In the original version of the story “Beauty and the Beast,” though, published in 1740 by the French novelist Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, the Beast seems to be an awful kind of elephant-fish hybrid. His blue eyes can’t quite conquer an ovine face crowned by a majestic lion’s mane and two disturbingly Freudian horns. But in the 2017 live-action movie, the Beast is unabashedly. In the 1991 cartoon, the animated Beast’s goofy facial expressions alleviate the weirdness of it all by making him convincingly human-ish (and so endearing that his actual princely form, as Janet Maslin wrote in her review of the first film, is actually a disappointment, a “paragon of bland handsomeness”). Here, presented by the foremost corporate purveyor of children’s entertainment, is essentially a story about a woman who falls in love with an animal. It’s easy to forget-amid the kicky tap-dancing kitchenware, the twinklingly romantic score, and the swooning waltz in both Disney versions-how strange the central concept of Beauty and the Beast is.
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