Episode 136 - Beauty and the Beast (Gary Trousdale & Kirk Wise, 1991) (with Peter Kunze)
Beauty and the Beast (Gary Trousdale & Kirk Wise, 1991).
The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!
The author of Staging a Comeback: Broadway, Hollywood, and the Disney Renaissance (Rutgers University Press, 2023), Dr Peter Kunze (Tulane University), is the special guest for Episode 136 of the podcast which looks at the impact of Walt Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (Gary Trousdale & Kirk Wise, 1991) and both the industrial and stylistic stakes of the film’s adoption of a Broadway style of musical arrangement. Topics include the film’s place within the Disney Renaissance period of the studio’s animated features and the role of key figures like Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Howard Ashman, and Alan Menken; corporate synergy and the top-down reimagining of Disney’s production strategies during the 1980s and 1990s; song, dance, and the film’s casting of established Broadway voices; the application of emergent computer animation and digital VFX to the presentation and realisation of the film’s musical numbers; and how Beauty and the Beast adapts both the original fairytale and the later fantasy La Belle et la Bête (Jean Cocteau, 1946) in ways that illustrated the contemporary state and status of the musical genre in Hollywood.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
Suggested Readings
Bunch, Ryan. 2021. “Soaring into Song: Youth and Yearning in Animated Musicals of the Disney Renaissance.” American Music 39, no. 2 (Summer 2021): 182-195.
Feuer, Jane. 1993. The Hollywood Musical Second Edition. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Fleeger, Jennifer. 2014. Mismatched Women: The Siren’s Song Through the Machine. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pallant, Chris. 2011. Demystifying Disney: A History of Disney Feature Animation. London: Continuum.
Smith, Susan. 2011. “The Animated Film Musical.” In The Oxford Handbook of The American Musical, eds. Raymond Knapp, Mitchell Morris, and Stacy Wolf, 167-178. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wasko, Janet. Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001.