Beauty And The Beast very much falls in to my Cinderella pile. As comparison piece to the original animation, this live action adaptation loses each battle it tries to forge. The ability to build a world using animation makes for a much more expansive, escapist aesthetic, and this kind of world building is very much missing in the remake. Belle’s (Emma Waston) ‘small provincial town’ looks exactly like what it is, a sound stage in a warehouse somewhere in Hollywood. Things get slightly better when we get to the castle scenes, but this time the problem lies not in the look of the sets but in the look of the characters. Lumiere (Ewan McGregor), Cogsworth (Ian McKellen), Mrs Potts (Emma Thompson) and co. don’t possess half the charm of their 90s predecessors, with the focus on making the ornaments look as ‘authentic’ as possible limiting their opportunity for real expression.
