Kirk Wise makes animated characters worth listening to, with a gift for brisk storytelling that leaves room for feeling. We rate his work with Gary Trousdale on Beauty and the Beast particularly highly, while questioning the romance’s assumptions.
Fi1m perspective
Belle is impatient, the Beast uncertain, and the household objects eager to contribute: in Beauty and the Beast (1991), Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale make each character worth watching. There is room for all of them within 84 minutes, without the emotional exchanges feeling hurried. We were moved by the Beast’s uncertainty, because the directors give it time even while keeping the fairy tale brisk. The songs keep the story going, and the supporting cast has something to do. It is the clearest reason to value Wise: he gets us interested in the characters quickly, then lets them hold our attention.
His work in story development and storyboarding helps explain that clarity, as does his attention to voice performers. He encourages improvisation from voice actors. That seems a useful freedom when even a household object needs a personality. Yet assigning the film’s success to Wise alone would be careless. Trousdale co-directed Beauty and the Beast, their first feature, and remained his directing partner for The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) and Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001).
The Hunchback of Notre Dame brought prejudice and redemption into their work; Atlantis: The Lost Empire took them towards steampunk adventure influenced by Jules Verne. The move suggests a willingness to try more than one kind of animated story. The latter received mixed reviews. Wise’s later supervision of the English-language version of Spirited Away (2002) put his experience with voices to a different use. That was work on Hayao Miyazaki’s film, and should not be confused with directing the original.
Beauty and the Beast is still our recommendation, with a reservation about its romantic assumptions. The pleasure of spending time with Belle and the Beast can make those assumptions easier to overlook, and they deserve more scrutiny than that. Watch it for the attention paid to every character, including those who might reasonably have been left as furniture.
Biography
Kirk Wise is an American film director, animator and screenwriter. He was born on 24 August 1963 in San Francisco, California. He graduated from Palo Alto High School and studied character animation at the California Institute of the Arts.
Wise began his career as an assistant animator on Disney's The Great Mouse Detective (1986) and worked in the story department on several features. With frequent collaborator Gary Trousdale, he co-directed the animated features Beauty and the Beast (1991), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) and Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001). He also supervised the English-language version of Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away (2001).
