Beastly tale of true love

here) is serviceable enough to get the job done.

It’s her solid, capable persona that take pride of place in Beauty and the Beast, which is as much about its lush French provincial costumes and settings as it is about story and character.

Belle’s opening number, during which she sings of longing and intellectual restlessness while swaying through her village’s market, is an eye-catching mélange of flowers, fabrics, textures and riotously bright springtime colours.

The opening sequence also introduces one of Beauty and the Beast’s most beloved and be-loathed characters: Gaston, Belle’s would-be suitor, played with fatuous relish by a wonderfully game Luke Evans.

The film’s biggest sequence, set to the song Be My Guest, revisits the Busby Berkeley design elements of the 1991 version, here elaborated with even more anachronistically psychedelic neon and a punched-up, disco-worthy colour palette.

Alan Menken, who composed the original songs, has enlisted lyricist Tim Rice for a batch of new tunes, none of which is particularly memorable, but none of which is objectionable, either (the orchestrations, meanwhile, are reliably swelling and lush).

The animated housekeeping items – Mrs. Potts the teapot, Lumière the candelabra and Cogsworth the clock – are all brought to convincing life by way of digital magic and terrific voice work by Emma Thompson, Ewan McGregor and Ian McKellen, respectively.

McDonald’s and Tucci’s characters – a wardrobe and harpsichord – have less to do but are on hand for the film’s grand finale, made all the more gratifying by the emotions that have been plumbed before.

By beefing up the presence of Belle’s father – and the absence of her mother – the filmmakers have given Belle as much shadow material as the diffident Beast, who starts out as her captor and winds up as her soulmate.

This Beauty and the Beast isn’t predicated on starry-eyed romance or animal attraction, but the solace of mutual loss and understanding, which makes it all the sweeter.

Although the Beast is an entirely digital creation, based in part on Jean Cocteau’s groundbreaking 1946 film, Stevens imbues his hauteur and hostility with pathos and arch humour.

Joining Heathcliff and Mr Rochester as yet another handsome dude in a bad mood, Stevens’s Beast provides the right kind of foil for Watson’s spirited, courageous heroine, who in one of two frightening sequences fights off a snarling pack of wolves.

The blink- and- you’ll- miss- it moment for two gay characters is part of the movie’s larger sense of expansiveness, wherein exteriors fall away, inner essences come to the fore and true love ensues. – Washington Post

This Beauty and the Beast isn’t based on starry-eyed romance or animal attraction, but the solace of mutual loss and understanding, which makes it all the sweeter.