Word: beastes
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BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. One day your kids will be taking their kids to this sumptuous Disney cartoon. Adults will be touched too, by a parable about the tyranny of convention and the liberation of love. It's also about magic mirrors, singing candlesticks and the art of drawing pictures that move people. A fairy tale for all ages...
Falling in love and staying there, these movies say, is a challenge of art and artifice. Like making a comedy of insane decor, or remaking a tale as old as time. The Addams Family turns voodoo into visual wit. Beauty and the Beast casts its own shimmering spell...
Beauty and the Beast, directed by Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, is more imposing, close to seamless. Its animators' pens are wands; their movement enchants. Enchantment is at the heart of the story too. A selfish prince (voiced by Robby Benson) lives under the curse of a righteous witch: that he be a beast, confined to his castle, until he can love and be loved. Pretty Belle (Paige O'Hara) will be his cure -- if she can shake off her revulsion at % being his prisoner and shiver out of the clutches of Gaston (Richard White), a way-too-handsome galoot...
With an emotional resonance rare in movies and a pleasing score by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, Beauty and the Beast gets the comic leavening it needs from a nice modification of the Seven Dwarfs. The prince's household staff, who labor under the same curse, have been changed into candlesticks (Jerry Orbach), teapots (Angela Lansbury), clocks (David Ogden Stiers) and armoires (Jo Anne Worley). In the Be Our Guest number, watch closely for the swimming spoons, the dishes stacked in Eiffel Tower formation, the tankards in chorale. The voluptuousness of visual detail offers proof, if any more were needed...
...favor of, what was once known as class. They side with the aristocrats of style -- the haunted prince of B&B and Gomez, a suave prince of darkness -- against the booboisie that presumes to understand and overthrow them. The films' makers are saying that style is what matters. The Beast must learn to chew his food and tamp down his temper and dance without crushing Belle before she can accept him. As for Gomez and Morticia, who moonily recall their first date ("a boy, a girl, an open grave") and rhapsodize about their last ("our lifeless bodies rotting together...