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

The Enchantress curses the Prince, from the prologue (Image via Disney)

9. An early draft included a sequence where we see the Enchantress create the Beast

After the Purdums left the project early on in its development, Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale were hired to direct. Both were fairly inexperienced, having never directed a feature-length animated film before. Conflict was bound to happen with the new team. In Tale as Old As Time: The Art and Making of Beauty and the Beast, Wise recalls a particularly tense conversation with playwright Howard Ashman:

“Finding a way to show how the Beast fell under the curse provoked a memorable disagreement. Howard envisioned the prologue as a fully animated sequence in which the audience would see a seven-year-old prince rudely refuse to give shelter to an old woman during a storm. Revealing herself to be a beautiful enchantress, the woman would chase the boy through the castle hurling bolts of magic that would turn the servants into objects. Eventually, her spell would change the prince into the Beast boy, who would press his face against one of the castle windows screaming ‘Come back! Come back!’”

Wise and Trousdale were not fans of the idea, which was pretty traumatic for a film intended for kids and their families.

“Gary and I hated the idea…. I got elected to break the news that we had a different idea for the prologue… one of the words I used was cheap, meaning doing something terrible to a child was a cheap way to pull an audience’s heartstrings. I couldn’t have picked a worse word, because Howard just lit into me.”

Thankfully, the idea stayed out of the film.