Beauty and the Beast is garnished with glamour but lacks the inner beauty of the original.

Rating: 6/10 (3 April 2018)

The original hand drawn animation is one of Disney's classics and has garnered acclaim from both critics and audiences. Disney daringly attempted to adapt the tale as old as time with visual effects and live acting. It's able to capture the magical enchanting allure which made the original all so memorable but pales in comparison. Let's face it we all know the story, a prince is cursed and is transformed into a beast and must acquire true love to break the spell. The overall story remained intact and had minor tampering, although some additional backstory elements were included such as Belle's mother. The musical numbers mostly remained the same, with a few alterations, including some new fresh songs to fill up the extended runtime. All the budget clearly went on producing "Be Our Guest" and rightly so! Consistently makes me want to dance and sing along to McGregor's false French accent. The visual effects, particularly the cursed castle items, were top notch as Lumiere and Cogsworth glisten in the warm candle light. The production and costume design were phenomenal and prevented the film from feeling like a musical stage set. Condon was able to produce a cinematic edge to the story that makes it viably enchanting for both younger and older audiences. A few issues that I had were with uninspired lines of dialogue. The script felt too artificial and was unable to inject any sort of natural characterisation. Consequently, this resulted in the actors being portrayed as cosplayers as opposed to real character actors. Watson's singing voice clearly had some modifications *cough* auto tune *cough*, especially during the opening number. I did also find she overacted everything which infuriated me, again it all comes down to this sense of fakery. I will say the supporting cast were excellent and suited their roles. Whilst this is an enjoyable magical romance, it's weighted down by a studio that was fearful of changing anything. Also an openly gay character? Right...