Tale as old as time, with the odd upgrade

about young love and monsters), working from a script by Stephen Chbosky and Evan Spiliotopoulos, has taken many of the old tale’s more cringe-worthy gender roles and mixed them up in the movie’s bright swirling medley.

Belle’s bookishness is more pronounced, thanks partly to the Harry Potter credentials of Watson. Her performance is a little minor key, still, but Watson lends Belle an intelligence and agency that she has lacked. She’s less of a Stockholm syndrome victim and more deserving of young girls’ admiration. And the Beast, a pile of horns, make-up and effects on top of the former Downton Abbey star Stevens, is more haunted and melancholy.

But as the film nears its celebratory coda, a buoyant pluralism bursts forth. Characters – large parts and small – are freed from their prescribed roles in a glorious dance, shortly after Mrs Potts (Emma Thompson), Cogsworth (Ian McKellen), Lumiere (Ewan McGregor) and the rest come to life. (Be sure to shake your living room and see which British star tumbles out of the furniture.)

Here is where that already much discussed “gay moment”, as Condon has called it, arrives. It comes and goes in a flash.

Josh Gad, the MVP of many a Disney movie, plays LeFou, the doting sidekick of the caddish Gaston (Luke Evans), the dopey pursuer of Belle’s hand.

LeFou spends much of the movie hinting at his affection for his lecherous friend, but LeFou, too, earns a chance for redemption toward the end. That’s all it is – an easy to miss suggestion that LeFou might find another love.

And yet this slightest wink of homosexuality has drawn the ire of some who, it’s worth noting, raised no concerns over a romance between an imprisoned girl and a beast or, for that matter, a candelabra and a feather duster.

In fact, Beauty and the Beast would be better if it dared more such moments and went further with them. Nevertheless, the uproar suggests even this must count as progress.

Perhaps we’ll be ready for a truly up-to-date Beauty and the Beast 3.0 in another few decades. – AP