A well-known "easter egg" cameo in Disney's 'Hunchback of Notre Dame' (1996) is actually more significant than it first seems

So, lots of people have seen that Belle from Beauty and the Beast shows up for a couple of seconds walking around Paris in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. It's a short cameo, but one that a lot of people have picked up on.What I've never seen really discussed is just why this cameo might be happening. It's not just because Belle is another vaguely medieval French character from an earlier Disney film; rather, the precise moment that she shows up on screen is extremely important to how we understand it.Belle appears just about 3/4s of the way through "Out There," the second song on the film's soundtrack and the one that serves as our introduction to Quasimodo. Initially cowed into submission by Judge Frollo, Quasimodo rhapsodizes about how much he wishes he could leave the bell towers of Notre Dame and walk the actual streets of Paris. The whole song is about how he looks from a distance upon everyone going about their lives and imagines what they're like.What we have here is an unusual conjugation of two "intro songs" for two remarkably different characters (both songs written by Alan Menken, for what it's worth). Belle opens the main narrative of Beauty and the Beast by walking around her tiny village, lamenting in the song "Belle" (again, the second song on the soundtrack and the one that introduces us to the main character) how boring and uninteresting it all is:There goes the baker with his tray, like always The same old bread and rolls to sell Every morning just the same Since the morning that we came To this poor provincial town In contrast, Quasimodo's introduction holds the baker and his tray in very high esteem indeed:Out there among the millers and the weavers and their wives Through the roofs and gables I can see them Every day they shout and scold and go about their lives Heedless of the gift it is to be them If I were in their skin, I'd treasure every instant While both Belle and Quasimodo are upset about their limited environments, they have totally different perspectives on how other people play into that. Belle views herself as extraordinary, and the "little people" she is forced to interact with as inferior, boring, and banal. Quasimodo, by contrast, views himself as hideously inferior, and so envies even these "little people" and their ability to live normal lives out among the rest of the world. Both characters also begin their respective films with exactly one person upon whom they can rely (Belle with her benevolent but incompetent father, Quasimodo with the malevolent but powerful Frollo) before shifting into the orbit of another who disrupts everything they ever thought they knew (the authoritarian Beast and the free-spirited Esmerelda, respectively). The totally inverse qualities of these developments seem to be more than a coincidence, given everything else we've seen.The contrast of these two viewpoints is arresting, to say the least, and certainly something that would seem to require more than a three-second cameo to unpack.TL;DR: In the space of four years, Disney functionally released Beauty and the Beast and Beast and the Beauty. Three seconds of film bridge the gap. via /r/movies https://ift.tt/2ybvGwG