Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Making Disney’s new ‘Beauty and the Beast’ come alive in latest liveaction remake
Disney has had great success recently with its live-action, if heavily CGI-assisted, remakes of the studio’s beloved animated features “The Jungle Book,” “Cinderella” and “Alice in Wonderland.”
Now the time has come for what is perhaps the company’s most admired cartoon of all, 1991’s “Beauty and the Beast,” to get the same treatment.
Starring Harry Potter supergirl Emma Watson as Belle and a computer-generated, fur-covered Dan Stevens as the prince-turned-monster, the elaborate new production was directed by Bill Condon (“Dreamgirls,” “Gods and Monsters,” the last two “Twilight” films) and features an expanded score by the animated musical’s composer Alan Menken plus three new songs he wrote with lyricist Tim Rice.
Don’t be alarmed, though. Most of the tunes like “Be Our Guest,” “Gaston” and the title track Menken and the late Howard Ashman put together for the ‘90s version are here as well, some with lines that were left out of the cartoon. So are all of those lovable household objects that live in the Beast’s cursed castle, with the classy likes of Ian McKellen, Ewan McGregor and Emma Thompson voicing Cogsworth the clock, Lumiere the candelabra and Mrs. Potts the teapot, respectively.
Looking more or less like themselves, Kevin Kline, Luke Evans and Josh Gad bring life to, also respectively, an expanded role for Belle’s father, Maurice, her vain rejected suitor, Gaston, and that egomaniac’s enabling sidekick, LeFou.
Shot at England’s Shepperton Studios on village and castle sets designed to capture the 18th-century French flavor of Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve’s 1740 fairy tale, the new “Beauty” is undeniably a feast for the eyes and ears.
Like it had better be. But it also had to walk the tricky line between recapturing the ‘91 film’s magic and making matters less, well, cartoony.
“It’s not simply you take what was there and shoot it in a real room with real actors,” Condon explains. “The fact that it does exist in the real world means that everything has to be re-examined. It’s not just that animated films are drawn; the characters are more archetypal, they’re broader. So, like, the comic idea of who Gaston is has to be translated into something that feels real. Questions that you might have had that didn’t bother you in the animated film suddenly become more pressing, like how did Belle and Maurice wind up in a town where everybody hates them.
“But mostly, it’s Emma Watson playing Belle, and you have to believe that she falls in love with this hunk of fur,” the director points out. “So you’ve really got to watch the steps of that friendship growing into love. It only can work, I believe, if you know more about those two people, so you fill them in psychologically, with history and nuance and all that stuff.”
Condon hired Watson — who, like all the other cast members, did her own singing for the film — because of her affection for the story since she saw the cartoon as a child in England, her bookish intelligence (in this one, activist Belle teaches village children to read) and what the socially conscious 26-year-old means to her generation.
“I’m just really proud to play a character that has a certain earnestness about her, and she’s not in any way ashamed of that,” sorcery-student-turned-rolemodel Watson states. “It’s not easy being an outsider, to work against the grain and move against the status quo. But she does so with kind of this amazing fearlessness. I’m just very grateful that this character exists, and I get to bring her to life.”
A different fearlessness — combined with fearsomeness and emerging sensitivity — was required for Stevens’ performance. The “Downton Abbey” vet had to play his role twice: Once on 10-inch stilts while wearing a 40-pound gray lycra muscle suit covered with motion capture dots, on set with Watson and other actors, and later again with a cage around his head, replaying every scene while 27 little Mova cameras caught every emotional expression on his face, which animators would then digitally hair-over.
“It was my face and eyes driving that digital monster,” the English actor says. “Facial capture is incredibly sensitive now, and the technology they went for was such that it captured the emotional tweaks and tinges with amazing sensitivity.
“I’d go into a booth every couple of weeks and they’d spray my face with UV paint,” adds Stevens, who also stars in the acclaimed FX mutant series “Legion” and soon-to-be-released movies “The Ticket” and “Colossal.” “Then the cameras would capture the facial expressions of the scenes we’d done, whether it was eating, sleeping, waltzing . ... I’d just do it all again with my face. That digital mesh was 10,000-dot resolution. Bear in mind, when Andy Serkis did Gollum [for the “Lord of the Rings” movies], it was a 12-dot resolution that they had, and the animators had to fill in the rest. With ours at 10,000 dots, the information that they have to invent is far less; most of the information is coming from my face.”
Of course, the living objects in the Beast’s castle required much more animation imagination. Condon reports that the showstopping “Be Our Guest” production number took two years to make it photorealistic as a magical banquet.
“I jumped into this hoping that we could make that work, thinking that the technology has caught up to the imagination of the animators in ‘91, but not being sure,” the filmmaker reveals. “There’s no point to doing this if, in the experience of watching it, you feel the animation; it’s just another animated movie, which I would not be interested in. The whole point is that it’s a complete rethinking of it in a new format, a new medium.”
That rethinking included the teensiest bit of gay awareness; no big deal for the guy who made “Gods and Monsters,” but apparently something unprecedented in an expensive Disney family entertainment. When word got out that one of Gaston’s henchmen discovers he likes cross-dressing and dances with LeFou at the film’s end, a drive-in theater owner in Alabama refused to book the movie for religious reasons and Russia slapped it with an R-equivalent rating.
“I do want to say, categorically, that we did not meet with any Russian officials on the set,” Condon cracks about what he ruefully calls LeFougate. “It’s a shame, because I know that this controversy gets a lot of clicks and hits and all that stuff and becomes a thing. What you regret as a filmmaker is that now the audience — the ones who care about this, I don’t think it’s going to be everybody — they get cheated of a nice smile moment or two.
“I’m sorry about that,” he adds. “But being clear, I’m not taking any of it back. I’m very proud of it.”
Condon is perhaps prouder, though, that this big corporate entertainment fits in remarkably well with his past work, and his obsessions with monsters, musicals and a theme that unites all of his protagonists, from sex researcher Alfred Kinsey to “Twilight’s” vamp and werewolf clans to the dementia-fighting Sherlock of his previous feature, “Mr. Holmes.”
“I’m speaking, maybe, self-servingly, but there’s a delicacy in the relationship that emerges between these two misfits and outsiders, which seems to be in line with all of the other movies that I’ve made,” the director says of Belle and her prince, the Beast.