There's Something Sweet, and Almost Kind

     In this new age of Disney films, the main event seems to be live action remakes of Disney renaissance films such as The Jungle Book, Lion King and Cinderella. One of the most popular remakes of the Disney renaissance movies would be the Beauty and the Beast remake, featuring Emma Watson as Belle. In a review made on theatlantic.com, David Sims dives deep into how this “Tale as old as time” was told worse. The story of transformative love, and learning to see someone’s inner beauty is a tailor-made Disney movie at heart. The 1991 original film is one of Disney’s greatest animated works. But in the 2017 edition of Beauty and the Beast to Sims “feels particularly egregious, in part, because it’s so slavishly devoted to the original; every time it falls short of its predecessor (which is quite often), it’s hard not to notice” (Sims,1).

    Sims mentions the added time to the remake due to extra songs which execute a little more of a back story to certain characters and adds continuity to programming the schedule of the storyline. One of the major songs critiqued in this review is Ewan McGregor’s rendition of the Disney classic, “Be Our Guest.” Sims describes the overall clarity of the song in the film to be one of the better songs on the soundtrack due to its “magical musical fashion,” but lacked in the aptness of task due to the new rendering of servants that were blocky and had a lifeless quality to them. Along with the new renditions of all time Disney Classics, the company also has the tendency to utilize the on-stage talent ingredient by bringing along a well known celebrity such as Emma Watson. Sims mentions that although she may have seemed fit for the role, there was only so much that she could’ve played with to bring forth and make Belle her own without striving from Belle’s archetypal role.