How Disney's Belle Doll turned out like Justin Bieber

From Digital Spy

On Jan. 6, William Herrington of Colorado came across a new Belle doll Disney released ahead of its live-action movie starring Emma Watson. The only problem was that the doll looked nothing like Emma. Nope. Not even close.

The internet and your neighbor's great-aunt were quick to react, accusing Disney of drawing more inspiration from Justin Bieber, the Queen of Hearts (from Alice in Wonderland, and Lord Farquaad (from Shrek) than Beauty and the Beast's lead actress. The doll, which Herrington found at a local J.C. Penney in Grand Junction, is currently not listed on the department store's site. It's also nowhere to be seen on Disney's official online store. Regardless of what happens to this Belle doll, it will live on forever, thanks to the fine meme genies online.

Cosmopolitan.com spoke to doll artist extraordinaire Robert Tonner to find out what might have happened with this particular Belle doll. Tonner, who has been in the doll-making business for 26 years, has designed and sculpted dolls for films like Lord of the Rings, Spider-Man 3, and Twilight (which means he probably knows Robert Pattinson's face all too well). When the first Harry Potter film came out, Tonner and his company were licensed to create an entire collection, which included multiple versions of Hermione and Harry dolls. When he found out about what happened with Emma's Belle doll, Tonner says he tried to look for one for his personal collection. "Right now it might be fun ... for under $20 bucks, I'd buy one for a hoot."

How movie dolls get made:

"Disney knows they have a movie coming out. There are toy people at Disney and they decide they're going to do a Belle doll. So that's the first step, and then they go into sketches and take pictures from the movie, and they have the costume. Then it's handed over to a sculptor to sculpt it. Then you have people over the sculptor to guide and to correct. The big clinker in all this is sometimes the talent has a say in it. [Although] I doubt Emma Watson sat there and said, 'I think the nose is too big' ...

"So you finally get a finished head. Then it goes to a face paint designer who's trying to as cheaply as possible make it look like as close to Emma Watson as possible. There's probably an artist and somebody to do the first paint. Then there are multiple screens made from the face paint - that's a whole other set of artists. It could be literally 100 people that have their hands on it.

"The people who do mass dolls - Mattel, Hasbro, and Disney - they have the best sculptors in the world working for them. They absolutely do. So seeing something like this this is disturbing."

How this doll likely went wrong:

"What happens with a sculptor and doll is that you have to idealize. Emma Watson has very refined features. It's hard to idealize her. It looks to me like what the sculptor did was he made her face a little bit longer to emphasize that she has a long, narrow face, she has not a prominent chin but she has a nice, beautifully shaped chin, but he exaggerated that just a touch. Then the sculpt can get approved because it looks like her but then you have so many other people touching it.

"To me, the head is too big for the doll's body. That's one thing. The hair rooting, the sewing of the hair into the scalp is wrong, it's too high up, which makes it look like she has a gigantic forehead. It also isn't rooted on the side of her head, which also makes it look like her forehead is wider. And then you have the face paint. She has naturally dark eyebrows but if I was doing a doll like this, I would lighten them slightly so it doesn't look so heavy. In a doll, you have to get these features but you have to know what to emphasize. It looks to me like every step up and down the line, there were a lot of hands in it, and it just got terrible."

How it could have been fixed:

"I think there are two steps in where it went wrong. The first step is in the sculpt. The second part is the styling of the doll for production. Had the hairline been lower, had the eyebrows been less strong, it would've looked better. Would it have looked like her? Probably not, but it would have looked better."

How actors respond to their dolls:

"We've done so many sculpts of celebrities. Sometimes the celebrity will look at it, sometimes they don't want anything to do with it. I did Harry Potter. I've done an Emma Watson. Of course, she was a kid then. My understanding was that J.K. Rowling looked at the likeness [of the dolls] and she was the final approval. They were kids at the time so they had less say.

"We had the license to do Halle Berry as Catwoman. The first go around, I thought we nailed the sculpt. I absolutely felt like we nailed it. I sent them the sculpt. The people that were working with her didn't seem, in my opinion, to have experience in looking at unpainted sculpture. It takes an artistic eye, you have to imagine what it's supposed to look like, and look at the form and not the paint. We had to paint this sculpt for them. I painted it, and they started correcting the paint, which has nothing to do with the sculpt. I feel like the sculpt was ruined by the time it went to market because of all the changes they made. We weren't changing the sculpt, we were changing paint.

"We did a Cate Blanchett from Lord of the Rings. I thought that was one of the best portraits we've done, the doll didn't sell but it was really nice.

"We also did Robert Pattinson from Twilight. They were easy. We signed on before the movie came out. My company should not have gotten the license but I guess I was on top of it. They did really well for us. He's our top seller. Harry Potter, Captain Jack Sparrow, and then Edward from Twilight - those have been our top sellers over the years."

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