The movie is incredibly faithful to the original Disney animated film that I loved so much when I was younger; there is everything: Belle walking down the village singing the Bonjour song, asking her father is she was ‘odd’, Gaston as pompous as ever, LeFou as in love with him as ever, Maurice taking a rose for her at the castle and the horse bringing Belle to him, the ‘demand’ that she join the beast for dinner, the way he scared her when she found the rose, the way he saved her from the wolves, and the big library!, and the disgusting way he ate his soup before and the funny way they both ate it later, and the time in the garden, with the “there may be something that wasn’t there before” song, and the ball and its preparation, and the mirror, and the townsfolk wanting to lock Maurice in an asylum...
They changed only a few things. Some of them don’t matter, I accept them very easily - Gaston goes with Maurice to see where Belle is supposed to be but Maurice can no longer reach the castle, so Gaston thinks he’s an old fool. Maurice tells him he’ll never agree to him marrying Belle, so Gaston ties him to a tree and leaves him there to be eaten by wolves, but Agatha finds him and saves him. Fine by me, it was effective and it showed even more how horrible Gaston was.
The beast has an enchanted book that can take him everywhere, and Belle uses it to visit the home in Paris where her parents lived; when her mother got sick her father ran away with her to protect her, to ensure that she wouldn’t get sick too. I’m fine with that.
The living-objects in the castle tell Belle about ‘a curse’, although they can’t tell her her part in it, but still she knows well ahead that he is a prince, and they also tell her that their prince was once a nice boy but then his good mother died and his bad father raised him to be like him... which serves to explain why he was an arrogant and heartless jerk who deserved to be cursed.
There are two more songs, one from the little prince after he lost his mother and one from the beast after he let Belle go.. I didn’t much care for them but they were ok.
I don’t much like the beast’s singing voice, but he looks a lot like the original prince, so that makes it ok enough.
I think there’s another song that wasn’t in the old movie, the one Belle sings after attending to the beast’s injuries.. That’s ok.
At the end they show us that Agatha is the enchantress, and even if Belle was too late - and not ‘almost’ too late as in the original movie - she sees Belle crying for his dead love and breaks the spell, reviving the castle. I can definitely live with that (although I wonder, if the enchantress has lived all this time in the village and knows them all, why didn’t she ever curse them?? Or at least Gaston!
They added a joke at the end, when Belle asks him if he would mind growing a beard, and that was not only fine but a lovely thing to add, because she had come to love that beasty-face.
Then there are a couple more changes, and I can’t accept these: after Belle has brought the beast back to the castle, after he saved her from the wolves, and they have that lovely fight - “if you hadn’t scared me I wouldn’t have run away”, you know which one - she doesn’t thank him for saving her life. She will, later on, in a ‘supposed-to-be-funny’ scene, but she doesn’t here and now and that was a mistake, because it was important, I always loved that bit because it’s the turning point for him, the first time she was nice to him. It was the first time she had a sweet voice while talking to him, and the first time he didn’t growl at her but replied in a tender tone.
The other thing: after the beast let Belle go, Cogsworth asks why did he do it, when they have so little time left to break the curse, and here it was Mrs Potts who said “because he loves her”, it wasn’t him. It may seem a technicality, a small detail, but there’s a difference between someone saying that a man is in love and the man saying so himself. They only hoped that Belle would love him so to break the spell, but they didn’t actually know how he felt. This was the moment when he confessed out loud that he loved her, he said it to them and to himself, and it was important. They shouldn’t have changed it.
Other than that it was very nice, I liked it a lot. Belle was always my favourite Disney character and I loved her here too.
It doesn’t ruin the movie, no, because there’s a lot in it that is as lovely as the original movie, and the ball was very lovely, and they kept the snow-fight, although they should have added a frightened face when he knocked her down, not a laughing one :-p
Even the credits were beautiful! Two/three little details and it would have been ‘perfect’.
Belle-Emma Watson
Beast-Dan Stevens
Maurice-Kevin Kline
Cogsworth-Ian McKellen
Lumière-Ewan McGregor
Plumette-Gugu Mbatha-Raw
Maestro Cadenza-Stanley Tucci
Gaston-Luke Evans
LeFou-Josh Gad
Mrs Potts-Emma Thompson
ITA la bella e la bestia
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