Beauty and the Beast slipped around all my roadblocks and penetrated directly into my strongest childhood memories, in which animation looked more real than live-action features. Watching the movie, I found myself caught up in a direct and joyous way. I wasn’t reviewing an “animated film.” I was being told a story, I was hearing terrific music, and I was having fun.
The film is as good as any Disney animated feature ever made—as magical as Pinocchio, Snow White, The Little Mermaid. And it’s a reminder that animation is the ideal medium for fantasy, because all of its fears and dreams can be made literal. No Gothic castle in the history of horror films, for example, has ever approached the awesome, frightening towers of the castle where the Beast lives. And no real wolves could have fangs as sharp or eyes as glowing as the wolves that prowl in the castle woods.
The movie’s story, somewhat altered from the original fable, involves a beauty named Belle, who lives in the worlds of her favorite library books and is repelled by the romantic advances of Gaston, the muscle-bound cretin in her little eighteenth-century French village. Belle’s father, a dotty inventor, sets off on a journey through the forest, takes a wrong turn, and is imprisoned in the castle of the Beast. And Belle bravely sets off on a mission to rescue him.
We already know, from the film’s opening narration, that the Beast is actually a handsome young prince who was transformed into a hideous monster as a punishment for being cruel. And a beast he will be forever, unless he finds someone who will love him. When Belle arrives at the castle, that lifesaving romance is set into motion—although not, of course, without grave adventures to be overcome.
Like all of the best Disney animated films, Beauty and the Beast surrounds its central characters with a large peanut gallery of gossipy, chattering supporting players. The Beast’s haunted castle contains his entire serving staff, transformed from humans into household objects, and so we meet Lumiere, a candlestick; Cogsworth, a clock; and Mrs. Potts, a teapot with a little son named Chip. These characters are all naturally on Belle’s side, because if the Beast can end his magic spell, they, too, will become human again.
There are some wonderful musical numbers in the movie, and animation sets their choreography free from the laws of gravity. A hilarious number celebrates the monstrous ego of Gaston, who boasts about his hairy chest and the antlers he uses for interior decoration. “Be Our Guest” is a rollicking invitation to Belle from the castle staff, choreographed like Busby Berkeley running amok. And there is the haunting title song, sung by Mrs. Potts in the voice of Angela Lansbury.
The songs have lyrics by the late Howard Ashman and music by Alan Menken, the same team who collaborated on 1989’s The Little Mermaid, and they bubble with wit and energy (“Gaston” in particular brings down the house). Lansbury is one of a gifted cast on the sound track, which also includes Paige O’Hara as the plucky Belle; Robby Benson (his voice electronically lowered and mixed with the growls of animals) as the Beast; Jerry Orbach as the candlestick who sounds uncannily like Maurice Chevalier; David Ogden Stiers as the cranky Cogsworth; and Richard White as the insufferable Gaston, who degenerates during the course of the film from a chauvinist pig to a sadistic monster.
Beauty and the Beast, like The Little Mermaid, reflects a new energy and creativity from the Disney animation people. They seem to have abandoned all notions that their feature-length cartoons are intended only for younger viewers, and these aren’t children’s movies but robust family entertainment. Perhaps it is inevitable, in an age when even younger kids see high-voltage special effects films like Die Hard or Terminator II, that animation could no longer be content with jolly and innocuous fairy tales. What a movie like Beauty and the Beast does, however, is to give respect to its audience.
A lot of “children’s movies” seem to expect people to buy tickets by default, because of what the movie doesn’t contain (no sex, vulgarity, etc.). Beauty and the Beast reaches back to an older and healthier Hollywood tradition in which the best writers, musicians, and filmmakers are gathered for a project on the assumption that a family audience deserves great entertainment, too.
Before Sunrise
R, 105 m., 1995
Ethan Hawke (Jesse), Julie Delpy (Celine). Directed by Richard Linklater and produced by John Sloss and Anne Walker-McBay. Screenplay by Richard Linklater and Kim Krizan.
They meet cute on a train in Austria. They start talking. There is a meeting of the minds (our most erotic organs) and they like each other. They’re in their early twenties. He’s an American with a Eurail pass, on his way to Vienna to catch a cheap flight home. She’s French, a student at the Sorbonne, on her way back to Paris. They go to the buffet car, drink some coffee, keep talking, and he has this crazy idea: Why doesn’t she get off the train with him in Vienna, and they can be together until he catches his plane? This sort of scenario has happened, I imagine, millions of times. It has rarely happened in a nicer, sweeter, more gentle way than in Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, which I could call a Love Affair for Generation X, except that Jesse and Celine stand outside their generation, and especially outside its boring insistence on being bored.
There is no hidden agenda in this movie. There will be no betrayals, melodrama, phony violence, or fancy choreography in sex scenes. It’s mostly conversation, as they wander the city of Vienna from midafternoon until the following dawn. Nobody hassles them.
Before Sunrise is so much like real life—like a documentary with an invisible camera—that I found myself remembering real conversations I had experienced with more or less the same words.
You may remember him from Dead Poets Society, White Fang, or especially Reality Bites, in which he played a character who is 180 degrees different from this one. She starred in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s White, as the wife who eventually regrets dumping her husband. Here she is ravishingly beautiful and, more important, warm and matter-of-fact, speaking English so well the screenplay has to explain it (she spent some time in the States).
What do they talk about? Nothing spectacular. Parents, death, former boyfriends and girlfriends, music, and the problem with reincarnation when there are more people alive now than in all previous times put together (if there is a finite number of souls, are we living in a period of a five-to-one split?). Linklater’s dialogue is weirdly amusing, as when Jesse suggests they should think of their time together as a sort of “time travel,” and envisions a future in which she is with her boring husband and wonders, “What would some of those guys be like that I knew when I was young?” and wishes she could travel back in time to see—and so here she is, back in time, seeing.
A sexual attraction is obviously present between them, and Linklater handles it gently, with patience. There is a wonderful scene in the listening booth of a music store, where each one looks at the other, and then looks away, so as not to be caught. The way they do this—the timing, the slight embarrassment—is delicate and true to life. And I liked their first kiss, on the same Ferris wheel used in The Third Man, so much I didn’t mind that they didn’t know Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten had been there before them.