The Disney renaissance began with The Little Mermaid in 1989, and the next big princess movie was Beauty and the Beast in 1991. The studio's animation department had a lot riding on the project, mainly to prove that they could continue making magic after Ariel's success. To create buzz for Beauty and the Beast, they proposed screening it at the New York Film Festival, two months before its premiere date -even though the movie wasn't finished.
The programming team had been putting the finishing touches on that year’s festival slate, which included pictures like Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Veronique and Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse — not exactly the kind of movies among which one would expect to find a musical romance from the Mouse House. Disney was seen as corporate, antiseptic, G-rated, while the New York Film Festival had introduced American audiences to the early work of Jean-Luc Godard, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Martin Scorsese.
What’s more, Beauty and the Beast was only about 60 to 70 percent finished. The “work-in-progress” version incorporated four different stages from the movie’s long, arduous creation: storyboards, rough pencil-sketch animation, cleaned-up black-and-white animation, and final color footage. You could see coffee stains and paper folds and marginalia. Sometimes a character would be accompanied by arrows and hand-scribbled numbers. (The film had been in production for four years but in development for decades. There had been numerous abortive starts, and the project had come close to having the plug pulled on it several times.)
Directors Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale were very nervous about the film festival screening. Read what happened at Vulture. -via Digg
(Image source: YouTube)