Forte

Oh, I have always looooved Forte. I was very impressed by him, and found him to be one of the very best parts of this movie (and I love the entire thing.) Yes, he is scary...imposing and intimidating...his face reminds me of like, a creepy mask or the Magic Mirror from Snow White (who also freaked me out in a good way when I was little.) By "in a good way," I mean that I thought the character was really scary, but that actually made me like him even more. x}

So yes, I think he's an absolutely fantastic villain and a very interesting character; but I also feel really, really bad for him. (Obviously he couldn't have appeared in the original, so I still hold out hope for his having been reassembled/repaired and "brought back to life/consciousness/health" eventually...to give him a chance to come to an understanding with everybody and make amends.)

Because he seemed like a nice guy initially, composing custom musical pieces to present to people and all. He just became hella possessive because he finally felt important and valuable to the master of the castle--who, of course, had been a complete d!ck to him when they were humans. Now, some chick shows up outta nowhere, tryin' to steal his bro away with her wicked womanly wiles (*cough Grumpy reference and he also played a pipe organ lol*), and he faces being ignored, unappreciated, and lonely once again.

And, like the antagonistic and bitter air conditioner in The Brave Little Toaster, he's stuck against a wall--having one single vantage point in one single room for years and years, while almost everyone else is free to move around. He wants to remain that way (or thinks he does) because of reasons, but it still has to flippin' suck. It's ironic, too, since he tries to convince Beast that *his* freedom is the most important thing he has.

I just had to feel for the guy, even if he WAS eventually willing to try and destroy the castle just to keep Belle and Beast from hooking up. You can feel the sadness in the Beast after he has to "defeat" his old friend and confidant.

He was possibly the only one in the castle who didn't want to return to his human form, instead preferring to keep Beast in the darkness with him. He went nuts enough to opt for trying to kill them in order to prevent their falling in love, breaking the spell, and returning things to the way they were. (That, of course, was a misguided assumption, because falling in love changed Adam/Beast--and so life in the castle would be far better for everyone, including him, if he just let events develop as they were. He'd still be treated as a good friend and not a mere servant, either abused or ignored.) It would certainly take some 'splaining, but I think I might be able to forgive him for what he wanted to do--and therefore Belle probably would as well, in time.

I liked Tim Curry's performance as Forte. The character himself, though? Not so much.

If this is a consular ship, where is the ambassador?

Have to agree with you, Forte definitely was very well-done as a villain. In fact, I'd even argue he was a far better done villain than Gaston and almost wish Forte was the villain in the original film over Gaston. He actually is a bit similar to Barthandelus from Final Fantasy XIII in appearance and motives.

For starters, he has motivations we actually can understand fully, since it is strongly implied that prior to the curse Forte was not exactly treated well by the Beast. At least they're made more sense than Gaston's "I must marry Belle for whatever reason" (Yes, I know it was because she was "the most beautiful woman in the village" but the problem is that they severely messed up that title by making those blonde triplets more beautiful than her, giving them Dead or Alive-style bodies).

I also liked the fact that Forte actually was demonstrated to be extremely manipulative and a good planner without making the protagonists seem extremely stupid or demonizing people who didn't really deserve to be demonized in the process due to cynicism for the audience's intellect. One of the things I hated about how they handled Gaston was that they had a reprise where he all but explicitly spelled out enough details for his heinous plan for the audience and especially the in-universe characters in the pub to not only deduce what he is planning, but thanks to his not even sugarcoating it with false sense of morality or pragmatic benefits, they would also deduce how much of a scumbag Gaston truly was, yet instead of arresting him on the spot or at least telling him off, they actually cheered him on (the triplets at least had the excuse of not being there until the final verses due to being waitresses and doing what waitresses do and prepare orders and thus not actually being in the know of the plan, the others didn't), and it was also implied that the entire village (barring possibly the triplets) agreed with the plan. That's not going to be realistic at all (I mean, did Stalin ever unveil openly he was going to be committing crimes for fun, especially to the entire USSR? NO! In fact, when his crimes were exposed by Khrushchev, there were riots). And then there's the reason why the climax happened, as they basically forced in a final battle between Gaston and Beast when they otherwise didn't have any known history (not to mention that, since the point of an antagonist is someone responsible for the ills of a character, Gaston really wasn't even that effective in that department as removing him won't change the sufferings of the characters) by having Belle stupidly revealing the Beast's existence to a mob and especially to Gaston, even when it should have been exceedingly obvious even to her what would happen, especially when she already deduced Gaston was trying to blackmail her. Forte, on the other hand, actually kept his ulterior motives a secret from everyone except for Fife, his accomplice in the entire thing, and even with Fife, he had to bribe him just to ensure his agreement by offering to let him have his own solo, and he even kept some details that would have been inconvenient for him away from him (like, for example, the fact that the music sheets were all blank). Not to mention thanks to his manipulations, he actually nearly won and had Beast smash the rose (the only thing stopping him being one of the rose petals falling on Belle's present), while with Gaston, it became exceedingly clear that Gaston wasn't going to win when Belle deduced instantly he was trying to blackmail her just from his asking for her marriage.

Probably the only real flaw with him is in the plan itself: Basically, based on Don Hahn's commentary, if the rose petals all fall before Beast gets love in return, he will become a literal beast (think Feral Chaos from Dissidia 012 Final Fantasy, or even what happened to Finwick in Pinnochio), with the implication that the servants will effectively die and become literal objects, meaning Forte effectively would be committing suicide with his actions. However, considering it was pretty clear even before his villainous breakdown that he had already lost a few screws thanks to the curse, I'll let that flaw slide.

Forte, among other things, is one of the reasons why I actually think Enchanted Christmas was actually arguably better than the original film. Another reason I think this is that they actually do show Belle to be pure of heart and thus an internal beauty (a major step up from the original film, where for most of the first act, her relationship to her dad aside, she behaved like a total jerk to a lot of people, and did stuff that were closer in the realm of internal ugliness than actual internal beauty, with those triplets, the closest she actually had to foils in the film as well as the closest standins to Belle's wicked sisters in the original tale, seemed more pure of heart in their characterization and actions than Belle despite their crush on Gaston, and even when she did actually get better in the second act, she really grabbed onto the idiot globe when exposing Beast to a congregated mob led by her stalker, not only endangering him, but also the servants, and we're somehow supposed to assume that she's beautiful both inside and out), and while we still don't necessarily have a real foil for her regarding internal ugliness, she did at least get a foil in the form of Angelique who is (initially) more cynical about Christmas (and for somewhat justified reasons, considering Beast keeps her locked up in the cellar) while Belle is more optimistic about it. Certainly, it is one of the best DTV continuations of various Disney films (I'd say "sequels," but that would technically be inaccurate since some of them are also prequels or midquels).

the way they killed Forte was hard for me to watch as a kid. and yes i say "kill" because in my eyes they did kill him. the keyboard was his source of power, the heart of the organ. the beast rips the keyboard away from him, essentially tearing out Forte's heart