I've been doing a lot of thinking about
Beauty and the Beast today...mainly after reading
this Entertainment Weekly article, "Beauty and the Beast trailer: 5 Callbacks to the Original Film."
I have a weird relationship with this film...as a child, I loved this movie. Like a lot. (It was no
Little Mermaid, though. That was, and remains, one of my top three favorite Disney movies. And Ariel is probably my favorite princess, since Tink is a fairy and Elsa is a queen.) After all, Belle was a bookworm -- she read books! Just like me!
But
Beauty and the Beast is also the only film I've changed my opinion about after teaching this course for a few years -- it's the one film where I find most of the criticism to be accurate, raising some really interesting questions and issues.
It's also the film that has the most plot-holes to me -- where "fairy tale logic" breaks down the most.
(For example: where does Chip come from? Lumiere says the servants have been "rusting, needing so much more than dusting" for ten years -- but at the end of the film, when the household objects all turn back into servants, "Chip" looks like a little boy about 6-8 years old. And his mother, Mrs. Potts, is an adorable white-haired old lady who looks like she might have a thing for Maurice, Belle's father. So where exactly did Chip the little teacup come from? It doesn't seem like he was born when the castle was cursed so...)
But another one of the big plot holes seems to be addressed in the trailer. As the EW article points out, one of the links between the live-action film and the original animated film is the Beast's slashed portrait:
"We don’t see the Beast in this teaser, but we do see what his claws can do. In the original, he slashes a portrait of himself in his pre-Beast form. Here, it’s a portrait of him as a young boy with his parents."
Okay. So here's my issue with the original, animated film. Here's the portrait of the Beast from the animated film:
Okay. Cool. He looks like a handsome prince, a fairy-tale staple.
But.
Again, as Lumiere tells us, the servants have been "rusting" away for 10 years. So far, so good.
But.
We also know that Beast has until his 21st birthday to break the spell -- otherwise, he'll stay a Beast forever. This is pretty much the year our story starts -- which explains why Beast is extra moody and the servants extra
needy desperate eager.
Now, I may be an English major, but even I can handle that math: If Beast is 21 now, and they've all been enchanted for 10 years, that means Beast was ELEVEN years old when the strange woman knocked on his door, demanding shelter.
Guy in that portrait above? Definitely not eleven years old. (In fact, he bears a remarkable similarity to what non-beast-Beast looks like once the spell is broken.)
Also--the plot basically hinges on the fact that an eleven year old boy is punished for not letting a stranger into his home. Clearly, wherever his parents are (another plot hole), they managed to teach Beast a little thing known as "Stranger Danger" before they left.
[Sidebar: I suppose you
could argue that the spell freezes them all at the age they were at the time of the enchantment, but I remain skeptical. Because, again, Chip. Clearly a little kid. And, after 10 years of being a teacup, you would think that he would have matured a little bit...but then again, I've never been magicked into a teacup, so what do I know.)
Regardless, I very much appreciate the fact that Beast's portrait has been appropriately aged-down:
Which, hopefully, means that Stephen Chobsky noticed the same glaring plot holes that I did.
Now, if they'll only address how the villagers didn't seem to know about the giant castle and the emo Beast living in the forest, we'll be in a good spot. (Because if you can march to a castle, on foot, as a giant angry mob, it's clearly not that far away.)
