Without the layer of abstraction provided by Disney’s cartoonists, it’s harder to ignore the uneasiness of this particular romantic adventure. The same is true in the live-action remake, which stars Emma Watson as Belle, and Dan Stevens, for most of the movie, as the disturbingly tender human eyes that blink from the face of the C.G.I.-swaddled Beast. Even for a viewer too young, as I was, to grasp the psychosexual undertones of a tale as old as this one, the Beast’s physicality-the big buffalo head, the wolf’s tail, all pathos and silly roughness-seemed less like an obstacle in the love story than its central object. At the end of the 1991 cartoon, when the enchantment is lifted, he looks incomplete, vaguely embryonic-a smooth-skinned creature with maidenly bedhead and a tentative smile. The half-buried truth about Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” is that, in the end, the prince is a letdown.
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