Belle’s Tales of Friendship (1999)

Starring: Lynsey McLeod, Paige O’Hara, Robby Benson, Jerry Orbach, and David Ogden Stiers
Grade: F

Well, I thought Belle’s Magical World was bad, but Belle’s Tales of Friendship managed to send the Beauty and the Beast franchise into the grave.

Summary

Starting with an oversimplification of the events from the first Beauty and the Beast, with a focus on the friends Belle encountered along the way, we cut to the live-action “Belle’s Book and Music Shoppe”. As two puppet caterpillars, Lewis (Jim Cummings) and Carroll (Christine Cavanaugh), read one of Belle’s favorite books James and the Giant Peach, they are interrupted by Belle (McLeod) herself. They beg to go on her traveling book cart into the village. She’s down, though she wants them to help decorate the book cart first. At the same time, she has to clean the book cart and the rest of her shop. She walks inside and realizes how much cleaning she still has to do. She tries to talk aloud about it next to her lazy prick of a cat Harmony (Jeff Conover), but the overly large puppet is still napping. The aptly named Big Book (Jim Cummings), a talking puppet book, interrupts because he says he’s allergic to dust. She points out that it wouldn’t be dusty if she had help, but Big Book says he can’t because he’s in the middle of a good story.

Then again, maybe he’s coping with the fact that he doesn’t have arms.

Later, Belle’s mopping is interrupted by a group of kids who show up to hear Belle read some stories, but she insists they’ll have to wait until she’s finished, unless they help. Trying to convince them it could be fun, a girl named Kirsten (Kirsten Storms) refuses. Belle tries to guilt trip her but to no avail. After two kids knock over some books trying to help and argue on how to fix the problem, Big Book suggests the first story of the day, Morris the Midget Moose. This 1950 short, narrated by Big Book, basically shows how teamwork between the diminutive Morris with big antlers, and a regular sized moose with small antlers, worked together to become friends and as a result, one complete moose. The story inspires the other kids to work together, but Kirsten still doesn’t “feel like it”. Sometime after, as the kids lie to themselves about how much fun they’re having doing chores, Kiersten tells Belle she wants to hear a story. She even calls helping “silly” when Belle tries to convince her to join the rest of the kids. This inspires Belle to call for a break and tell another story about friends helping each other.

She tells the story of Hansel and Gretel, a reworking of the 1932 short Babes in the Woods. Through Belle’s narration, we watch how Hansel and Gretel wander into the woods, befriend some elves, and get captured by an evil witch. Once she turns Hansel into a spider and is about to turn Gretel into something equally grotesque like all of the other trapped children/animal hybrids she has in her home, the elf army shows up to save the day and shoot her out of the sky. Falling a hundred feet, the uprising of saved children, after Hansel and Gretel use a potion to turn them back into humans, drag out a cauldron for the witch to fall in. She falls out and turns into a rock for the rest of eternity.

All things considered, it’s a pretty morbid short.

This is enough to inspire Kirsten to join in on the chores.

Following this, Belle, Lewis, and Carol talk about this gingerbread house they made. They hear some sky rumblings and talk about it potentially raining too, so Belle uses this as an opportunity to bring up a story about Mrs. Potts (Anne Rogers), giving us the original short Mrs. Potts’ Party. Finally, we get to see the animated Beauty and the Beast characters! This story takes place during the timeframe where all the characters were still cursed objects of the Beast’s (Benson) castle. It’s been raining for days on end, and Mrs. Potts gets a bit depressed because of it. She’s so out of it, she offers tea to Belle (O’Hara), but it’s just warm water. Realizing she’s fucked up her only purpose, she excuses herself from the room to regroup and think about things. Belle has her rest in her room to feel better. Meanwhile, the Beast sleeps, still tired after repairing leaks from the castle roof the night before.

After talking with Chandeleria (April Winchell) about Mrs. Potts state, Belle decides something needs to be done. They need to have a party for who Lumière (Orbach) considers to be the “heart of the castle”. Belle, Lumière, Cogsworth (Stiers), and the others all spring into action to set up this surprise party to lift Mrs. Potts’ spirits. Unfortunately, no one is on the same page on how to approach said party. It starts with the cake. They enlist Chef Bouche (Jim Cummings) to make it, but Lumière and Cogsworth argue over if she would like angel’s food cake or devil’s food cake, creating a separation for new characters and married oven mitts Tres (Rob Paulsen) and Chaude (April Winchell). Going along with this, Lumière and Cogsworth argue over the presentation of everything else from the music to the flowers. Additional problems surface when Cogsworth runs into Mrs. Potts while he wheels around his load of flowers for the party. Trying to keep the secret of the party alive, he tells her it’s for Beast because he has a new fondness for them. Unfortunately, the lie spirals out of control because Mrs. Potts then insists on helping Cogsworth put all the flowers in Beast’s room. Thankfully, Beast is sleeping, but who knows what he’ll do when he wakes up. Belle tries to keep everyone on the same page in hopes of making this party happen, but it becomes increasingly harder as time moves on. Sadly, these household objects argue over everything, can’t seem to compromise unless something disastrous happens, and love to complicate things with easily avoidable misunderstandings.

Later, we will go back to the live-action Belle, as she continues to teach the children in her bookshop about helping, getting what the fuck you deserve (The Wise Little Hen), teamwork (The Three Little Pigs), and friendship.

My Thoughts:

With Belle’s Tales of Friendship, Disney tries its hand at making a PBS-like show. With a lighthearted vibe, lessons, cartoons, interactive puppets, and a real-life Belle leading the charge, they try their best in making a direct-to-video film version of Disney’s Sing Me a Story with Belle show. Now, you picked the right Disney princess for a format like this. Belle is the type of person to teach, and the bookstore setting allows for the type of show they want to create, but if you’re binging the Beauty and the Beast franchise and watch this because you’re expecting a fourth adventure of the characters you love, you will be disappointed. You have to sit through way too much shit to see the one segment you want to see. This is entirely a boring, “let’s teach kids a lesson or two” special while shoehorning animated shorts from the Disney vault into the show to make it somewhat watchable. Are the cartoons decent? Sure, but it doesn’t make this a necessary sequel to watch.

The “lessons” were bullshit too. Belle tries to pass them off as several individual lessons for the children, but most of them are redundant. It also felt a little insincere. It seemed more like she just needed help cleaning her bookstore and would guilt trip and lie to the children nonstop into helping her. There’s not a child you can find in the entire world that would exclaim “This is fun!” when putting books on a bookshelf, but Belle’s Tales of Friendship manages to find two of them. Who the hell are you trying to fool? For the most part, the puppets worked for the show they were trying to make, but Harmony the cat was detestable. This gigantic son of a bitch would just sit there and do absolutely nothing. His sole contribution was influencing one of the other kids to be a fat, lazy fuck just like him. Harmony is perfectly okay with not helping or moving an inch, and Belle just accepts him for who he is (at least until the closing minutes of the show). Then, Harmony has the audacity to ask why he didn’t get a bowl of chili at the end of the movie? Honestly, Belle should’ve strangled the good-for-nothing puppet. It would’ve been a great lesson for the kids too: Karma is a bitch.

Side note, when Belle and the kids settled down to eat the chili they prepared, they all toasted with a glass of milk. What kind of Canadian shit is this? Chili with MILK?! ARE YOU INSANE?

Regardless of everything else boring anyone over the age of four to tears, the animated Beauty and the Beast segment, the only reason I forced myself to watch this movie, wasn’t half-bad. In fact, it was the only thing inherently worth a shit. Plus, it takes up a solid chunk of screentime. Oddly enough, it was the only thing that felt out of place because the format of Belle’s Tales of Friendship was so different. Since most of it was live-action with five-minute animated shorts, the fifteen-or-so minutes of Mrs. Potts’ Party felt like an entirely different special that didn’t actually fit the Belle-centric movie. It doesn’t even make sense as to how this turned out the way it did, but it’s the truth. It would’ve made a lot more sense had this segment been in Belle’s Magical World rather than this sequel, simply because of the narrative structure. With the way things play out, Mrs. Potts’ Party doesn’t work in this movie, despite it being the only good thing about Belle’s Tales of Friendship.

It doesn’t include a lesson nor relate to anything Belle is doing. She just brings it up because her caterpillar friends bring up how it might rain. It doesn’t fit the story they’re trying to tell at all, but it takes up the entire second act. This movie is all over the place.

One major point I brought up in my review of Belle’s Magical World was how it basically showed how a television show based off the Beauty and the Beast world couldn’t work. However, this lone segment in Belle’s Tales of Friendship shows us how they could’ve pulled it off. Just so everyone doesn’t live in fear of Beast and walk on eggshells around him, they keep him asleep! Weird, they actually had a full segment that wasn’t asinine just by not including the Beast of Beauty and the Beast. Actually, now that I think about it, this also reaffirms why you can’t make a cartoon show based on this property. The Beast is the coolest thing about Beauty and the Beast. Though the show flows better without him, you can’t not have him. Otherwise, the show should be called Beauty and Her Household Object Friends.

As you can see, this show would have a shelf life of about 4 episodes.

Though it’s cool to see animated shorts from Disney’s vault being repurposed for a new generation, Belle’s Tales of Friendship is a complete waste of time, especially if you’re a Beauty and the Beast fan. This exists purely to milk the 1991 film for all it’s worth. If you want to see a show like this done right, just watch PBS. They need the viewers.