In Defense of Disney: Beastly Boogaloo

This one is short enough that I'm not even going to bother with a cut. I hardly need to go on at length about Belle, both because the criticism of her is so short, and because it’s ridiculously obvious to anyone who’s actually watched Beauty and the Beast that she is a badass.


Character: Belle, from Beauty and the Beast (1992)

Criticism: “Saves a prince’s life. With her only asset, her sexuality.”

Again, did you even watch Beauty and the Beast? The way to save the prince was for him to love someone, and earn her love in return. That means that 1. It was Belle’s love, not her looks, that saved the day, and 2. It had to go both ways; she had to be a strong enough person to love him as the beast in order for the spell to break, and an awesome enough woman for him to love her back. It wasn’t “find a hot chick and love her” it was “find someone, who you can love, who will also love you back, even though you’re both a big hairy beast and kind of an asshole.” Plus, if you’ve ever had any kind of dating life at all, you know how hard it can be to find someone you can stand to be around for more than five minutes at a time, never mind someone you can love for all eternity.

Additionally, Belle does save the beast’s life several times using things other than her sexuality. Once, she hauls his unconscious ass back from the snowy forest, when she could have just ridden home and left him to freeze/bleed to death or be eaten by the wolves. If anything, her being a woman is a disadvantage here (I still don’t know how she heaved his bulk onto that horse, being a country girl who reads in her spare time, not lifts weights, but I imagine a feat of strength akin to women lifting cars off their children. Or, you know, he came to long enough to help her, but the first option is more fun.) Then, during the climactic fight, Belle pulls the Beast towards her after he gets stabbed, preventing him from plummeting to his doom, and then helps him climb back over the railing so she can profess her love and save him again (both from succumbing to his wounds, since apparently the transformation also heals him, and from being a beast forever).

Besides the life saving, Belle is also smart, well read, unafraid of shouting matches with the beast, loves her father, and has a million other excellent traits, including patience, kindness, self-sacrifice, a longing for more than a provincial life, some form of medical knowledge, the ability to take talking objects in stride, and excellent aim with a snowball. How is her sexuality her only asset? She saves the beast because they fall in love, and they fall in love because she’s an awesome person, as well as because she can see past his rough exterior. Her being beautiful is just a perk, really. If Belle had been pretty but stupid, or mean, or shallow, it never would have worked. Her asset, with which she saves Beast, is all of her, and how dare anyone reduce her to just a pretty face?

And of course there’s the magically magical love in general, which not even beastliness, Gaston, or stab wounds to the kidney can thwart.

All the other essays in this series can be accessed via the 'in defense of Disney' tag.