Beauty and the Beast wasn’t the first movie in the decade-long Disney Renaissance, but it might be the best. The whimsical retelling of Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s French fairy tale became the first animated film to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, and composer Alan Menken won two Oscars for Original Score and Original Song. So, there’s a lot of pressure on director Bill Condon (The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn) to not screw up the Beauty and the Beast live-action remake, one of approximately 73,492 Disney has in store. The stakes are much higher here than they were for Pete’s Dragon, a movie which few have any fondness for.
Based on the just-released trailer, Disney isn’t taking any chances.
The remake recreates many of the original’s most iconic moments, including the “Beauty and the Beast” dance, Gaston (Luke Evans) demanding the villagers kill the Beast, and Beast (Dan Stevens) saving Belle (Emma Watson) from a pack of wolves. It’s a tale as old as time. The biggest changes are the more “realistic” designs for Lumière (a very flamboyant Ewan McGregor) and Cogsworth (Ian McKellen), and Belle, not her father Crazy Ol’ Maurice, being the inventor in the family. That’s according to a recent Entertainment Weekly cover story, which adds that Menken wrote “three new ballads.” Hopefully none of them involve Belle talking down to the “little people” in her “little town.” No wonder no one, save the book store owner, likes her.
Watch the trailer above.
