Beauty And The Beast: 20 Fiendishly Clever Easter Eggs You Probably Missed
Hidden skulls, decapitated frogs and Battleship Potemkin... Wait, what?
Before the MCU and Pixar came along to corner the market on Easter Eggs and make themselves look both big and clever, Disney was doing it for fans who didn't have the luxury of super high-definition cinema or even a reliable means to pause their home video releases to capture the delightful little secrets. Even if they somehow managed it, actually sharing discoveries would have been impossible without the Internet, so it's a wonder Disney ever bothered in the first place.
But having added a number of Disney fan-baiting references in The Little Mermaid in 1989, Disney went fully Egg-crazy in 1991 for the ground-breaking - and still utterly glorious - Beauty And The Beast. This wasn't just an opportunity to show of CGI, or to adapt a story that was previously deemed impossible for animation, but it became a veritable treasure trove of knowing winks, cameos and secrets hidden in plain sight that fans wouldn't discover for decades in some cases.
Now, thanks to the freeze-frame capabilities of blu-ray, and people having way too much time on their hands (aherm!), the film can be picked apart to see just how clever the animators and writers really were.
Go on, be our guest...
20. Belle's Book Of Easter Eggs
In the very first song, Belle sits down at a fountain to read her new book, having described it as an adventure about a prince in disguise that sounds suspiciously like Beauty And The Beast. To add flesh to the bones that she's basically reading her own future, the film shows her turn the page to reveal a picture.
The picture features a young girl with dark hair and a familiar looking blue dress sitting in the foreground of a castle with tall towers and red roof tiles, and a handsome prince who she seems to have been hiding from.
Beneath the illustration there's also the words 'le prince charmont': Prince Charming for the less Francophiliac viewers out there.
Despite this very obvious shot, the picture still doesn't stop Gaston taking the book off her and demanding to know how she can possibly read it without any pictures. The ruddy idiot.