Mamoru Hosada’s new anime BELLE is the latest take on a certain tale as old as time, one that was previously enshrined in the animated feature canon with 1991’s BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, one of the touchstones of Disney’s storied late-20th-century renaissance. This week we crack open the clamshell VHS case on Disney’s version, in particular its labored-even-by-Disney-standards development process, its unforgettable Ashman/Menken music, what made it stand out in the animation landscape back then, and how those same elements look compared to the film’s modern-day successors.
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