Belle

Belle (2025)

A couple have a peaceful existence in a small provincial town. He is a teacher and she runs an opticians practical. Their life is turned upside when Belle, a friend’s daughter who is lodging with them, is found dead in her room. The husband becomes the prime suspect as the only one at home at the time.

Date of release
2025-03-13
TMDB
5.8 / 10 (38)
Runtime
1h 40m
Genres
Drama, Thriller
Director
Benoît Jacquot

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Based on: Beauty

Belle is a fictional character in Disney's Beauty and the Beast franchise. First appearing in the 1991 animated film, Belle is the book-loving daughter of an inventor who yearns for adventure and respite from her mundane village. When her father is imprisoned by a cold-hearted beast, Belle offers her own freedom in exchange for his. Despite his outward appearance, she gradually befriends the Beast, who learns kindness in return.

Development

After the success of Disney's first feature-length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Walt Disney himself had attempted to adapt the "Beauty and the Beast" fairy tale several times. The project was shelved due to challenges encountered translating the fairy tale's static main characters and plot to film, and Walt Disney was particularly wary about animating Belle's imprisonment.

Woolverton is credited with creating the character. She felt Disney had typically portrayed their female leads as victims, with Belle's lack of agency in early drafts of the script proving contentious among the film's writers. While the studio still wanted Beauty and the Beast to evoke their classic films, the writers by contrast envisioned Belle as "a woman that was ahead of her time".

The story team for Beauty and the Beast was predominantly male. Woolverton frequently debated Belle's characterization with some of the more traditional-minded story artists, although she was supported by Katzenberg and lyricist Howard Ashman, who advocated for Belle to be "a thinker and a reader" rather than a passive character.

In adapting the fairy tale, Woolverton omitted Belle's two selfish sisters and their love interests to prioritize her dynamic with Gaston. She also removed the subplot in which Belle asks her father for a rose. Characters from Purdum's treatment, including Belle's younger sister, Clarice, and her strict aunt, Marguerite, were discarded; Clarice's removal emphasized Belle's loneliness, while Marguerite was replaced by Gaston as the film's primary…

Disney auditioned approximately 500 actresses for the role of Belle. They originally considered rehiring Ariel's voice actress, Jodi Benson, but decided she sounded too young and American for the character they created, who they wanted to sound more like an adult woman than a girl.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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