‘Beast’ Before It Became Such a Beauty

Although Disney has already released the videocassette of its smash animated hit “Beauty and the Beast,” the laser disc won’t be available until sometime next spring--to prevent piracy.

Meanwhile, laser-disc buyers will have to be content with the work-in-progress version released this week. In this form, it will likely appeal more to animation devotees--who should relish the insights it offers into the filmmaking process--than to fans of the finished film.

The work-in-progress version attracted widespread attention when it was shown at the New York Film Festival in 1991. Disney had never permitted anyone but studio personnel, test audiences and backers to see an incomplete animated film before. The laser-disc version offers rare insights into how animation is done (without robbing the final version of its magic), but a lot more information could easily have been included.

Various scenes appear in the four major stages of animation: storyboard, rough animation, cleanup animation and color. The supplemental material on Side 4 follows a single sequence through all four stages, but the narrator doesn’t really explain what’s going on in each phase.

The storyboard was invented at the Disney studio to bring order to the chaotic cartoons of the 1920s. A storyboard enables the filmmakers to see how the various scenes work in relation to each other through a sort of visual shorthand. Although often simply rendered, storyboard drawings suggest moods, expressions and even camera angles. Contrast the storyboard version of Belle following Beast through his castle (in Chapter 8) with the finished version on the videocassette.

The segments in rough animation disprove the popular notion that animators draw perfect likenesses of familiar characters. The supervising animators are concerned with the timing of a character’s movements; how his body masses shift during a movement; whether a pose reveals the character’s attitude, and all the details of acting.

Step through the sequence at the end of Chapter 5, when Beast enters the parlor to confront Maurice: The individual drawings are loose but extremely powerful--every line suggests anger and suspicion. The animal’s bulk seems to settle into place as he sets each paw on the steps.

The clean-up artists do worry about drawing a perfect likeness: They have to find a single line that will capture the contours of the rough drawing. In the bath sequence in Chapter 16, the animator devised the movements and expressions that tell the audience how scared Beast is about declaring his love for Belle; the clean-up artists had to draw every tuft of fur when Beast shakes himself--and keep each tuft in register in dozens of drawings.

The explanatory lecture scrupulously avoids mentioning the computer-coloring system used for the film. (Although the system won a technical Oscar in 1991, studio officials refuse to discuss it.) Electronic coloring enabled the artists to re-create the visual richness of the great Disney features of the ‘30s and ‘40s. Note the triangles the clean-up artists draw on Belle’s cheeks: They indicate areas where the computer would apply a diffuse patch of pink. The women on the ink-and-paint crews achieved a similar effect in “Snow White” by rubbing rouge onto the individual cels, but such a labor-intensive process would be prohibitively expensive today.

Although the “bonus materials” include a few interesting surprises (especially the early version of “Be Our Guest,” when it was sung to Maurice, rather than Belle), the work-in-progress disc will appeal most strongly to hard-core animation fans and aspiring animators. Fans of the film will have to be content to wait until the finished version appears sometime next spring.

* “Beauty and the Beast” (Walt Disney/Image), two discs, 28 chapter stops, CAV (standard play), letterboxed, 101 minutes, $50.