Beauty and the Beast: It took Disney 26 years to fix this script error

For several years, the Disney studios have been revisiting their great animated classics to give them new life in live action. This is an opportunity for directors to transform famous characters into flesh-and-blood actors, but also – from time to time – to correct minor script errors (for example, in 2019’s The Lion King, where Rafiq’s tail was changed).

But let’s focus on another masterpiece of animation. Signed in 1991 by Gary Truesdale and Kirk Weiss, the first animated feature to be nominated for an Oscar in the Best Picture category, adapted to live action 26 years later, it is, of course, Beauty and the Beast.

Considered by many fans to be one of the most beautiful Disney animations ever made, this little gem of animation does contain a minor plot inconsistency that slips into the lyrics during Lumer’s famous song. It’s a party.

“Ten years of real hardship, covered in dust, without showing our knowledge”complains about the candlestick, which leads to a long period in which the prince is transformed into a beast and the prison staff into pieces of furniture.

Knowing that the Prince is 21 when he meets Belle (as indicated in the film), we can infer from this little sentence that he was transformed at the age of 11. So how does Belle discover her adult portrait?

Even if many fans have tried to theorize this anomaly, it is definitely a script error…which Disney Studios corrected 26 years later in the Bill Condon feature film directed by Emma Watson and Dan Stevens.

Indeed, in the original version of the 2017 film, Lumiere no longer sings “We have been rusting for ten years” (“10 years have passed”) but “We’ve been rusting for too long” (“Too Long We’ve Been Rusting”).

A simple little adjustment that allows us to be much more vague about the duration of the enchantment that hit the Prince and his crew, and thus remove the inconsistency we talked about. However, this change – no doubt related to the issue of tempo in the lyrics – was not carried over to the French version of the film, where Lumiere always refers to the entire decade.

(Re)discover our theory about Prince’s age in ‘Beauty and the Beast’…