Much as it’s getting kind of repetitive to be doing another piece on the upcoming live-action adaptation of Disney’s classic animated feature “Beauty and the Beast,” here comes another one to really fire up the hype for the ever so closer March 17 international release date. Already the past trailers have emphasized the extreme care that the production has undertaken to take in the iconic detail and beats of the original 1991 animation, as well as the viability of the stars Emma Watson, Dan Stevens, Luke Evans and others in their roles. The final trailer also teased the worth of Ariana Grande and John Legend in being chosen to revive the original theme song sung by Celine Dion and Peabo Bryson (though the trailer version was arguably “superior” in sound quality to the official release).
Now another teaser has been released showcasing the singing and acting chops of star Watson, as she owns her new role as Belle in her “self-titled” crowd song.
A funny girl, that ‘Belle.'
Anybody who’s seen the Disney animation knows about the whimsical crowd song at the start of the movie when Belle walks into her little provincial town one morning, makes token conversation with some townsfolk, and walks the streets with her face to a book as the other people make note of her beauty but still call her weird for loving to read. It introduces her circumstances and that of the antagonist Gaston, how she eschews traditional womanly roles and preferring to “get ideas” and think, while she despises his extreme chauvinism that his fans enjoy.
The classic film also has Belle getting indirect negative rep from her father Maurice, the eccentric inventor, but in this “Beauty and the Beast” retelling Belle alone is the inventor, thus making her ostracizing more pronounced. We also get to see and hear Emma Watson as Belle, singing a few lines of the song and acting as the funny girl – in a not-so-nice connotation – and she’s very good.
So is Disney with their set design for the provincial town, now named Villeneuve after the author of the original fairy tale.
Faithful adaptation
It’s plain to see here that all efforts were made to really sell to skeptics that a live-action “Beauty and the Beast” will work with movie audiences, and it does. So much in fact, that the only criticism now is that such a point-by-point conversion has become superfluous, with no surprises left for Disney to pull.
This teaser hopefully dispels that notion, as well as to invite the viewer to see Emma Watson not as Hermione but as Belle, Disney Princess in the flesh. She definitely rocks the image more than if she had been cast as Cinderella as originally planned.
