Belle du Jour

A tale as old as time but never more pertinent in these dark days. Total Film talks Trump, trolling and tyranny with the team behind the Mouse House’s multi-layered and dark live-action update of Beauty And The Beast, designed to speak to everyone, not just little girls. And don’t call Belle a Disney princess, OK?

- Jane Crowther

New York City, 14 November, 2016. It’s a beautiful, crisp day in Manhattan – chilly with bright blue skies, Central Park aglow with russet leaves and sun glinting off the skyscrapers. The sort of picture-perfect autumnal day on which you could imagine people bursting into song and performing a joyous dance around the Bethesda fountain. And yet, a pall of discombobulation hangs over the city. Just days earlier, Donald J. Trump has sensationally been voted US president, leaving Democrat-voting New York, and the world, reeling.

It’s all any cab driver, deli server or barista can talk about. And yet, TF and the Beauty And The Beast (BATB) team are in the swishy Loews Regency hotel on Park Avenue to chew the fat about a fairytale. Doesn’t this seem a little fatuous at times like these? “The tale of a vain, spoiled rich kid, a billionaire who lives in a luxury tower and treats women as objects… is possibly relevant,” jokes Dan Stevens grimly.

Rewind 26 years to (relatively) simpler times, when George Bush Sr. was POTUS and Disney was primarily an animation house (it wouldn’t buy Marvel until 2009, or Lucas film until 2012), routinely sprucing up classic fairytales for modern audiences. BATB came hot on the fins of blockbuster hit The Little Mermaid (which Disney is also remaking in live action) and spearheaded a Disney renaissance of animation features (Aladdin and The Lion King followed), which turned the studio’s fortune around after a run of commercial disappointments, making monster-hit money and gaining serious critical praise. Like the diminutive fish girl, BATB’s Belle wasn’t a meek Disney princess, but an active, feisty protagonist, who, as Roger Ebert rejoiced, “Thinks and acts independently, even rebelliously, instead of hanging around passively while the fates decide her destiny.”