That was a morality tale in which Beauty deserves her happy ending-the prince, his riches-because of her modest decency, which just so happens to coexist with her superior intelligence and undeniable good looks. Belle’s story, Tatar writes in the introduction, is a “mere nostalgic remnant of a vast repertoire of stories” about similar pairings-fairy tales and folktales that turn “antagonists into allies,” allowing us to pursue an “understanding of what we share with beasts even as we try to discover what makes us human.”īoth of Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” movies are essentially faithful to the durable, child-friendly version written by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont for her Magasin des Enfants, in 1756. He looks back at her knowingly, and gives a short, beastly roar.Ī new book from Penguin, edited by Maria Tatar, titled “ Beauty and the Beast: Classic Tales About Animal Brides and Grooms from Around the World,” provides some historical context. Such thoughts are out of bounds, needless to say, in the Disney garden.” And still, at the end of the remake, as Belle is dancing with her prince, who wears powder-blue pants and a hair ribbon, she asks him, flirtatiously, if he’d consider growing a beard. In Anthony Lane’s review of “Beauty and the Beast” for the magazine, he noted the glint and tug of sex in Jean Cocteau’s 1946 “La Belle et la Bête,” in which the Beast, after becoming a man again, says to Belle, “It’s as though you missed my ugliness.” Lane writes, “The lady preferred the animal. When Belle and the Beast met at the top of the grand staircase, and “Tale As Old As Time” started swelling, the woman-a stranger, and a perfect one-leaned over to me.
EMMA WHATSON TOON SEZ FULL
During the duet “Something There,” Watson sings, about the Beast’s suddenly apparent sweetness, “I wonder why I didn’t see it there before.” (I wanted to yell, as if to a girlfriend across a bar table, that the delay might have been because her man was a bison.) As the song continued, the Beast sang, full of pathetic wonder, “When we touched, she didn’t shudder at my paw,” and the woman sitting alone one seat away from me, who had treated herself to two wines during our Alamo Drafthouse matinée, started to giggle. 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.
0 kommentar(er)
