 Disney’s animated Beauty and the Beast begins with a prologue explaining the Beast's history. A prince selfishly refused to grant shelter to an old woman, who turned out to be an enchantress. Turning him into a beast, she left him with a rose, which “was truly an enchanted rose, which would bloom until his 21st year. If he could learn to love another, and earn her love in return, by the time the last petal fell, then the spell would be broken. If not, he would be doomed to remain a beast for all time.”
Later, the Beast’s servants - cursed into the forms of household objects - throw a joyful welcome feast for Belle. In the showstopper “Be Our Guest,” they explain, Ten years we've been rusting, Needing so much more than dusting. Based on these two segments, readers did some basic math and went… wait, was the Beast cursed at age eleven? Did the Enchantress curse a literal child? Time in Disney’s BatB is squishy. We don’t know specifically how long Belle is at the castle. It seems like she passes the winter there, but it gets a little confusing when you try to nail down, say, how long her father is searching for her. The Beast is about twenty-one at the time of the story - more specifically a “twenty-year-old guy” trapped in the body of a monster (Solomon, p. 91, emphasis added), since being in your twenty-first year would mean you're twenty. Similarly, Belle is somewhere in her late teens to early twenties. The art book Tale as Old as Time describes her as seventeen (Solomon, p. 62), and this is the age usually passed around fandom spaces, but her voice actress, Paige O’Hara, described her as “the oldest Disney princess. She’s the only one who they ever created to be in her 20s” (Chi, 2016). This is backed up by supervising animator Mark Henn (Mallenbaum, 2016). So if they've been isolated for ten years, then the Beast had to have been eleven, or even ten, when cursed - right? But then we hit a different problem: visually, the original film tells us that he was a young adult when he was cursed! The stained-glass sequence at the beginning, and a portrait of the prince which Belle discovers in the castle, both show him as a young man. I don’t believe the animators would have flubbed the prince’s visual age in such important sequences, and I don’t think they would have been misleading, either. They should be taken as just as important as the conflicting dialogue. And then there’s Chip, a child teacup who is definitely younger than ten. Did the Enchantress curse everyone who would ever be born in the castle in the future? How exactly does a teapot give birth? There’s also a cursed ottoman-dog who doesn’t look ten years old either at the finale of the movie. Fans have suggested a number of solutions:
Different Disney works take different approaches. A 1997 direct-to-video sequel, Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas, shows the prince looking around eleven or twelve when he’s cursed. On the other hand, the live-action 2017 remake changes the song lyric to “Too long we've been rusting,” removing the problem. The Broadway adaptation also removes the math problem. In fact, there may be an answer in the film’s development. Lyricist Howard Ashman “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!’” Directors Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale “hated the idea.” Wise said, “The only thing that I could see in my head was this Eddie Munster kid in a Little Lord Fauntleroy outfit” (Solomon, p. 63). This led to a rather fiery disagreement, but the directors eventually won out and the film ended up with its stained-glass sequence. Although Ashman shaped the film into the masterpiece it is, this is one point where I’m glad someone countered him. As Kristin of Tales of Faerie points out, “Why would you ever punish a seven year old with a curse that could only be broken by falling in love?” and she adds that it creates entirely the wrong tone for the curse. This still applies for an eleven-year-old. In my opinion, the story simply works best if the prince is a young adult when cursed, and that's what's indicated by the film's visuals, too. Still, this might be the reason for the discrepancy between the song lyric and the finished prologue. The lyric is really the only reason there's a numbers problem; everything else matches up. Maybe they'd already recorded the song. Personally, I never felt like the timeline needed that much scrutiny. It’s a fairy tale, and fairy tales are bonkers. The animated film is very different from the original 1740 novella of Beauty and the Beast, in which the prince is cursed by an evil fairy angry that he turned down her romantic advances (after she tried to groom him as a child!). There, the focus is on Beauty learning to see past his appearance. Disney’s version is a modernized fable, more about Beast learning to become a better man, but still feels timeless - and, in a way, outside time. But yes - it does have plot holes. Sources
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Researching folktales and fairies, with a focus on common tale types. Archives
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