Beauty and the Beast Revisited

My favorite fairy tale of all time is Beauty and the Beast.

The storybook that my mom read to me from when I was little had these elaborate stylized illustrations that fell somewhere between a big-eyed 70s doll painting and a trip to Versailles, odd, but memorable.  Then as a teenager I read Robin McKinley’s Beauty – a novelized retelling of the story that remains one of my favorite books to this day – I reread it once a year.

Then came Disney’s version.  At the time it came out I was a bookworm girl who felt like a fish-out-of-water in the town where she lived – so you can imagine how much I related to their version of Belle.

Now Disney’s back and I’m full of both excitement and trepidation over this:

 

The style of the movie, from what you can see of it in this trailer, looks beautiful, and while I’m a bit nervous about the casting of the Beast, clearly the best thing this movie has going for it, besides being based on  my favorite fairy tale, is the casting of Emma Watson as Belle – cause we know that girl has the charming bookworm thing down.