Belle's Tales of Friendship

Now we finally get to the last of the “Beauty and the Beast” series, “Belle’s Tales of Friendship,” released in 1999, a prequel to “The Enchanted Christmas.” Never heard of it? Well, that’s because this movie only had a VHS release and was never re-released on DVD. Also, much like a lot of these direct-to-video sequels, this one was made to promote the short-lived Disney Channel series, “Sing Me a Story with Belle.”

The film actually has two episodes from the show. The first one is “Working Together,” where Belle, played by Lynsey McLeod, owns and works at her music and bookstore in France. The friends she has in this bookstore are a cat named Harmony (Jeff Conover), Big Book (Jim Cummings), and two book worms Lewis (Jim Cummings) and Carroll (Christine Cavanaugh and Amber Hood). One day, a group of children come to the store: Shawn Pyfrom, Kirsten Storms, Natalie Trott, Hampton Dixon, Jennefer Jesse and Julie Vanlue. They want to help Belle clean the store while at the same time Belle tells the kids two stories, one about Hansel and Gretel and the other about Morris, the Midget Moose.

“Reap What You Sow” is the other episode featured in this film, where Belle is fixing chili soup for everyone, but Shawn and Harmony are not helping. To fix this situation, Belle tells everyone the story about The Little Red Hen and The Three Little Pigs.

Finally, there is an animated feature with the original voice actors called “Mrs. Potts’ Party.” For those who may not remember my “Belle’s Magical World” review, I will quickly go over this segment. This was an episode planned for the television series and was released in the 2003 DVD release of “Belle’s Magical World,” which also had episodes from the same television show that were later scrapped. This segment shows everyone that Mrs. Potts, voiced by Anne Rogers, is feeling depressed since the sun hasn’t been out for a while and it has been raining. Belle, voiced by Paige O’Hara, gives the idea to throw Mrs. Potts a surprise party to make her feel better. However, Lumiere (Jerry Orbach) and Cogsworth (David Ogden Stiers) cannot agree on the flowers or cake, making a huge argument in the planning, but at the same time, everyone is not wanting to wake the Beast (Robby Benson).

My thinking is that the film does a good job telling kids that they should be a part of the team, since it shows a few of the children being selfish and lazy, and Belle does a good job teaching them that they should not be. Although children might be scared of the parts of the Hansel and Gretel and The Three Little Pigs stories, or even the animated segment of “Mrs. Potts’ Party.”

Personally, I would probably agree with Jason Wheeler when he said in his blog, “Utterly pointless. Sure it’s an actual sequel to the original film, but Belle telling stories comprised of classics is not a good idea for a complete film. Why not have had THIS as the series?”

As much as it shows a good job teaching kids basic principals in life, I personally did not see a need for this sequel. I had searched for this sequel since I was able to get the rest from the library, but VHS’s are very hard to find, and after watching it, I did feel that this felt like a special for Saturday mornings. It wasn’t until recently that I found out what it was trying to promote.

Heed my advice and try to not find this sequel. If you are able to get it on VHS somewhere, you will be able to know exactly what I was talking about with this movie. You will see that there was no need for this, but Disney was going through a bit of a phase with trying to get money off of their animated sequels. This was at the time when they were making sequels to their smash-hits, much like how they are doing now with remaking their animated movies into live-action movies.

Phew, I finally got that out of the way. Stay tuned tomorrow when I talk about another sequel that only had a VHS release in “Disney Sequel Month.”