Belle and Sebastian Cartoon
Tuesday, July 8th, 2008
Judging by ‘Belle and Sebastian’, you’d think that the band got their name from a cartoon. It’s easy to make that assumption. Not only are Belle and Sebastian important characters in a pair of Disney movies (Belle in Beauty and the Beast, Sebastian in Little Mermaid) but Belle and Sebastian is also the name of an older Japanese cartoon based off a French live action series.
Yet neither of these answers is correct. In fact the name comes from an old French novel called Belle et Sebastien, a story upon which the later cartoon was also based. It’s the tale of a young boy, Sebastien, traveling around the countryside in the French Alps with his dog Belle and getting into all sorts of adventures. The book was written by Cecile Aubry, a now-retired actress and filmmaker who used her son as the original Sebastien in the black-and-white television series.
So at some point one of the band members from Belle and Sebastian read the book (probably during their childhood), and the name stuck into their head until, in 1996, the band was born.