Beauty And The Beast Disney Emma Watson

Director: Bill Condon. Cast: Emma Watson, Dan Stevens, Luke Evans, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Josh Gad, Ian McKellen, Emma Thompson, Ewan McGregor, Stanley Tucci, Kevin Kline. PG cert, 129 mins

Twenty six years ago – yes, yikes – Beauty and the Beast rolled out the red carpet for a second golden age of Disney. It was the first animated film ever to be nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, and won, quite rightly, for Alan Menken’s score and one of the three nominated songs.

It’s the music that makes it particularly special, and appreciating that is entirely the point of the live-action remake. It’s hard to imagine a case for this film’s existence without the songs – without, say, that five-note “Tale as Old as Time” motif, which rivals the one from Close Encounters of the Third Kind as a call-sign for a entire shared past of filmgoing.

Amazon.com: Beauty And The Beast (live Action) [dvd] [2017]

Easily the best move of Bill Condon’s generous update is to grasp the nettle and make an out-an-out, bells-and-whistles musical: something none of Disney’s other refurbishments of its back catalogue lately, from Maleficent through Cinderella and The Jungle Book, have quite had the gumption to attempt.

Menken’s score, and the evergreen lyrics of Howard Ashman – the genius of his art who died before he could even see the original film – are the pulse, the purpose and headline draw.

Not that the design team, headed by the Atonement duo Sarah Greenwood (sets) and Jacqueline Durran (costumes, including that yellow one) have taken a back seat. The Beast’s castle is a triumph – a gnarled, craggy seat of foreboding, with acres of winter garden laid out before it like some frozen-over Versailles. Inside, it’s a darkly sumptuous Gothic dream, with Belle’s bedchamber fit for Marie-Antoinette, and the library… well, just you wait.

Disney Sisters: Emma Watson As Belle In Disney's 'beauty And The Beast'

What’s changed? A running time that’s 45 minutes longer than before allows scope for expansion, including three new Menken songs, which hit character beats and fill in backstory elegantly enough: he’s not trying to bowl us over with these. A prologue now tells us of the Prince (a powdered Dan Stevens, formerly of Downton Abbey), the curse, and the red rose with its dropping petals; there’s more later on Belle’s dead mama, and a deeper relationship with her dad (Kevin Kline), too.

But the core of the story is blissfully intact. It’s fitting, for a tale about gradually discovering inner beauty, that the Beast is tricky to know at first: withheld from our sympathy, hard to recognise as Stevens through the digital fur.

Scene by scene, the film takes its time with him, and we get the hang of the character at the same pace that Belle does. Once he’s belting out baritone laments from the blackened eyries of his home, we’ve understood his soul.

Dan Stevens: 5 Things To Know About The 'beast'

Emma Watson isn’t a flawless Belle. However overawed the character should be by her surroundings, there’s a lack of confidence in her gait – she sometimes seems to be hitting marks obediently rather than owning each moment. But she’s good: that girl-next-door winsomeness and a sweet, clear singing voice see her through.

She’s ideal in close-up, a charming reactor in that trickiest aspect of her craft – feigning delight at dancing crockery. Perhaps Harry Potter gave her an inside track at doing this so well.

And what a makeover the contents of the castle’s scullery have received. The biggest names in the cast line up to do their bit: you might consider Ian McKellen and Emma Thompson vastly overqualified to be voicing a grumpy old mantel clock and a chirpy tea pot respectively, but once you’ve heard their interpretations, you wouldn’t want anyone else having a go.

Amazon.com: Hot Toys Disney Beauty And The Beast Belle Emma Watson 1/6 Scale Figure

Resurrecting some of his Moulin Rouge! va-va-voom, Ewan McGregor is especially delightful as Lumière, the affable candlestick-MC. Menken-Ashman’s Be Our Guest, in Condon’s hands, flings out a show-stopping kaleidoscope of state-of-the-art dazzlement, with perfect licence to get as trippy as it damn well chooses. It even tops the original – talk about throwing in everything

Back in the village, everything’s similarly and satisfyingly familiar – well, except maybe that doting lickspittle of the hunter Gaston, LeFou (Josh Gad), who has been reimagined as a slightly gross and obvious closet case. Much has been made of Disney’s first “overtly gay” gesture in the ballroom-dance finale, but this lasts a fraction of a second – hardly enough to redeem the non-progressive, smirked-at stereotype we otherwise get throughout.

Still, Luke Evans is utterly perfect as Gaston – malignly virile, a camp narcissist in all the right ways, and a paragon of macho bigotry whose sway over the townsfolk has real weight in the third act. His signature song is naturally Gad and Evans’s showpiece, and it clicks whatever your qualms.

Emma Watson's 'beauty And The Beast' Costumes Reflect A Modern Belle

After all, it’s scientifically impossible to hear Ashman’s “I use antlers in all of my DECORATING!” without wanting to hand the whole sequence a bouquet. Or, ahem, sorry, a manly handshake. (Gaston’s own sexuality remains, shall we say, a lively debating point.)

It hardly needs saying that this is not a film for cynics, or anyone with the remotest Disney allergy, or anyone hostile to the whole idea of jukebox revamps. If you’re ticking any one of those boxes, stay away, and if it’s all three, what even are you?

Condon has done virtually everything in his power to make this film work, down to a sugar-rush finale which makes the star cameos pay off like bonus punchlines – or those “very special guest” appearances for 10 seconds at the end of a panto. Gorging all at once on this chocolate box of a picture feels almost greedy, but why stop at once? A large chunk of its audience will be straight back in line for seconds.Emma Watson says she has made her Belle ‘the kind of woman I would want to embody as a role model’. Photograph: Laurie Sparham/PR Company Handout

Hear Emma Watson Sing As Belle In Beauty And The Beast

She’s about to star as the heroine of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, but post-Potter she has received more plaudits for her activism than her acting

I t may seem strange that one of the most anticipated films of 2017 should be a live-action remake of a Disney cartoon about Stockholm syndrome, but Beauty and the Beast has already built up the kind of fan base that is normally reserved for rebooted sci-fi franchises and adaptations of erotic bestsellers. When the first trailer went online in November, it was viewed a record 127m times in 24 hours, beating the previous leaders in that particular field, Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Fifty Shades Darker. Stranger still, 27m of those views were on the Facebook page of the film’s star, Emma Watson.

That figure might suggest that the 26-year-old who played Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter series is now a bona fide superstar. But Watson’s celebrity status is slightly more complicated. As a Hollywood player, she isn’t going to give Jennifer Lawrence or Scarlett Johansson sleepless nights, but as an actor-activist she has the kind of influence that would have been unimaginable a generation ago.

Emma Watson 'beauty And The Beast' Belle Image Is Fan Art

For proof that Watson isn’t yet an A-lister, you just have to glance at her filmography since she hung up her Gryffindor robes. Broadly speaking, she has taken supporting roles in ensemble projects, such as Simon Curtis’s My Week with Marilyn and Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, and above-the-title roles in films that vanished without trace. Alejandro Amenábar’s repressed-memory chiller Regression didn’t recoup its $20m budget, and Colonia (AKA The Colony) pulled in a grand total of £47 in its opening weekend in the UK. Meanwhile, she turned down the title role in Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella, and accepted then dropped out of La La Land, thus handing Emma Stone the part that may well win her a best actress Oscar. In the years between Harry Potter and Beauty and the Beast, in other words, Watson was better known for films she wasn’t in than for films she was.

‘She is clearly not an activist of the old school’ ... Emma Watson at the Noah film premiere in New York. Photograph: Startraks Photo/Rex Shutterstock

In contrast, Kristen Stewart followed her stint in the Twilight series by embracing arthouse cinema and being embraced right back: she was the first American female actor to win a César award for her performance in Clouds of Sils Maria. And Harry Potter himself, Daniel Radcliffe, has grabbed every possible acting opportunity, from big-budget capers (Now You See Me 2) to indie curios (Swiss Army Man), from television (A Young Doctor’s Casebook) to theatre (Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead). Compared to them, Watson is barely trying.

Emma Watson To Play Belle In Disney's Live Action Beauty And The Beast

But there is more on her mind than acting. Having stepped away from the business to study for an English degree at Brown University in Rhode Island, she now spends as much time on feminism as she does on films. In 2014, she became a UN Women goodwill ambassador; in 2015, she was named on the Time 100 list of world’s most influential people, and last year she continued to make headlines by, for example, leaving feminist books around the London Underground system.

None of that may appear very remarkable: Watson isn’t the first film