Spectacularly beautiful, if anachronistic.

Rating: 10/10 (7 July 2003)

It's hard to imagine a more delightful telling of a fairy tale. Sure, there are some anachronisms, but this is fantasy: clocks did not exist until the Renaissance, and modern eating utensils (knives, forks and spoons) are decidely not medieval. Above all, Belle is a feminist and a bookworm, two rarities of the Middle Ages, and above all a person more sophisticated and mature than the typical denizen of the Middle Ages. Then again, so is the curse that turns the Prince into the Beast...
Characters are well-defined. We see Gaston, the rival for Belle's affection, a man who could supposedly have any woman of his choosing and can't appreciate his pretty toadies, as a crude, boastful, male-chauvinist pig and as an organizer of mob violence against The Beast.

Disney's trademark anthropomorphism of animals and even such objects as plates, candles, knives, forks, and spoons reaches the zenith in "Be Our Guest", a dance sequence that would have put Busby Berkeley to shame, to music reminiscent of the first movement of Mahler's Third Symphony. (If you don't know who Gustav Mahler was, he was merely the greatest symphonist since Beethoven).
Realistic? No -- it's a fairy tale, one very much in the canon. The best-established fairy tales have lives of their own. An absolute must-see.