Until its final scene, there isn’t a moment in the new live-action version of Beauty and the Beast that wasn’t done better in the 1991 animated film from which it derives.
The songs are sung worse: Emma Watson works hard to trill on-key as the real live Belle, but in the original, Belle’s lush and confident voice in the opening number (voiced by Paige O’Hara) is what tells you she is a formidable person to be reckoned with.
The characterizations are worse. Ewan McGregor’s transformed CGI valet, Lumière, doesn’t hold a candelabra to Jerry Orbach’s, or to the latter’s sensational original rendition of “Be Our Guest,” which is the high point of the cartoon but a flat soufflé in this one.
The visual scheme overseen by director Bill Condon is worse. The tavern in which Gaston the hunter sings his solipsistic paean to his own manliness is riotously overdone in the original (which credits Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise as directors) but is just a shadowy, if lavishly, art-decorated set here.
The script is worse, with screenwriters Stephen Chbosky and Evan Spiliotopoulos taking Linda Woolverton’s superbly distilled version of the fairy tale and adding all kinds of pointless “context.” They seem to have been obsessed with explaining things that shouldn’t be explained—such as why the enchantress who transformed the vain prince into a monstrous beast had also turned his castle staff into clocks and teapots and the like. The ridiculous reason given for the fate of the household is that these servants didn’t intervene when the prince’s father was mistreating him—because, you know, servants in pre-revolutionary France really had the means and opportunity to prevent aristocrats from abusing their kids. In any case, this is a fairy tale, and fairy tales are deliberately harsh stories that traffic in sadistic hardship. Trying to explain away a magical injustice in a fairy tale is to misunderstand what fairy tales are trying to teach us.
And adjusting for the time, the special effects are worse. By which I mean, in 1991, something happened in the cartoon that had never happened before: During the scene set to the title song, in which the two title characters dance together, the camera moved and swirled as they did. It sounds like nothing now, but no one had seen its like before. This was the moment at which computer-generated imagery moved from its infancy into its adolescence on its way to becoming the next great advance in cinematic storytelling.
There’s not a special-effects trick here that makes you gasp—as there was, for example, in last year’s Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them—despite the fact that it cost $160 million to make. It’s impossible to make sense out of what they spent that money on.
The movie is making coin hand over fist, so if I say there’s literally no reason for its existence, I’m saying something foolish. It exists to earn a billion dollars in rentals worldwide, and it’s going to do that. But I’m right as a matter of aesthetics: There was no need for a new version of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast without an inspired and original vision of how to do it because, as it happens, the original is all but unimprovable. It is, in fact, one of the greatest movies ever made, and one of the most important.
The 1991 cartoon was released two years after Disney reinvigorated the animated feature with The Little Mermaid, which awakened the form by adding the pizzazz and wit of a first-rate Broadway musical, but still only intermittently. But Beauty and the Beast is a unified whole, seamlessly integrating song and story, emotion and lesson, in a manner that can only be called timeless. And it moves like a bullet train.
Consider this fact: Disney’s powers-that-be ruthlessly decided to cut an absolutely wonderful song called “Human Again” from the original score. “Human Again,” in which the enchanted objects in the beast’s castle ruminate on what they will do when they are restored to life, is so good that it became the showstopper when Beauty and the Beast was transmogrified into a Broadway musical in 1994. But the thing is, in the movie’s own terms, the elimination of “Human Again” was absolutely the right decision. Just 84 minutes long, Beauty and the Beast is practically flawless, in fact, and perfectly paced—but it wouldn’t have been with “Human Again” in there.
One example of how disappointing the new Beauty and the Beast is: It runs 40 minutes longer than the cartoon and has a bunch of new songs in it. They’re all lousy. And none of them is “Human Again.” The movie does leave you on a high, as the restoration of the castle and the enchanted objects provides it with a genuinely exhilarating and well-earned finale. But when the only successful new thing in a remake comes in the last 90 seconds, you’ve been had.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard‘s movie critic.
