La Belle et la B ête has influenced everyone from Ridley Scott in Legend to Francis Ford Coppola in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and its smoke-and-mirrors fantasy of “childlike sympathy” (produced amidst great shortages after World War II) is the equal to any overproduced digital fairyland of today.īeaumont’s “Beauty and the Beast” was written in her native French, but fairy tales travel well across cultures. And yet the narrative is still easily accessible, and much more faithful to Beaumont’s writing than Disney. La Belle et la B ête offers long corridors lit by disembodied hands, busts with glowing eyes flanking a fireplace, moving shadows, smoke pouring from the hands of the beast after a fresh kill, and extended sequences of slow motion, trick photography, and music employed to create an ambiance of enchantment. Cocteau has been named part of the “avant-garde,” and his film work can be more concerned with poetic expression and imagery than plot. Before Disney’s, this was considered the definitive interpretation of “Beauty and the Beast” on film. It is the version Disney adapted for their 1991 musical smash, and the version renowned poet Jean Cocteau made into La Belle et la B ête. Variants on the idea of a beauty in a love affair with a beastly figure are universal and timeless, but in the realm of popular written fairy tales, the French version written by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont is the best known. To do our part in improving that exposure, here are just a few of the live action adaptations of classic fairy tales that make for fine alternative viewing to Disney’s retreads, from around the world and across the history of cinema:įor Beauty and the Beast:La Belle et la Bête (1946, France) More films can and have been made from them, but with how much of a worldwide conglomerate Disney has become, what chance does any fresh approach have in getting a comparable degree of exposure? These fairy tales can be brought to the screen in other ways.
But they are alternate takes on the Disney version, a self-imposed limitation. And if I were being fair to the remakes (and lord, is that hard), they are also valid efforts at adapting these stories. They’re certainly my preferred version in most cases. The cartoon features by Walt Disney and his successors are among the most well-known in some cases, they are seen as definitive. Many of the fairy tales Disney has produced through animation and then live-action are centuries to millennia-old, passing through myriad interpretations. Their existence means we live in a world where you have to specify which Lion King you’re talking about, and there are people who don’t immediately know which one you mean when you say: “the good one.”īut another objection, with repercussions beyond the broken hearts of lapsed Disneyites, is the oxygen they take away from fresh adaptations. The very idea of such repetition was anathema to Walt Disney. Their moral posturing in relation to the originals usually backfires. They’re part of a larger negative trend in Hollywood. There is no shortage of reasons to not like Disney’s live action remakes.