Recently I watched an animation of Beauty and the Beast, which was different from the one done by Disney. I think it was probably done by a small new company(the quality was terrible, bad continuation, bad storyboarding, shallow character design, cheap sound design, excusable animation, but that was outsourced to China )(ps:this was not even the Thai version, how many rip offs can one story get?)

But my grief aside, the story seemed to be more loyal to the original version of the fairytale, which got me interested in finding the original version online and having a read. The good thing about these fairy and folktales is that they are so old that there's no longer any copyright on them, you can just get them legally online. While looking for it, I stumbled upon a collection of really good illustrations for the story, done by an early 20th century French guy called Edmund Dulac.

He went for a Middle Eastern treatment of the illustrations, which is really interesting to me.
Art noveau +watercolour=genius.

I like it when I see artists with a strong stylization, but yet you can see that they have a really strong command of their medium(Some artists actually have really great skills, but because of their style, all their work looks like it's been scrawled by a 3 year old, which is a waste)


Still on Beauty and the Beast, up till here.

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And here are some illustrations for Hans Christian Andersen,Edgar Allan Poe and some Middle Eastern poems and folktales
The Little Mermaid
The Snow Queen (wow...it's been so long, feels good to read it again)

The Nightingale.It's more obvious in some of the other pictures, but there's a stronger influence of traditional Chinese paintings in this series, in the stylization of the plants, the facial features, colour scheme and composition.

I've heard before that one major difference between Chinese paintings and Western is that Western paintings place a big importance on the humans;the characters are the main subject of the picture(exp: a painting of someone's face). Whereas in Chinese paintings the humans are only part of the background, everything is of equal importance.(exp: a painting of a mountain, and there's a shepherd drawn in small, at the bottom)
Incidentally, Japanese art had a very strong influence on Art Noveau, that was the time when trading brought more exposure of Asian art and culture to the west, and became a sort of fashion.Apparently some artists were fascinated by the scrap Japanese prints used to wrap china bowls or something like that if I remember correctly, next thing you know, the who's who of the art world from Toulouse Lautrec to Mucha have peacock feathers and kimonos decorating their houses. I like that.