Claim: Beauty and the Beast’s Belle can be glimpsed in a scene from The Hunchback of Notre Dame.



Status: True.



Origins: Belle appears during the film’s second musical number, the sequence in which Quasimodo sings “Out There” from atop the roof of the Notre Dame cathedral. As the camera slowly pans down and along a street reminiscent of Belle’s home town in Beauty and the Beast towards a small group of people, Belle appears in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, walking and reading a book (and wearing her blue dress, of course). In the same scene, a sharp-eyed viewer can catch glimpses of a rooftop satellite dish, The Lion King’s Pumbaa being carried by two men with a pole, and a street merchant shaking out the flying carpet from Aladdin.















Another of the self-referential bits of humor that have appeared in Disney films (most notably Aladdin) of late, Belle’s cameo reportedly came about after a storyboard artist included her in the scene as a joke because both Beauty and the Beast and The Hunchback of Notre Dame are set in France (albeit in quite different time periods).

Last updated: 19 August 2007









Sources:



Britton, Bonnie. “Theme of Bigotry Is More Scary than Quasimodo.”

The Indianapolis Star. 21 June 1996 (p. C1).

Murphy, Maggie. “Flashes.”