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Animation Sensations Animation Art gallery has an extensive collection of original vintage animation art, including Beauty and The Beast production cels and drawings, production backgrounds, Courvoisier set ups, and Disney limited edition cels.  We buy and sell original animation art.  Please call or email with inquiries. 

Beauty and the Beast Walt Disney 1991
About the Film

Beauty and the Beast (Walt Disney, 1991) is Walt Disney's thirtieth animated feature film.  The story is based on the fairy tale La Belle et la Bête by french author Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont and a 1946 film version of the novel. This cinematic masterpiece  required the talents of nearly 600 animators, artists, and technicians and took three and a half years to produce. Art directors working on the film traveled to the Loire valley in France for inspiration, and studied the work of romantic French painters like Fragonard and Boucher.

Lyricist and Executive producer Howard Ashman is credited with having the idea to transform the castle's enchanted objects into living creatures with unique personalities. Glen Keane, the supervising animator on the Beast, created his own hybrid beast by combining the mane of a lion, the beard and head structure of a buffalo, the tusks and nose bridge of a wild boar, the heavily muscled brow of a gorilla, the legs and tail of a wolf, and the big and bulky body of a bear.

Computer-generated imagery was used in several parts of the film, most notably in the "Be Our Guest" sequence and in the creation of a striking three-dimensional ballroom background, allowing dramatic camera movements on the animated characters as they danced.  Walt Disney producers and animators were wary of computer animation and unsure how the industry and audiences would react to it.  However new improvements in technology and CAPS (Computer Animation Production System) convinced them to test out computer animation in some of the film's scenes.  Beauty and the Beast was a pioneer in computer-based animation and the success of the ballroom sequence helped convince studio executives to further invest in computer animation.