The 74-minute Aladdin is a little more entertaining, with a funnier and faster-paced script, but suffers from the same visual problems. Add to this the crude animation, clumsy direction and occasional attempts at visual humour that don't really work at all and you end up with a film that may entertain small children, but will probably be a chore to sit through for anyone else - even at a slender 68 minutes. The respected actors who lend their voices to the two films - Christopher Lee, Edward Woodward, Derek Jacobi - add to this impression.īut although the novelty of the script lends some appeal, the story is ultimately pretty dull. Whereas Disney used musical numbers and other set pieces to tell the story, Bevanfield instead cooked up lengthy scenes of characters discussing their lives at home, the result resembling something along the lines of an animated BBC costume drama. The thing that struck me most about Bevanfield's Beauty and the Beast is just how talky it is. And so I came to Bevanfield's films with an open mind. Clearly, then, whatever the motives behind these films, sometimes competent crews have been attached to them. However, a few were pleasant surprises - the Goodtimes Pocahontas, for one, turned out to be a perfectly solid piece of work (and more historically accurate than Disney's film to boot). At one point I bought several from a charity shop out of morbid curiosity and most were predictably awful. Sandwiched between the releases of Disney's versions of the same fairy tales, it seems a safe bet that these direct-to-video offerings were conceived to cash in on their Hollywood counterparts.Ī few years ago VHS tapes of cheap cartoons adapting the same stories as films by Disney and other big animation studios were a common sight at Co-Ops and Poundlands, with outfits such as Goodtimes, Burbank Animation Studios and Golden Films releasing umpteen versions of The Little Mermaid, Snow White and even The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Anastasia. If you let go of some of that and you face your fears, you discover that they're not so terrifying or horrifying after all.In 1992 Bevanfield Films (the company behind Murun Buchstansangur, What-a-Mess and Bill the Minder) added two titles to the meagre ranks of British animated features: Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin. Part of the message, Tatar says, is "recognizing also that the monster out there isn't necessarily the one to be feared. ![]() Of course, the original beast was a metaphor for other things. And just as the villagers feared the beast, society wouldn't and didn't help victims of the AIDS epidemic until, for many, it was too late. Like the beast, he suffered from, essentially, what felt like a curse-and time was running out. As the film was heading toward its premiere, Ashman was dying of AIDS. It's said that Howard Ashman, the lyricist on Disney's 1991 animated Beauty and the Beast (and The Little Mermaid and Little Shop of Horrors), identified with the character of the beast. The X-Men can be read as an allegory for the ostracization of LGBTQ people the Hunchback of Notre Dame is similarly "ugly" in the eyes of society. We create these monsters, and then make peace with those monsters." BATB takes its place alongside other classic examples of outcasts (a trait over which Belle and the beast bond in the live-action version). ![]() I don't think Madame de Beaumont emphasized this, but the monster is a projection of our own anxieties. "The other side is, this is a story that tells us about monstrosity. That's not all: "That's one side of the message," explains Tatar. Or whatever else you were hoping for in a husband. "A person does not have to be necessarily good-looking." Or young. "It was a story that sent…a beautiful message about the power of love and the importance of valuing character," says Tatar. In a way BATB is a comforting story of how even if this happens to you, you can make the best of it and get to know the person you don't have to be scared and feel doomed. So much about the tale makes sense now, right? To a girl of, say, 13, a man who has gone through puberty is basically a huge, scary, smelly beast.
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