Originally entitled Beauty and the Beast: A Christmas Belle, and since renamed Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas (a better title, IMHO!) it is set during the winter when Belle is still being held prisoner by Beast in the castle; this story slots in to the interval after Beast's rescue of Belle from the wolves and before he makes her a gift of the castle's impressive library. It is said to elaborate further on the causes of the Beast's transformation, and introduces a number of new characters. Forte, for example, is the Court Musician who is quite happy to be an 'enchanted object' - he has been transformed into a huge pipe-organ - as he is able to control Beast with music ('Music soothes the savage Beast, I guess). Reputed to be an impressive example of CGI usage, Forte will be voiced by Tim Curry (if you ever saw 'Legend', you'll remember him. He was red. With horns. And the yellow eyes...)

The film was made by Walt Disney Animation Canada (WDAC) in record time - a mere 16 months - compared to the normal 3 - 5 year span. This was possible, in part, because the majority of the characters had been designed and animated in the original film - hence, the long and tortuous process of creating new characters, finding voices etc. could be bypassed. Additionally, artwork created for the original film could be used in the new one, or could be used as reference material to speed new work.

More on this and other Disney direct-to-video projects can be found in this article at the online Animation World Magazine.

See stills and .AVI clips from the film on Disney's Web Site... click here!

Like many people, I hold the original film as something of an achievement and complete in itself. It seems to me to be a bad thing to try and fiddle with the story and insert new segments; it disrupts the way the original is perceived. Of course, if you don't see the sequel, what's the problem... well, the problem is it's there. Every time you see the original again you know that there's a chunk of stuff that went on that they didn't tell you about first time round. Apart from that, I see continuity problems for this like nothing on earth. There'll be so much 'but why didn't they mention it/realise' type analysis afterward.