Beauty and the Beast

The latest in Disney’s campaign to do live-action remakes of all its animated films: Beauty and the Beast. Ironically, redoing its groundbreaking 1991 classic requires a ton of CGI, which means it’s mostly still animated, and yet much of the charm and the wit has been lost in this technological updating. Somehow, an attempt to make royal servants magically transformed into candlesticks and clocks and teapots look more realistic has made them less believable.

The Beast is also still wholly animated, as motion-captured and CGI’d actor Dan Stevens. He looks like a cartoon, but far less beastly that his actual-cartoon counterpart from 1991. Even Belle’s village looks more like something out of Epcot Center, an exaggerated and almost fantastical idea of rural Frenchness, than a supposedly realistic place.

Everything about this new Beauty and the Beast feels like a theme-park mounting of the 1991 cartoon: It’s a watered-down pastiche of itself. It’s very much like the blandified pop versions of the enchanting signature character tunes we typically get over the end credits of animated movies: overproduced and underwhelming, manufactured, flavorless and personality-free. Kids will be thrilled, I’m sure, and appropriately distracted (though at a run time of over two hours, it may try the patience of some of the younger ones), but that’s a low bar when Disney, in 1991, set the bar so high for itself.

The bar for more progressive Disney princesses, like Belle, is also a lot higher now than it was in 1991. Belle here is still bookish, still dreams of “adventure in the great wide somewhere” (though she still does not get it), and still is no pushover even in the face of the cold and cruel Beast; this was radical a quarter of a century ago, but not so much today. This new Belle has a taste for inventing – she comes up with a clever donkey-powered clothes-washing contraption – which is a nice touch, but it doesn’t change the fact that her story remains all about romance. (Emma Watson as Belle is perfectly fine, if rather uninspired. She doesn’t get much room to bring anything new to the character, and she doesn’t seem to try.)

Weirdly, the new script doubles down on Disney’s long-standing problem with absent mothers. There’s a new added backstory about how both Belle and the Beast lost their mothers, but it adds absolutely nothing to the tale. That’s unless it’s intended to suggest that girls who lose their mothers in childhood do just fine – Belle is a lovely and well-adjusted person – but boys who lose their mothers in childhood turn into monsters, as the Prince was even before he was transformed into the Beast.

This new film cannot evade the same pitfall as its progenitor, the implication that it is actually the job of women to tame wild men. (The new script is by Stephen Chbosky and Evan Spiliotopoulos. Maybe Disney should have asked a couple of women to update it.)

The few new songs here – presumably inserted for Oscar eligibility, since only new songs may be nominated – are insipid, on-the-nose things that suffer in comparison to Howard Ashman’s literate and witty lyrics and Alan Menken’s music for the original batch of tunes. (Some of those lyrics have been changed, most notably in villain Gaston’s signature song. I wish I could see any reason why that was deemed necessary.)

Even the most effective sequence, Gaston’s (Luke Evans) rallying of the village to storm the Beast’s castle “The Mob Song,” still retains much of its original power. But even that scene is undercut by a new addition to the story that changes the villagers’ motivation from general human small-mindedness and fear of the unknown into something more specific and less universal.

Oh, and the addition of a gay character? It’s pure ridiculousness to make a fuss about this minor update: It’s nothing more than a glance or three to lend a subtle subtext to a line of dialogue; it couldn’t be more underplayed.

There is stuff to like here, even if the whole package is a disappointment. Kevin Kline as Belle’s father, Maurice, is as engaging as he always is. Josh Gad as Gaston’s sidekick LeFou steals every scene he’s in by embracing the over-the-topness that isn’t supposed to be here but is anyway.

Mostly, though, this is an unfortunate example of the fact that what works in a cartoon doesn’t necessarily work in live-action. In this remake, I never believed that a beauty actually fell in love with a beast, even given the expectation that such a thing isn’t supposed to be extraordinary.

BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (2) • Directed by Bill Condon • Starring Emma Watson, Dan Stevens, Luke Evans • Rated PG • 129 min. • At Century Cinemas Del Monte, Century Cinemas, Northridge Cinemas, Lighthouse Cinemas, Maya Cinemas