Black hair and blue eyes is for some reason a very popular animated color combination (at least, it seems to be in comics - comicbooks are overflowing with black haired, blued people). Blue eyes are enough of a default that Marvel colorists frequently forget what model they're supposed to be following and give Spiderman or the Scarlet Witch (both canonically brown-eyed, and her eye-color is even mentioned in dialogue *and* is supposed to be sign of her ethnic background, given that she's half Jewish and half Romany) blue or green eyes.

Belle was one of my favorites as a little girls, because she read books, something relatively few other heroines did.

(then, of course, there was the near-total lack of anybody with glasses who wasn't a comic-relief nerd, prior to Harry Potter. You had Arthur the aardvark and that one 1940s American girl, and that was it - I shudder to think what it must have been like for any child with a disability, if even near-sightedness was non-existant through not being normal enough).