Gender:
Beauty and the Beast does not pass the Bechdel Test. There are only two named women in the movie, Belle and Mrs. Potts. These two women never have a conversation about something other than a man. They either speak about the Beast or about Belle’s father, Maurice.
The other female character that Belle speaks to in the above scene is never named. The other females in this movie are portrayed in a very stereotypical fashion. The ‘Bimbettes’ are a homogeneous trio who seem to portray a swooning, driveling female character. The other women in the town are seen with armfuls of babies or baking bread or doing other stereotypical ‘womanly’ things. There are no men in these scenes tending to any children.
Babette, the feather duster, is encouraging of Beauty and the Beast’s love, yet the only time we see her in the film she is Lumiere’s girlfriend and nothing more.
Gaston is a goldmine of masculine stereotypes. He is described as strong and handsome by some and rude and conceited by others. He thinks that women should stay home and take care of children and tend to the household. He organizes a wedding without first asking the to-be-bride to participate in said wedding.
In Gaston’s song (called Gaston), it is sung that all males in town are inspired by him and it is not very hard to see why (at this point, the Bimbettes swoon and fall onto Gaston). He decorates only with antlers and drinks and gets into fights often. He is the archetype of traditional masculinity.
The Beast is another form of masculinity, though not quite as obviously as Gaston. The Beast is explosive and volatile for the first half of the film. He has a clear position of power over Belle. There is speculation that Beauty and the Beast is an example of stockholm syndrome, with many arguments for or against this notion. I found a still from the film that really highlighted the disparity in power between Belle and the Beast. For context, this is just after the Beast saves Belle from being attacked by wolves when she runs away (because the Beast had a temper tantrum). With Belle kneeling at the Beast’s feet and him towering over her, we can see exactly how much power he has over her and everything else in the castle, with the other characters much smaller in the background.
Race:
Many of the townspeople of Belle’s ‘poor provincial town’ are shown in Belle’s song Little Town. Every single person shown in the town is Caucasian.
At the end of the film, when all of the household objects are turned back to humans, every one of them is also Caucasian. In fact, in the entire film, the only person whose skin is not milky white is Monsieur D’Arque. He portrayed as a villain and his skin is tainted green.
We assume that this film is based in the mid 1700’s in France. During that time period, France had a population of approximately 20 million people and was the third most-populous country in the world. In the latter half of the 18th century, the Age of Enlightenment began and encouraged people to look critically at slavery, which France had been very involved in. Slavery in continental France was abolished in 1789.
Because of the above information, we can assume that there were people of color living nearby Belle’s hometown and could even assume that if the Beast were a real person, because of his affluence and the abundance of the slave trade, he would have owned a slave or two.
Sexuality:
There are a number of heterosexual relationships explicitly shown in this film, Lumiere and Babette, Gaston and the Bimbettes, Gaston and Belle, and of course Belle and the Beast. There is not a single LGBTQ+ relationship explicitly shown in this film.
Lefou, Gaston’s henchman, is portrayed as an expressively gay man in the 2017 live-action remake of the film. He was not explicitly homosexual in the 1991 animated version of the film. There is also speculation of a relationship between Cogsworth and Lumiere in the film because of ‘the way that they look at each other‘. There is a coding system for queer characters who are not expressively queer, with a list of Disney characters here.
Critical Review 