enchantress may believe that past a certain age, there’s no going back from being a selfish jerk. Or that certain people are simply too stupid to learn valuable lessons. Judging by Gaston’s actions, she may be on to something.
Given all this reflection from just two minutes of stained glass windows, I’d go so far as to say that the Enchantress is the most compelling character in the entire “Disney Renaissance” oeuvre. She imposes a dark, uncompromising, surreal vision of justice that engulfs the film after she departs, and, like the hunter in Bambi, she never returns to account for her actions, making her that much more inscrutable.
Such a character would never appear in a Disney film today. That may be because we’re more confident in our contemporary ideas of discipline, but—more likely, in my opinion—it could also be that we’re more unsure of them, and thus more averse to the presentation of their bold and terrible alternatives.
–Jim Andersen
For more animated movie exploration, see my piece on Toy Story 3.