The Shirley Temple version

Oh, I remember first seeing La Belle et La Bete years ago as a student and remember being absolutely spellbound by it. Everything about it was so much larger than life - its almost no wonder that Walt Disney allegedly backed out of producing a version of his own in the early 50s after seeing the Cocteau version - what an act to try and follow (and obviously its the root of the Gaston character).

Interesting to note that Shelley Duval's "Fairy Tale Theatre" episode (with Susan Sarandon and Klaus Kinski) almost copies the film "exactly" frame by frame - which is cool if only to see it in full color and spoken in the English-tongue, even if its still vastly inferior to the original. But, Disney certainly couldn't have done the same - masterful though Cocteau's version was, some of the scenes - like the Beast's claws spouting smoke every time he kills for food - would have terrified children (to be honest, I always imagined that if Disney had gone through with a version of his own, it would have resembled the Purdum "Storyboard" project - which moves slower than the final version, but had a pace that would have suited the "Golden Age" of animation).

That, and my personal theory is that Beauty/Belle would have been a very difficult heroine to "Americanize" for the period, in the way that they did - say - Cinderella. The way Cinderella was portrayed she always struck me as a spiritual cousin to the young post-WWII housewives who had held down their husbands' jobs and worked the war effort factories while the men were overseas. The "Nine Old Men," most of whom had served in some form, variously seemed to have had Rosie the Riveter (the "we can do it" working woman), Betty Grable (the full-figured "pin-up girl"), and Donna Reed (the classy "homemaker") in mind at the same time when they drew her - for instance, Marc Davis and Eric Larson reportedly clashed on "what kind of girl" she would be depicted as.

But, "Beauty" would have needed to be more "introspective" - as in the original fairy tale (where she experiences almost prophetic "dreams" which are crucial to the story) - - in order to see the good in "a hideous beast." And, at the time, movies in America just weren't made granting female characters that level of profound agency, and I imagine it would have been as big a challenge as it would have been to depict a "lovable Beast." But, by the late-80s feminism was in full swing and audiences would have been more ready to accept a heroine who "knew her own mind" in a way that the average "Princess."

It annoyed me how Roger Ebert took time to disparage the Disney version as a "kids film" when he praised Cocteau's version. Its really a matter of apples vs. oranges; both masterful in different ways. Clearly the 1991 version owes something to the 1946 version though, most evidently the Gaston character (whom I don't believe was in the original story).