43263 Beauty and the Beast Castle is a towering addition to the LEGO Disney collection and Senior Model Designer Ryan Van Woerkom is sharing insights into his process working on the set.
Beauty and the Beast is a tale as old as time, or at least 30 years – the animated film released in 1991 and since then has enchanted children with its story of not judging by appearances, forgiving others, and the importance of showing kindness to everyone.
It’s also been one of Disney’s most enduring films and so it makes sense that the LEGO Group would want to release a set that captures this legacy and importance. 43263 Beauty and the Beast Castle pays homage to the film – made up of 2,916 pieces, it’s an impressive castle that depicts most of the film’s major scenes and includes the majority of its central characters.
Senior Model Designer Ryan Van Woerkom relished the challenge of building this 18+, 2,916 piece model for Disney fans.
“The castle is your home now”
Ryan is a self-professed Disney nerd, and his love of Beauty and the Beast goes back to his childhood. “It’s one of the video cassettes that was worn out the most as a kid. I was just talking with my mom about it, she was saying that it was more my older sister who influenced that, because she’s a little more of the generation where she was right at that age of seven or eight when the film came out, and so it was her absolute favourite. And then I, as the younger brother, just sort of absorbed that. So it was one of the ones we watched and re-watched,” he explains.
“Belle generally ranks as one of my favourite Disney princesses, so to get to work on this is just a dream come true,” Ryan says, and he wasn’t the only designer with love for the film. “What was also really special was that, for everyone involved, it’s very nostalgic for us; maybe it’s just because we’re all of that millennial age. Everyone was fighting over the opportunity to get to work on the castle.”
Ryan thinks this long-standing love of the franchise will mean it’s popular with a slightly older age group. “This is definitely an 18 plus set. I think the intended audience are all the people in my age demographic who grew up with this film as kids and are now adults, maybe some with their own kids. We’re definitely leaning a lot into the nostalgia and making sure that all the magical scenes that you remember from childhood are in there.”
But with nostalgia comes some surprising challenges as he is working with older material. Ryan had to rely on various sources to understand the castle’s architecture and internal layout.
“There have been lots of iterations of this castle. As a fan, what I find the most enjoyable about this whole process is getting to research all of the ways it has developed over the years. The main reference for this is, of course, the 1991 animated film Beauty and the Beast.
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“The 2017 live action remake wasn’t really part of it; we primarily focused on the classic animation. But for those of you who are fellow Disney nerds, you’ll know that back [in 1991], all of the scenes of the castle were just animated by hand. They did integrate some 3D into Beauty and the Beast, but it was primarily for the ballroom sequence, and so they never had a fully rendered 3D model of Beast’s castle.
“We have an establishing shot at the beginning of the film; we get the transformation sequence at the end, where it goes from the enchanted, cursed castle to a kind of rosy castle; and then we get a couple little views of the castle here and there.
“The best view is actually, I think, when Belle is arriving or leaving with Filipe the horse, and it pans out slowly as she’s going into the forest. But you never actually see the whole castle in a frame. So I have a reference board that I use where I have stitched different frames, I think there are three different movie frames on top of each other, so that I can see the whole height of the castle, because we never actually get all the castle on screen at one time.
“When I worked on sets for Moana 2, we have the digital models in the film, so we can get a turnaround and see exactly what it looks like. But for something like this that was done more than 30 years ago, they don’t necessarily have an archive of all the references they use, so I’m typically relying on documentaries and art books. But, because I’m a Disney nerd, I do that for fun anyway. I like looking at all of the making of the film to try to kind of get in the head space of where the creators of the film were at, what they used as reference, and then, of course, just looking at the film itself, pausing everything, snapping screenshots, and then stitching them together to try to get the best views possible.”
Another set of useful reference points however came from the various Disney parks across the world – Disneyland Paris, Walt Disney World in Floria, Hong Kong Disneyland and Tokyo Disneyland all have versions of the castle.
“It was useful to look at ways Disney has made the castle in 3D – I think the Disneyland Paris theme park was one of the first ones that got it sometime in the 1990s. That’s theme park I go to the most, since it’s so close to us in Denmark. There’s a storybook ride, and you can get around the castle there and we would look at YouTube videos to see how they interpreted the structure of the towers when they were designing the ride.
“Then the Tokyo attraction has a really big and expansive castle too and again we would watch YouTube videos to try to figure out where we think certain towers go. The interesting thing is, each generation of designer and Imagineer has interpreted it slightly differently, so we tried to kind of distil it into the salient features and identify what are the most common things that we see across all the iterations.”
Building a miniature version of LEGO Disney 43263 Beauty and the Beast Castle!
“Just a little change, small to say the least”
43263 is not the first LEGO model of this castle – three versions released between 2016 and 2021 (41067, 43180 and 43196, all with mini-dolls) – but despite its significant piece count and increased price tag, some rooms are missing in this version that were included in others, like Belle’s bedroom. There were various criteria at play to decide whether or not a room was included.
“Beast’s bedroom is attached, I guess, in universe, to the rose room, and it’s in the forbidden wing,” Ryan says. “It was something we realised would take up a lot of space, it had a lot less screen time and didn’t have an accompanying musical number or something particularly memorable. In her room, Belle does have a quick chat with Madame Wardrobe, and there is a cute scene in the Beast’s room where he’s getting ready for the ballroom with Belle, but it would always come at a cost of sacrificing a more iconic room.
“There was a time when the castle was a little bit taller, but it still wasn’t tall enough to accommodate a whole other floor with those rooms, so that was a very easy decision for us to make, to go for the more iconic scenes of the ballroom, the dining room scene for Be Our Guest, and the staircase, where they come down for the first time and see each other with new eyes.”
Getting the size right is essential for a statement piece display like this. “It really is a subjective thing. We’re typically comparing it to the other models of a similar type. And so, of course, 43222 Disney Castle is the flagship of Disney models. It’s one of the most iconic structures; it’s what everyone recognises; it’s the highest price point of a Disney set. There was never really an ambition to make this bigger.
“I always felt that this should have a size somewhere between [43242 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ Cottage] and the Disney Castle. We were always just putting them side by side and seeing how they look together. We’re always abstracting things, shrinking certain aspects, and really just trying to fit in the most iconic and necessary details without too much empty space or unnecessary size.
“This one should still feel grand and quite tall, but it shouldn’t overshadow 43222 Disney Castle. And similarly, with the price point, we wanted this to be a little bit more attainable than the Disney Castle, because not all fans maybe have the space or the budget for such a large set. This offers, I think, a nice in between.”
Despite Ryan’s contentment with the final model, it’s inevitable that some ideas were left on the building-room floor. “I think the first sacrifice, usually, is scale. We tend to start all of our concept models a bit bigger, and they typically end up smaller; in the end, I feel like usually detail is not lost, but actually gained, because as we’re shrinking things to minifigure scale, we’re basically finding the most essential features, and usually discovering new ones along the way.
“This set was actually concepted by a designer friend of mine, Robert [Lehmann] on the Disney team, and his initial concept, I think, was a bit bigger overall. Then as time went on and as we developed it, we narrowed the structure just a little bit, which we felt helped with the perception of height. It actually originally had a bit of a micro-scale build, a front gate and an outer keep before the stairs leading up to the main door. But we ultimately determined that it wasn’t as iconic, so ultimately we lost a small amount, but I think it enabled us to have a model that feels a lot more iconic.”
“Ever a surprise”
Iconography is not easily achieved, and designing a model of this scale necessitates experimenting with lots of different iterations until the final version is chosen. “Sometimes there are iterations that we’re physically building to test something out; sometimes it’s things that we’re just digitally adding and changing over the course of months. It’s kind of this slowly evolving thing, playing around with different architectural features and parts of the castle, and then also just the overall scale,” Ryan says.
“Then with the interior, it was just constantly changing new rooms and playing around with where the rooms are located. Robert, my colleague, and I, spent a lot of time trying to figure out, like where the rooms should go, and ultimately agreed that our current setup made the most sense. The enchanted rose room seemed kind of the most important, but it also required the least amount of space, and so it made a lot of sense to put it at the top.”
Ryan worked on 43222 Disney Castle, based on 2016’s 71040 Disney Castle. One of the big changes between those two models was the castle’s colour – Ryan used the warmer sand blue and sand yellow pieces on his new model, as opposed to the tan and grey pieces used in the castle’s predecessor.
Choosing the right colour was again a key part of the design process of the Beauty and the Beast Castle. “The colour was definitely something we tried lots of different versions of. It’s another one of those interesting things, like the structure of the castle, because it changes throughout the movie from scene to scene – at the beginning, the castle is not enchanted, youf come in and the castle almost appears like off-white, but it gets a lot of reflections from the rising sun that give it a bit of a pink tone. When the curse is lifted at the end of the film, it appears to be almost like marble, like a rose quartz, so there’s lots of lavender hues. And with the interior of the castle, in scenes when it’s representing Beast and Belle falling in love, there’s a lot more of that kind of like rose hue to it.
“I don’t exactly know when our products and other products and versions of the castle started adopting kind of the lavender tone, but you can see it in the Disneyland castles. We tried this castle in white, and it didn’t look quite right – it just didn’t look iconic at all. We tried it in grey, because that is kind of true to the reference of what it looks like when the cast was cursed, but it just looked far too gloomy, and we didn’t want it to look like a haunted house. And then finally, we ended up with the lavender tone, where I think it feels magical and enchanted. And also, I think it does help align it with the expectations of what Belle’s castle looks like from LEGO products and from what you see in other Disney versions of the castle.”
Unsurprisingly, a large number of considerations that go into crafting a set – some of which are related to the model’s design, like its colour, but others are more orientated towards the builder who has purchased the set. Creating an interesting build process is one of these aspects.
“It’s always a part of our build throughs that we do when we’re working with the building instructions designers – how do we keep this complexity level so that it rises and falls? Having a wave so it gets maybe more complex and challenging, and then you give them a break with something maybe more simple and repetitive. So in the build flow of this, we try to do it in layers – you’re building parts of just the wall structure, which maybe is not very interesting, but then you add more interesting techniques for some of the interior furniture or characters. And we also try to scatter the different characters across the experience, so that you’re getting one or two characters every bag or every other bag that are relevant to the different scenes.”
While it may seem like the least significant part of model design, getting that build experience just right is why putting a LEGO set together is so satisfying. Thanks to that careful attention to build flow, along with the other essential aspects that Ryan has discussed; paying attention to source material, selecting appropriate colours and carefully judging the scale is why 43263 Beauty and the Beast Castle immediately tugs on the nostalgia of fans who grew up with the original.
43263 Beauty and the Beast Castle is available to order at LEGO.com. Get a subscription to Blocks, the monthly LEGO magazine for fans, so you’re ready for an exclusive interview about the set in Issue 128 – including a peek at the original digital model that started the whole design process.