It's not the worst movie but when compared to the original its not even in the same league

Rating: 5/10 (27 June 2017)

As a fan of the original Walt Disney Beauty and the Beast I was quite looking forward to seeing the live action adaption of the story. The trailers looked interesting and following on from Jungle Book last year, I was hoping for a similarly impressive remake.
Beauty and the Beast is a story many of us will know, A poor farm girl gets taken hostage by a Beast, who is under a spell to stop him from returning the his human form as a Prince. The only way the Beast can return to his previous form is if he learns to love another and is loved in return. 'Only true love can break the spell', as it were.
One of my biggest gripes about this movie was that the auto tune is simply horrific. If an actress cannot sing then an actress cannot sing, simple as that. You could try singing and editing it slightly to make do, or you could simply recast the actress and get someone in who can actually sing, to star in a musical, a Disney musical. What you shouldn't do it auto tune the life out of someone's voice to the point that it sounds as far away from lifelike as possible. However, saying that, all the original songs are there, and even if they are sang badly, they still gave me some nice nostalgia.
Following on from the recent Jungle Book adaptation which delivered some of the most impressive CGI that I have ever seen so I was expecting much of the same here. Some of the shots and sequences looked very sharp and beautiful with vibrant colour. Some of the scenes with the live household goods looked impressive and the shots of the castle generally looked very good - especially the library scene and the dancing scenes. However some of the backdrops and landscapes looked quite poor at times, the scene in which Belle runs to the top of the hill near the start of the movie singing and we get a panoramic shot, it simply screams 'green-screen'. The Beast looks cheap at times and not what he should look like, his movements are often not too lifelike and rather wooden. They used motion capture for The Beast to make him as lifelike as possible but when you compare that to movies such as The Planet of the Apes franchise and how they move, you can really see the difference in quality. The scenes in the villages look like something out of a stage play, with lots of close up shots and choppy camera work.
My motto is 'if it isn't broke, don't fix it'. Beauty and the Beast stayed true to the original story with only a couple of subplots and changes, but even with that in mind, it really was missing the magic of the original. The great thing about the animation Beauty and the Beast was the way it connected with us on an emotional, really heartfelt level. A cartoon story between a girl and a Beast, crammed into a runtime of under 90 minutes could still deliver heart and emotion, something which the new adaptation completely missed. The scenes between Belle and The Beast feel awkward. The characters were all very bland and not once did I feel invested or rooting for any of them. Something was definitely missing here. In the original the Beast was a beast for much more of his life and was more out of touch of human interaction however in this version he was transformed into a beast much later on in his life and subsequently is more intellectual, meaning that the relationship he has with Belle is more on a human level.
The movie felt 30 minutes too long, at just over a 2 hour runtime I felt it dragging around the middle period. The pacing was a little off and I did find it boring as time went on.
Overall, I have very mixed opinions on Beauty and the Beast. Part of me liked it and part of me didn't. It seemed to do an OK job of retelling the story but ultimately felt flat and emotionless. It's a beautiful story which is completely driven on emotion however we really didn't see much emotion and that was disappointing. It isn't as impressive as Jungle Book and it is leagues behind the original Beauty and the Beast animated movie.
5/10