I have to admit, when I watched the live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast in 2017, I enjoyed it well enough. I thought that the CGI was, at times, a bit too ornate, and I felt the vocals were far from impressive — way too much auto-tuning — but overall, I thought it was a pleasant cinematic experience. As the weeks passed and I thought more about it, however, I began to feel more and more dissatisfied. After watching the subsequent remakes of both Aladdin and The Lion King, it gradually began to dawn on me that something had been missing from all of these experiences, some magic ingredient that the originals had possessed that was simply lacking their successors.
At first I thought it might just be that I was making unfair comparisons between the originals and the remakes. Perhaps, I thought, I was being too cynical. Perhaps I should just learn to love these films for what they were, as so many other millions of people apparently had. Being a scholar and historian of film, however, I couldn’t do that. I had to know what it was that was so maddening about these films, particularly Beauty and the Beast. I spent many an hour mulling it over, turning the problem this way and that in an attempt to understand my own feelings. Finally, it came to me in of those flashes of insight that are so tantalizingly rare, and I finally knew what these films were missing…
