Beauty and the Beast

A little like "Into the Woods" (2014) this is a technically ambitious attempt to reconcile animation and live action with an excellent cast. Again, it works spectacularly as a piece of cinematic innovation - but has no spirit. We know the story: a vain Prince is cursed by a sorceress to remain shut up, hideously disfigured, in his castle until the spell is broken by true love's tear. "Belle" (Emma Watson) does well to keep this almost Ziegfeld-esque extravaganza on track. She manages to avoid the amorous intentions of Luke Evans as "Gaston" before ending up doing the prisoner swap for her father in the castle of the Prince - an extremely well made up Dan Stevens. The additional voice cast line up is great - Kevin Kline, Sir Ian McKellan, Ewan McGregor, Emma Thompson and Stanley Tucci. The songs are reprised from the 1991 version of the story but without the charm and mischief of their original iterations; they are just too precise and dare I say "professional". The technology has now super-subsumed every element of the process to the point that it is almost clinically delivered. The characters and story are still great, but please, Disney, leave something a little rough around the edges for us....

Very disappointed in this movie. I was expecting it to be as good as the cartoon one, but it wasn't. It was actually kind of boring. I also didn't buy in to thier chemistry at all. It looked really cool though.

**An admirable adaptation of a classic tale.** One of the best live-action Disney adaptations, even though that isn’t difficult to achieve, Beauty and The Beast (2017) excellently transports the audience into the magical world of the Beast’s magical and cursed castle. The scale of the tiny claustrophobic village contrasted with the grandiose halls of the enchanted clearly presents the different worlds of the main characters despite grappling with the same loneliness. The cast has two major standouts in Luke Evans’ Gaston and Ewan McGregor’s Lumière. The aesthetics and CGI of this movie are stunning and enhance the film rather than distracting, which would be so easy with so many computer-animated characters.