According to the production team behind Beauty & The Beast, the success of The Little Mermaid prompted Disney to change how they approached their film. The now-iconic Beauty & The Beast, released in 1991, was directed by Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise. The film was a critical and commercial success, becoming the first animated film to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture.
An adaptation of Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s tale, Beauty & The Beast saw young book-loving French villager Belle (Paige O’Hara) make a deal with a frightful Beast (Robby Benson) to save her father from a lifetime of captivity in his castle. An incredible success, the film continues to influence Disney productions, inspire sequel projects, and live-action reimaginings to this day. However, Beauty & The Beast wasn’t always a guaranteed success as the film saw a large shift in direction early on in production thanks to another Disney animated classic.
In a discussion with THR, directors Trousdale and Wise – along with then-Disney Animation president Peter Schneider and Bill Lauch, partner of acclaimed lyricist Howard Ashman – shed light on how 1989’s The Little Mermaid caused the production of Beauty & The Beast to change. After the project was relaunched following its shelving in the 1950s, Schneider stated that he and other producers weren’t impressed upon seeing the first 20 minutes of complete work. Wise explained that they felt the film, which wasn’t even a musical at this point, was slow and boring. Lauch elaborated, saying that producers hoped it could be more like The Little Mermaid following its success. Check out the full discussion below.
“Trousdale: The story is that Walt Disney tried to do Beauty and the Beast back in the ’50s, and they kicked around the story but couldn’t make it work, so they shelved it. It had been somewhere in the studio attic for a long time.
Schneider: We hired Richard Purdum to do Beauty and the Beast and sent Don Hahn with him to London. When they came back a few months later and showed us the first 20 minutes, we realized we had a problem.
Wise: I think they felt was it was very slow and boring and not fun. It wasn’t even a musical at that point.
Lauch: This was on the heels of a huge success with Little Mermaid. The Disney people were looking at that and said, “Why aren’t we doing more of that?”
Set to receive its own live-action adaptation in 2023, The Little Mermaid is the first film in what is often considered to be the Disney Renaissance, a period in the late 1980s and ’90s that saw the studio produce wildly critically and financially successful animated films. The film was directed and written by Ron Clements and John Musker, with composition and songwriting being handled by Ashman and Alan Menken. The movie was credited with bringing Disney Animation into a new age, with Clements, Musker, Ashman, and Menken having a hand in many subsequent productions across the Renaissance period. That influence was made clear when the creators were told to retool Beauty & The Beast.
Despite its live-action adaptation’s spin-off TV show being shelved, Beauty & The Beast continues to be a crucial part of Disney’s filmography. Belle, the Beast, and even Gaston are characters cherished by those who grew up with the film. As such, it’s hard to imagine a final product so starkly different from the film that Schneider hinted at being initially problematic. Luckily, the success of The Little Mermaid prompted a course correction and resulted in a classic.
