Beauty and the Beast (1991 film)
The video game series "Kingdom Hearts" features a world based on the film, named "Beast's Castle", along with several of the film's characters. In the first game, the world has been destroyed and Belle kidnapped by the Heartless, led by Maleficent, but the Beast travels to Maleficent's stronghold and works with Sora to defeat Maleficent and rescue Belle and the other captured princesses. In "Kingdom Hearts II", the world has since been restored following Ansem's defeat, but Beast and Belle are having difficulties due to the enigmatic Xaldin of Organization XIII attempting to bring out the Beast's darker side in order to turn him into a Heartless and a Nobody, but the Beast eventually comes to his senses and works with Sora once again to defeat Xaldin once and for all. In the game's ending credits, the Beast turns back into the Prince. In "", the world is featured as a playable level but the story is not essential to the main plot. In "Kingdom Hearts χ", the world is featured again, this time as a hallucination that follows the plot of the movie more closely. The characters featured in the series are Beast, Belle, Lumiere, Gaston, Cogsworth, Mrs. Potts, Chip, Maurice, and the Wardrobe. After Gaston is defeated, the Beast transforms back into the Prince. Gaston does not appear in "Kingdom Hearts II", the world's primary antagonist being Xaldin, an original character created for the series, but who shares several traits with Forte, the main antagonist of "Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas".
Belle (Beauty and the Beast)
Before "Beauty and the Beast", Disney's tradition of depicting female characters as victims had already long been established. The fact that Belle was hardly depicted as a feminist in earlier versions of the film became a point of contention among the filmmakers. Despite the fact that Disney wanted "Beauty and the Beast" to resemble an old-fashioned film, the filmmakers envisioned Belle as "a woman that was ahead of her time". As the first woman in the history of Disney to write a feature-length animated film, Woolverton decided to explore Belle as an opportunity to create a female character who would ultimately be better received than Disney's previous animated heroines, specifically Ariel from "The Little Mermaid". Woolverton was aware that the task would be particularly challenging due to the previous character's popularity, but fought relentlessly to make sure that she was creating "a new kind of Disney heroine." Inspired by the women's rights movement Woolverton herself had experienced during the 1960s and 1970s, the screenwriter was determined to avoid creating another "insipid" Disney princess and decided to conceive Belle as a headstrong feminist. Woolverton strongly believed that contemporary audiences would not identify with Belle unless she was updated appropriately, and thus evolved the character into "a woman of the '90s". The screenwriter refused to watch Jean Cocteau's 1946 film adaptation of the fairy tale and chose to base Belle on American actress Katharine Hepburn's portrayal of Jo March in the 1933 film adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's book "Little Women" instead, who she felt was "a real depiction of womanhood." Similarly, story artist Brenda Chapman drew influence from Hepburn's on-screen bickering with actor Spencer Tracy during the scene in which Belle tends to the Beast's wounds.