Beauty and The Beast is a 1934 animated short film, directed by Isadore Freleng for Leon Schlesinger Productions

Warner Bros. Cartoons

Warner Bros. Cartoons, Inc. was the in-house division of Warner Bros. Pictures during the Golden Age of American animation. One of the most successful animation studios in American media history, Warner Bros. Cartoons was primarily responsible for the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies theatrical...

 as part of Warner bros. Merrie Melodies

Merrie Melodies

Merrie Melodies is the name of a series of animated cartoons distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures between 1931 and 1969.Originally produced by Harman-Ising Pictures, Merrie Melodies were produced by Leon Schlesinger Productions from 1933 to 1944. Schlesinger sold his studio to Warner Bros. in 1944,...

series. released on April 14, 1934, the short is notably the second Merrie Melodie in Color. It was one of the earliest WB cartoon's in Cinecolor

Cinecolor

Cinecolor was an early subtractive color-model two color film process, based upon the Prizma system of the 1910s and 1920s and the Multicolor system of the late 1920s and 1930s. It was developed by William T. Crispinel and Alan M...

.

Plot summary

A little girl is eating too many snacks when she doesn't realize that it is her bedtime. Then the Sandman comes out of nowhere and, sure enough, the girl falls asleep in the blink of an eye. Just then, she has a dream that she is in Toyland, where she encounters all kinds of fairy tale characters. They sing her a welcome song and then meet a friendly toy soldier for the first time while marching in a Toyland parade. Just then, they open a book called "Beauty and the Beast" and sing the title song from out of the pages, but as soon as they are about to get to the next page, a horrible, monstrous beast is about to take her captive. Sure enough, it's an all-out brawl between the girl and the beast. Even a toy airplane can't soothe the savage beast. When she realizes that it's all a bad dream, she gets scared and jumps back into bed, but when she covers herself with the blanket, the flap of her pajamas hangs out when she goes back to sleep.

Censorship

• Some older syndicated prints of this cartoon shorten the part where Humpty Dumpty topples off the wall and shatters into a half-dozen dancing or skating wooden ducks for time and pacing reasons.