Release Date: June 21, 2013. This set of 11 vinyl figures tell a tale as old as time. The set includes the common figures from the Disney Parks Beauty and the Beast Series 1 vinylmation collection. The figures included Belle (in iconic blue dress), Beast, Gaston, Cogsworth, Lumiere, Mrs. Potts, Maurice, Philippe (Belle's horse), LaFou, Bimbette (green dress), and Monsieur D'Arque.
Each figure measures approximately 3 inches. The figures are on a Mickey body - a figure resembling Mickey Mouse with "Mickey" ears. Each vinyl figure in the set has translucent "stained glass" (vinyl) ears with different objects that represent the character. For example Belle's "ears" have a rose and a book, the Beast's "ears" have horns and Mrs.Potts' "ears" have Chip (her teacup son) and china. The bottom of each figure has the printed signature of the artist who designed it, the series information and the character name. The characters in the vinylmation collection were designed by Disney artists Maria Clapsis and Caley Hicks.
It was released on June 21, 2013. Collector's Note: This figures set includes the villainous Monsieur D'Arque, the proprietor of the local insane asylum in Disney's Beauty and the Beast. This vinyl figure is one of the few figures (and pieces of merchandise) created of the villain. Please send a message with any questions.Beauty and the Beast is a 1991 American animated musical romantic fantasy film produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation and released by Walt Disney Pictures. The 30th Disney animated feature film and the third released during the Disney Renaissance period, it is based on the 1756 fairy tale of the same name by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont (who was only credited in the French dub), while also containing ideas from the 1946 French film of the same name directed by Jean Cocteau.
To break the curse, the Beast must learn to love Belle and earn her love in return before the last petal falls from an enchanted rose or else he will remain a monster forever. The film also features the voices of Richard White, Jerry Orbach, David Ogden Stiers, and Angela Lansbury. Walt Disney first attempted to adapt Beauty and the Beast into an animated film during the 1930s and 1950s, but was unsuccessful. Following the success of The Little Mermaid (1989), Walt Disney Pictures decided to adapt the fairy tale. Lyricist Howard Ashman and composer Alan Menken wrote the film's songs.
Ashman, who additionally served as the film's executive producer, died of AIDS-related complications six months before the film's release, and the film is thus dedicated to his memory. Beauty and the Beast premiered as an unfinished film at the New York Film Festival on September 29, 1991, followed by its theatrical release as a completed film at the El Capitan Theatre on November 13. Beauty and the Beast won the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy, the first animated film to ever win that category.
It also became the first animated film to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture at the 64th Academy Awards (ultimately losing to The Silence of the Lambs), where it won the Academy Award for Best Original Score and Best Original Song for its title song and received additional nominations for Best Original Song and Best Sound. In April 1994, Beauty and the Beast became Disney's first animated film to be adapted into a Broadway musical, which ran until 2007. Production of Beauty and the Beast was to be completed on a compressed timeline of two years rather than the traditional four-year Disney Feature Animation production schedule; this was due to the loss of production time spent developing the earlier Purdum version of the film. Most of the production was done at the main Feature Animation studio, housed in the Air Way facility in Glendale, California.
A smaller team at the Disney-MGM Studios theme park in Lake Buena Vista, Florida assisted the California team on several scenes, particularly the "Be Our Guest" number. Beauty and the Beast was the second film, after The Rescuers Down Under, produced using CAPS (Computer Animation Production System), a digital scanning, ink, paint, and compositing system of software and hardware developed for Disney by Pixar. The software allowed for a wider range of colors, as well as soft shading and colored line effects for the characters, techniques lost when the Disney studio abandoned hand inking for xerography in the early 1960s.
CAPS/ink & paint also allowed the production crew to simulate multiplane effects: placing characters and/or backgrounds on separate layers and moving them towards/away from the camera on the Z-axis to give the illusion of depth, as well as altering the focus of each layer. Ashman and Menken wrote the Beauty song score during the pre-production process in Fishkill, the opening operetta-styled "Belle" being their first composition for the film.Other songs included "Be Our Guest", sung (in its original version) to Maurice by the objects when he becomes the first visitor to eat at the castle in a decade, "Gaston", a solo for the swaggering villain and his bumbling sidekick, "Human Again", a song describing Belle and Beast's growing love from the objects' perspective, the love ballad "Beauty and the Beast (Tale as Old as Time)" and the climactic "The Mob Song". As story and song development came to a close, full production began in Burbank while voice and song recording began in New York City.
The Beauty songs were mostly recorded live with the orchestra and the voice cast performing simultaneously rather than overdubbed separately, in order to give the songs a cast album-like "energy" the filmmakers and songwriters desired. It ranked as the third-most successful film of 1991 in North America, surpassed only by the summer blockbusters Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.
Upon its release, Beauty and the Beast received near-universal acclaim from critics and audiences alike for its animation, screenplay, characters, musical score, musical numbers, and voice acting. The website's critical consensus reads, Enchanting, sweepingly romantic, and featuring plenty of wonderful musical numbers, Beauty and the Beast is one of Disney's most elegant animated offerings. The film also holds a score of 95/100 on Metacritic, which indicates the reviews as "universal acclaim". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film a rare "A+" grade. Beauty and the Beast has been named one of Disney's most critically acclaimed films.In 2010, IGN named Beauty and the Beast as the greatest animated film of all time, directly ahead of WALL-E, The Incredibles, Toy Story 2, and The Iron Giant. In June 2014, Walt Disney Pictures announced that a live-action film adaptation of the original animated film was in the works, with Bill Condon directing and Evan Spiliotopoulos penning the screenplay. Condon originally planned on not only drawing inspiration from the animated film, but also to include most, if not all, of the Menken/Rice songs from the Broadway musical, with the intention of making the film as a "straight-forward, live-action, large-budget movie musical". In September 2014, it was announced that Stephen Chbosky would re-write the script. [155] In January 2015, Emma Watson announced via her Facebook page that she would portray Belle in the live-action film.
In March 2015, Dan Stevens, Luke Evans, Emma Thompson, Josh Gad, Audra McDonald, and Kevin Kline joined the film as the Beast, Gaston, Mrs. Potts, Lefou, Garderobe, and Maurice, respectively. The following month, Ian McKellen, Ewan McGregor, Stanley Tucci, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw joined the cast, as Cogsworth, Lumière, Cadenza, and Plumette, respectively. Beauty and the Beast merchandise cover a wide variety of products, among them storybook versions of the film's story, a comic book based on the film published by Disney Comics, toys, children's costumes, and other items. In addition, the character of Belle has been integrated into the "Disney Princess" line of Disney's Consumer Products division, and appears on merchandise related to that franchise. In 1995, a live-action children's series entitled Sing Me a Story with Belle began running in syndication, remaining on the air through 1999. Two direct-to-video followups (which take place during the timeline depicted in the original film) were produced by Walt Disney Television Animation: Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas in 1997 and Belle's Magical World in 1998; in contrast to the universal acclaim of the original, reception to the sequels was extremely negative. Disney on Ice produced an ice version of the movie that opened in 1992 in Lakeland, Florida. The show was such a huge commercial and critical success, touring around the world to sell-out crowds, that a television special was made when it toured Spain in 1994. The show ended its run in 2006, after 14 years.