 Hoping to release a film that achieved similar success, the studio decided to adapt the fairy tale "Beauty and the Beast" by Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont into an animated film.Prior to getting professionally involved with Disney, Ashman and Menken had collaborated on a musical adaptation of "Little Shop of Horrors" and its subsequent musical film adaptation.Following the studio's attempt to adapt the fairy tale into a non-musical animated film under the direction of Richard Purdum, Disney CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, dissatisfied by the direction in which the film was headed, ordered that it be scrapped and restarted from scratch, this time in the form of a musical.