Disney dearly hopes you will not see this French adaptation of the fairy tale definitively penned by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, because just about any competitive live action film will suffer in comparison. Of course, there is already the Jean Cocteau masterpiece and Disney’s own exceptional animated feature. However, for pure visual spectacle, it will be hard to equal Christophe Gans’s “Beauty and the Beast.”
The story is still a fairy tale, suitable for a mother to tell as a bedtime story for her two rapt children in the film’s framing device. Belle is also still the beauty and consequently the apple of her merchant father’s eye. Sadly, all of the old man’s ships are lost at sea, forcing his family into provincial poverty. Yet, clean country living agrees with Belle, but not so much with her five entitled siblings.
