For my major project I adapted the 1756 edition of ‘Beauty and The Beast’ written by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, designing it for a modern day film. The story intrigued me with it’s elements of the female gothic genre, with the idea of a young female heroine being entrapped in a domestic space. I played on this idea of intrusion in my designing of the Beast, making him a grotesque, invasive character.
Beauty’s character design is based around typical beauty standards of the 19th century. Her makeup is very natural with porcelain skin and perfectly flushed cheeks.
My choice to design the Beast as a human came from research into Julia Kristeva’s theories on the abject as well as the idea that when you can see parts of your (human) self within something that you find repulsive, that makes it all the more scary.
Beauty’s sister was designed to showcase a difference in her values comparative to Beauty’s. The sister values only class and worries only about how she is perceived by the rest of society. Because of this I chose to design her as wearing much heavier makeup and with tightly curled ringlets.
