Development
Director Kirk Wise mentioned that the Beast was challenging to design, saying that he and co-director Gary Trousdale "didn't care for" the early designs for the character because they were mostly "variations of a man with an animal head." They asked Chris Sanders, who was part of the Beauty and the Beast story team, to draft the designs for the Beast. Sanders came up with designs based on birds, insects, and fish before coming up with something close to the final design. The Beast's supervising animator, Glen Keane, refined the design by spending months surrounded by a zoo of animals for inspiration in developing the character. He looked at a mandrill in the London Zoo named Boris and a gorilla named Caesar in the Los Angeles Zoo. Keane said of the final result,
| “ | The first challenge was to design a Beast that felt real, felt like a real animal from earth ... The animal that most inspired me was the buffalo. There seems to be an incredible power and size in a buffalo. But he has very sad cow eyes that say there's a gentleness inside of him. | ” |
Keane's final result was the face of a mandrill, brow of a gorilla, beard and muzzle of a buffalo, tusks of a boar, neck hair of an ibis, and body of a bear atop the legs and tail of a wolf.
When Glen Keane and one of Belle's animators, Mark Henn, were drawing their respective characters in the same scene, they had to coordinate their work across the country. Henn was at the Disney-MGM Studio in Florida, and Keane was at the animation studio in Glendale, California. To keep the scenes harmonized, the animators had to exchange drawings daily by courier.
Read more about this topic: Beast (Disney Character)
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