Beauty and the Beast (1991)/Trivia

Trivia

 * In "The Mob Song", Gaston quotes Macbeth by William Shakespeare. "Screw your courage to the sticking place."


 * The mob's cries of "Kill the Beast" is, probably unintentionally, reminiscent of William Golding's Lord of the Flies. In both cases the people believe the "Beast" is evil, when it is they themselves who are really evil.


 * The film was restored and remastered for its January 1, 2002 re-release in IMAX theatres. For this version of the film, much of the animation was touched up, a new sequence set to the deleted song "Human Again" was inserted into the film's second act, and a new digital master from the original CAPS production files was used to make the high resolution IMAX film negative. Beauty and the Beast: Special Edition, as the enhanced version of the film is called, was released on a 2-disc Platinum Edition Disney DVD in October 2002.


 * "Belle" is French for 'beautiful' (the name of the film is, after all, Beauty and the Beast).


 * Gaston is the first-ever animated character in a modern Disney film to make chauvinistic comments about women (Gaston calls Belle his "little wife" and says that they will have six or seven "strapping boys" like himself, with Belle (and also says that it's inappropriate for women to read). Jafar, another Disney character, says that silence is "a fine quality in a wife" when speaking to Princess Jasmine).


 * When Gaston places his feet on Belle's table, the mud coming off the boots strongly resembles Mickey Mouse's head, following the long standing Disney tradition of having "Hidden Mickeys" in their movies.


 * Beauty and the Beast was the first animated film to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. It lost to The Silence of the Lambs.


 * At the very beginning of the movie, as soon as the picture comes on the screen, it shows the castle before it is cursed. There is a deer in the foreground drinking out of the stream. If you watch the deer, it suddenly picks its head up to look around. This is the same deer as Bambi's mother, in the scene right before the hunter kills her (The hunter is obviously alluded to be Gaston).