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Here’s the story of how it came about, told by the people who brought it to life.
Then the whole gang would come back to Los Angeles to begin production.
Credit: Disney
Except it didnt work out that way.
Hahn and Purdum privately showed Katzenberg a 20-minute reel of rough sketches and temporary vocals.There were no songs.
With one exception, none of the enchanted-castle objects had faces or voices.
Everett Collection
GLEN KEANE, ANIMATOR: We were waiting back in London.
Don [Hahn] pulled us together and said, Well, Ive got good news and bad news.
The bad news is, everything youve worked on so far has been thrown out.
Disney
It lacked that Disney charm we all know and love.
He proposed ideas for musical numbers.
The Purdums decided this wasnt the movie they signed on to make, so they graciously bowed out.
John Seakwood/Disney
That left an empty space in the directors chairs.
But Gary and I werent feature directors.
I think they were happy with Cranium Command, this crazy five-minute short we directed for Epcot Center.
I guess they figured, Why not give these guys a shot?
GARY TROUSDALE, CODIRECTOR:Kirk and I got called in by the head of the development department.
Christmas was three weeks away.
He said, Can you be on a plane in two days to New York?
You might get to directBeauty and the Beast.
I didnt really have that great a time directing Cranium Command.
Directing was a lot of work and not a lot of fun work.
So I said, Can I think about it?
And [development head] Charlie [Fink], God bless him, said, No!
And that was that.
GARY TROUSDALE: Howard was smart.
I mean really, really smart.
He clearly knew the Broadway musical-theater discipline.
He wasnt a theater snob.
Howard and I wanted to make a sea change in the Disney heroine.
Together we conjured up Belle, who loved to read.
She was unconscious about her beauty.
We of course came into a lot of pushback about it.
Thats not what I felt the world needed.
I used to rail about it, honestly.
I didnt make myself very popular.
Which Im sure youll hear.
And I would say that if she were in the room with me right now.
It was an unusual [and] difficult, tense relationship with Linda.
But…Howard liked her, and Jeffrey saw that Linda would be a good collaborator with Howard.
KIRK WISE:The visual possibilities were leaping off the page with every rhyme Howard turned in.
He had a great imagination and a tremendous sense of humor.
But like many artists, he was also extremely passionate.
And he could be very stubborn.
DON HAHN:Howard was a very intense guy.
He used to chew legal pads.
And hed work over these amazing couplets and rejoinders of words.
He didnt suffer fools.
But he wasnt a jerk.
He was incredibly big-hearted.
He would come in with donuts from his favorite bakery every day.
Our story crew would pitch ideas, and Howard would musicalize them.
Alan Menken was kind of a short-order chef, serving up melodies in the appropriate style.
When the songs started coming in, it was like winning the lottery.
The title ballad came in on a separate tape a few weeks later.
ALAN MENKEN, COMPOSER:Howard was pretty apoplectic when we FedExed those cassette tapes.
He was saying, We cant send a seven-minute opening number to Disney.
Nobody asked for that.
But they went crazy.
