The Encyclopedia of Walt Disney's Animated Characters: From Mickey Mouse to Hercules by
John Grant

Character Description of Belle from "Beauty and the Beast" (1991)

It was decided early that the movie's heroine should display a lot more spirit than the somewhat passive virtue of the character in the original fairy tale. The liveaction performance for the animators' reference was supplied by Sherri Stoner, the actress who had not long before served the same funtion so very excellently for The Little Mermaid's Ariel, another feisty female part. Belle's part was spoken and sung by Paige O'Hara, a talented and strong actress who could be relied upon to give the role both depth and variety: she was able to provide the right lightness of touch for the comic scenes and the dramatic strenth required for the serious ones. Belle was also given a very prominent role in terms of appearance time: she is on screen for just under half an hour, which is twice as long as any of the other characters. Her animators, under the supervision of the young Jasmes Baxter (who used an early sketch by xstoryman Roger Allers as a main reference), let her spirit be emphasized as much through her facial expressions as through her movements or her dialouge. Although she has the large eyes typical of many a more passive Disney heroine, they have a slightly exotic shape, and they are certainly very expressive (they also have something of Bambi's about them). Her mouth too, with its quite full lips, is extremely mobile; in tandem with her dialouge, it conveys the impression of a young woman from whose tounge a rapid retort is never far.
Belle is needed to be a strong character if the balance of the movie were to be right: she had, after all, to act as a counterweight to the Beast. She also had to hold her own against the brutish Gaston, and it might have been this that gave the moviemakers the key to her final personality: what holds her together, what gives her her strenth, is the fact that she is a thinking, intellectual young woman placed in era in which women were suppose neither to think nor to be inerested in matters of the mind - as exemplified by book reading.
In terms of capturing our sympathy for Belle, the moviemakers chose to walk something of a tightrope for, while we can understand her wish to escape from her very conservative and tedious (however lovely) surroundings, it would be easy enough to read her aspirations as something not far from snobbery. Throughout her introductory song she has expressed her rejection of the narrowness of "this provincial life" (much as Ariel expressed her yearning for the human world through her song "Part of Your Word" in The Little Mermaid); this could be interpreted as an example of the kind of facile dismissiveness with which spoiled children decide they're far too good for their home backgrounds. We are given another of these slightly mixed messages about her personality as she leads into a brief reprise of that song:

"Is he gone? Can you imagie... He asked me to marry him! Me! The wife of that boorish, brainless..!
Madame Gaston! Can't you just see it?
Madame Gaston... His "little wife"!
No sir! Not me! I guarantee it!
I want much more than this provincial life.
I want adventure in the great wide somewhere -
I want it more than I can tell -
And for once it might be grand
To have someone understand...
I want so much more than they got planned...

Then Phillipe staggers into view, sans Maurice, the main action of the movie is underway, and from then on we recognize Belle for the sterling character she is. This "real" Belle is particularly to the fore when she scries her father's plight and begs immediately to leave what has become something of an idyll in the castle in order to rescue the old man. And, of couse, once we have become properly acquainted with this "real" Belle, we no longer in any way begrudge her the happiness she finds.