Belle, the brave bookworm at the heart of Beauty and the Beast,
is my favorite Disney princess. While I tend to gravitate more toward
representations of her in her peasant dress, when I saw the 2011
Hallmark ornament The Enchanted Rose, in which she wears the elegant
golden ball gown featured in the iconic scene accompanying the title
song, I couldn’t resist snagging it.
This ornament, about two
inches wide at the bottom and standing just over three inches tall,
shows Belle gazing curiously at the rose that the Beast keeps under a
glass dome in the west wing. It’s a little odd in that it doesn’t
exactly capture a moment in the movie. It’s more a mash-up of two
moments. While Belle is within proximity to the enchanted rose
immediately after her idyllic dinner and dance with the cursed prince,
her focus is on the mirror and she barely gives the drooping flower a
passing glance. Hence, although her costume is from the latter part of
the movie, this hearkens back more to her first night in the castle when
her inquisitiveness got the better of her and she tiptoed up to the
forbidden room to investigate its contents.
Despite that
incongruity, I really like this ornament designed by ornament artist
Katrina Bricker, and I’m not the only one. I bought it along with
several ornaments that I lined them up on the shelf for my parents and
brother to look at, and Nathan’s eyes immediately fell upon Belle. While
he liked the others, he couldn’t stop looking at this Disney heroine.
“It’s just so pretty,” he said.
Belle certainly looks
elegant in her golden gown, which is accented by glitter, mostly on the
shoulders and the looping bits of fabric about midway down the skirt. Of
course, there’s no actual fabric here; it’s just plastic. But it’s a
very nice replica of that dress, with the slender gloves to match. She
presses one hand against herself just below the neck, while the other is
poised to remove the glass covering on the rose. So close they
practically brush against the clear plastic, her gloved fingers
practically seem to tingle with a sense of mystery.
The rose we
see here is hunched over, with the front facing away from Belle.
Although it hangs down on the bright green stem, it is in full bloom
without any sign of wilting. Belle’s heart-shaped face is slightly
cocked under her brown hair, and there seems to be a direct line between
Belle’s chocolate eyes and the majestic rose, which rests upon a white
pedestal with a flat green surface on top. She is standing so close to
it that her dress enfolds half of the pedestal at the base.
It’ll
be another several weeks before we pick out a tree to put in our living
room, so I haven’t been able to test Belle’s hanging ability on an
actual branch, but I tried dangling her from a basket handle, which
seemed to work well and didn’t seem to result in any tilting. The small
golden loop in her hair is well placed for hooks. Still, I’m undecided
as to whether I will hang this on the tree; while I think it would look
very nice against those dark green needles, the flat bottom makes it
ideally suited to placement on a shelf. I might just decide to leave
this one on elsewhere in the room.
This is not a magic ornament,
and because Hallmark has so many of those now, I get a bit spoiled and
can’t help craving those elements a bit when they are absent. Still, I
can’t really think of anything that the Enchanted Rose should have
incorporated, and because it isn’t “magical,” the price is more
manageable. If you too were swept up in the enchantment of Beauty and the Beast, it shouldn’t be hard to see the beauty of this ornament.
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