All songs were the last complete works for a movie by Academy Award winner Howard Ashman. Ashman died eight months prior to the release of this movie. This movie is dedicated to Ashman; at the end of the final credits, you can read the dedication: "To our friend Howard, who gave a mermaid her voice and a beast his soul, we will be forever grateful."
Dame Angela Lansbury (Mrs. Potts) thought that another character would be better suited to sing the ballad, "Beauty and the Beast." Directors Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise asked her to make at least one recording to have for a back-up; that one recording ended up in the movie.
Glen Keane, the supervising animator on the Beast, created his own hybrid beast by combining the mane of a lion, the beard and head structure of a buffalo, the tusks and nose bridge of a wild boar, the heavily muscled brow of a gorilla, the legs and tail of a wolf, and the big and bulky body of a bear. He also has blue eyes, the one physical feature that does not change whether he is a beast or a human.
The majority of the sculptures seen in the castle are different earlier versions of the Beast.
Many scenes were storyboarded but never animated. Those include a scene where Gaston visits the asylum, and a scene where the Beast is seen dragging the carcass of an animal he killed. Both were considered too gruesome for this movie and the ideas were dropped. However, an animal's skeleton can be seen, though just barely, since it is heavily in shadows, in the corner of the West Wing, leaving a subtle implication of just how far his transformation had affected him.