20 Things You Didn’t Know About Beauty and the Beast

A sequence from “Human Again” in Beauty and the Beast (Image via Disney)

10. The song “Human Again” was cut from the original 1991 film

The original song was cut partially because it added eleven minutes to the film. However, it created larger problems with the passage of time. Director Kirk Wise just couldn’t make the song fit into the timeline of the film without slowing the progress of the story to a crawl. “[W]e kept asking, ‘Well what? Is Maurice wondering around in the woods all this time? Is Gaston just sitting around in a tavern drinking beer after beer growing a long white beard?”

As much as the creators wanted to keep the song, they eventually chose the story over self-indulgence. “Human Again” was out.

It’s a pretty cute song, however, and it’s nice to be able to see it today. All of the enchanted objects in the castle sing about how they’re excited to finally be done with the curse, now that Belle and the Beast are growing closer. The couple doesn’t appear in the animated sequence for long, which is probably just as well – listening to a bevy of humans turned into home goods yearn for their lost humanity probably puts a lot of pressure on your romance.

They are briefly seen in the library, where Belle is teaching the Beast how to read with Romeo and Juliet. This is a little ambitious – wait, the Beast can’t read? He’s a prince, right? Like, yeah, he was spoiled and terrible, but seriously no one bothered to teach a young royal how to read? This… this really raises a lot of questions.

Eventually, the entire song was removed from the film. More recent releases of the film on DVD and Blu-ray include the sequence as extras. It’s also included in the Broadway musical version of Beauty and the Beast.