What does she want?

“I want adventure in the great wide somewhere!” Belle sings it to us directly. She gets her adventure, but while the castle is certainly more than the provincial life she feared, being confined there is not a great wide open space. When she leaves the castle to go to her father, she has a second adventure, but again this isn’t a great wide somewhere. She can’t have both of the things she asks for, apparently.

Also notice how she complains that nothing changes in the quiet town where every day is like the one before and then ends up in a castle where everything has been the same day after day for years. In this case, however, she herself brings the change she wants and makes everything different.

What does he want?

It isn’t said directly, but apparently more than being human again the Beast wants to lash out and punish others for his unhappiness. He might want to be human, but he has no hope that it can happen and assumes it never will, so being angry at the world is all there is, along with being angry at himself for causing this mess. My own speculation is that while he doubtless started out blaming everything and everyone but himself, over the years he’s come to admit to himself that his own behavior led the enchantress to cast the spell, and he’s owned up to his own role in his misfortune. But that’s not what will break the spell, so he’s still always ready to spread his misery to anyone in striking range.

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How can she be so casual about a sheep chewing the corner off a page in her book? What is wrong with you, Belle? How can you love books and not care what happens to the pages? In my mind she swipes the book away and frowns sternly just before the sheep can take a bite.

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I’m uncomfortable every time I see a movie with wolf scenes like this film has. Philippe the horse might have something to fear, but basically wolves don’t attack human beings without a reason like rabies or the human is violently threatening the pack. I’ve heard that European wolves may have been less hesitant to attack people than U.S. wolves are, but scenes like this are essentially Medieval anti-wolf propaganda.

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Things I never noticed before:

• For all the talk of how much Gaston is admired and adored, at the start of the story everybody pretty much ignores his pleading for them to get out of his way. He’s not more important than their own business (or gossip).

• The Beast is in body a beast. He’s gigantic, has fangs, has massive paws with ravaging claws. But by all appearances he doesn’t physically harm Maurice in the slightest. He has the power to inflict a nightmarish mauling, but instead places the man in a cell uninjured.

• “I have been burned by you before!”

• The castle staff have been living under this spell for ten years and most days there is nothing to do but lie around idle. I’ve watched Beauty and the Beast several times, and heard “Be Our Guest” even more, but I had not really listened to these lines. Now I finally hear how miserable their lives must be in this near-vacant castle with only the Beast to feed, and the rest of the day (every day) reduced to sheer emptiness.

• Although we the audience have seen the prologue, Belle has not. For all she knows, the Beast has been a beast his entire life. She’s left to figure out for herself that he was once human.

• When Belle sneaks into the west wing of the castle, she’s being spectacularly rude. The enchanted staff have just gone out of their way to break rules for her, and she repays them by slipping off into the one part of the castle she knows she’s not allowed into and where Cogsworth and Lumiere have just begged her not to go. Worse, when she gets into the Beast’s torn-up room and sees the flower in a glass case, she goes right over and takes the case away! It’s the one precious item in a devastated room that gets careful treatment (along with the hand mirror beside it), but she doesn’t respect the painfully obvious intention to keep this flower safe. Her curiosity has led her past common decency and good sense.

• In the song “Something There,” the Beast entertains (though quickly dismisses) the idea that Belle might now care for him. It could be that he is finally coming to see something in himself he hasn’t seen before (or saw only, as a human, in an entitled, privileged, false way): that he is someone worth loving.

• At the end of the movie, Mrs. Potts assures Chip the couple will live happily ever after, but she isn’t saying this to the audience, or not to all of the audience. She’s saying this to her son, because of course this is how you answer a small child; yet the rest of us don’t have to imagine things are as simple as that in a relationship.

• The closing credits have a couple of voice credits for characters labeled “Bimbette.” No. No. No. Ugh.

For a sideways look at the 2017 live-action remake, see here.