Emma Watson stars as Belle, a bookish loner who longs to escape small-town France, but who instead becomes the prisoner of the cursed neighborhood beastie. There’s no need to worry that this version might crush the gentle charms of the 1991 picture: Even though Condon more or less faithfully follows that movie’s plot, this Beauty is its own resplendent creature. This Beauty and the Beast is out of step, beautifully, in the same way. MORE How Beauty and the Beast’s Screenwriter Shaped Disney’s First Feminist Princess They were marvelous not in spite of the fact that they were out of step with the times, but because of it. Those projects came to life as the era of the great movie musical was waning, but they were filled with color and bravado, not to mention dozens-if not hundreds-of people essentially proclaiming, “We’re dancing! We’re singing! Loudly! With a big orchestra behind us!” These unapologetically bold entertainments, worlds apart from era-defining pictures like Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, were daring in their own feisty way. In its go-for-broke exuberance and wedding-cake lavishness, this new Beauty most resembles the musicals of the mid- to late 1960s, works like Carol Reed’s Oliver! or the Rodgers and Hammerstein made-for-TV Cinderella, whose star, Lesley Ann Warren, became Cinderella for every kid who saw her. It’s not even a movie of 1991, the year Disney released the animated film that provides its framework. The key to Bill Condon’s wondrous live-action musical Beauty and the Beast is that it’s not a movie of its time.
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