Movies that Deserved Better: 'Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas' (1997)

         In 1997, eight-year-old me was enamored with an animated film called 'Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas', which is a sequel to the Oscar winning Disney classic. Unfortunately, the film did not strike the same joy in critics, who gave the film a score of 13% on Rotten Tomatoes. In the film, "the lovely Belle (Paige O'Hara) and her monstrous beau, Beast (Robby Benson), are in the midst of the holiday season. While Belle has no problem getting into the Christmas spirit, Beast isn't so easily swayed into a celebratory mood. Meanwhile, the castle's pipe organ, Forte (Tim Curry), becomes opposed to Belle's presence, as well as to her holiday decorating, and schemes to put an end to both her relationship with Beast and any Christmas festivities to boot." The ensemble cast includes Bernadette Peters, Angela Lansbury, David Ogden Stiers, and Jerry Orbach. But what did the critics say?

        Sandie Angulo Chen of Common Sense Media says, "Nothing could compare to the original Beauty and the Beast's splendor. But once audiences lower their expectations to meet the level of direct-to-DVD films, THE ENCHANTED CHRISTMAS is an amusing if unnecessarily dark installment in the "tale as old as time." The musical numbers are catchy and the story compelling, but it doesn't always feel like an actual Christmas movie. The focus on Forte's mission to stop Beauty and the Beast from falling in love takes away from the holiday spirit that permeates the rest of the movie. But on the bright side, Curry is always pitch-perfect playing evil characters, and his desperation to remain BFFs with the Beast is upsetting but surprisingly understandable. O'Hara's Belle is lovely to behold, whether she's dancing around with Chip or telling Beast she just wants him to be happy. She's the heart of the story, and her loving charm makes every Beauty and the Beast ultimately enchanting."

Photo by Brian McGowan on Unsplash

        Tim Brayton of Alternate Ending notes, "Continuing the story makes no damn sense, which is perhaps why The Enchanted Christmas actually doesn't continue the story, but we'll get to that in a moment. In the meanwhile, I was busy making an ass of myself by declaring, in public, that I'm pretty much okay with this spectacularly unworthy sequel. If nothing else, by the standards of the three DTV features that had already been released by that point, the animation in this film is incomparably better, good enough in points that if you didn't know, you might think it was a legitimate production by a legitimate studio - not Walt Disney Feature Animation itself, of course, but certainly better than a TV animation outfit had any right to put out, and maybe this has something to do with The Enchanted Christmas being one of a small number of projects made at Disney's TV animation studios in Canada, something I didn't even know existed until watching the movie's credits." Adding, "But not all is lost: the enchanted objects, the comic sidekicks voiced by the likes of Jerry Orbach, David Ogden Stiers, Angela Lansbury, and newcomer Bernadette Peters (it's kind of stunning how successfully this sequel kept the whole cast intact; the only sub was Haley Joel Osment as upbeat preteen teacup Chip, presumably owing to previous actor Bradley Pierce coming down with a bad case of the puberty) are all, within the relative frame that this is a much cheaper project, entirely fair recreations of the original characters, moving with approximately the same flexibility and expressed with more less the same amount of caricature. The villainous Forte, despite his considerable dramatic flaws, is brought to life with CGI that would have been a whole hell of a lot more impressive in 1997 than it is today, allowing that for this reason, he does not cut together with the other, cel-animated characters at all, and perhaps to minimise this problem, he very rarely appears in the same frame." 

        As for myself, seeing the 'Beauty and the Beast' characters back on screen as a kid was a glorious sight. Who doesn't love the sight of everyone's favorite talking candle and clock back in action? As an adult, it is darker in tone than the film from which it stems at times, but you have to remember the whole "kill the beast" scene and the part about throwing Belle's dad in an institution as blackmail to realize the original is not so clean cut as we think. And that is not mentioning how close Belle came to getting a castle with non-verbal furniture. So watch this with that in mind as Forte is nothing compared to those stakes.