In my opinion, Beauty & The Beast is without question the finest film of the Disney oeuvre.

My husband and I gave ourselves a much-needed treat and travelled to the Paramount Sunday night. This in itself is rare; the flashy, loud atmosphere doesn’t turn us on. Nor does the flashy, inflated price of entry. This was a special occasion, however: the tenth anniversary IMAX version of the first animated movie to be nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award. It�s been cleaned up a bit, and a cut sequence has been restored.

Breathtaking! From the opening truck in past the bushes and trees, we were gasping. Nothing like seeing your favourite Disney story on a screen three times the size of the one you saw it on originally; or like hearing the score you know backwards and forwards on a sound system like the one the IMAX theatre has. Woo! There is also something rather special about re-living the story at that proportion. I know IMAX is designed to overwhelm the viewer to a certain extent, and I’m usually not able to take all of an IMAX show in, but this one was really quite well done.

The restored “Human Again” sequence was terrific. I own the Broadway recording so I know the song, and I was eager to see what Disney had originally conceived for it. The inclusion makes a lot of sense. If you’ve ever wondered how the castle goes from grimy and gloomy to bright and shiny, here’s your answer. The enchanted objects decide to facilitate the romance (and thus their restoration to original form) by creating appropriate atmosphere. The sequence also includes Belle and the Beast in the library reading books, a scene in the Broadway recording that always touched my heart. Both characters are ciphers with a polishing of personality, but Belle’s love of storybooks is the trait that makes her, well, human. What was eliminated from the Beast’s character along with the “Human Again’ sequence is the fact that he is virtually illiterate. I had no idea that his shameful revelation was a part of the original Disney script, seeing as how there was so much other new material created for the Broadway version, so the scene was a delightful and exciting surprise! In the Broadway show, Belle is reading a King Arthur story to him. In the original animated version, she’s just finishing up Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, an interesting difference.

What they didn’t restore for the IMAX version (which irritates me no end) is the pause at the end of LeFou’s song for Gaston where he tries to spell Gaston’s name. I’ve heard that it was cut from the movie because they didn’t want to make fun of people who couldn’t spell. It was a really amusing snippet of (again) character action, and I would have appreciated seeing the entire movie in its original form.

It was a truly special evening. My husband and I love Beauty & The Beast for several reasons, but the ones uppermost in our minds Sunday night were that in the end it’s a terribly romantic love story, and romance is something that’s been quite absent from our lives these past few difficult months; and the associated fact that, physically, we embody the pair. In fact, it’s a comment a lot of people make when they see us, and especially when looking at our wedding pictures. (I would like to take this opportunity to state that my husband looked fantastic on our wedding day, and the Beast could never pull off a kilt the way my husband does! It’s the size ratio that tips most people off. Okay, and our colouring, and the length of hair on both of us, and my love of literature, and his slow warming to the idea of reading books�) A few Hallowe’ens ago we did the Belle and Beast costumes and pulled it off quite nicely, thank you. There are pictures somewhere, but I am scanner-less. My costume (the blue dress) is still intact, and I think we’ll repeat it some Hallowe’en in the future. This time, though, instead of the scruffy cloak, we’ll find a nice blue jacket and a white shirt with a jabot for my beau!

So, to my shaggy Beast of a husband, from your very own Beauty: may we have a happily ever after, as well.

CURRENT READING:

Spells of Enchantment, a well-loved collection of fairy tales. I’m big on the “happily ever after follows trials and hardship” thing these days.
Perdido Street Station, by China Mieville
Actually, I lie. I finished The Eyre Affair (criminal that the second book remains yet to be published! How can I wait until July?), and I know I said I’d pick up Perdido Street Station (“[r]eminiscent of Charles Dickens, Franz Kafka, and Neal Stephenson”), but, um, I can’t find it. So I picked up…
An Exultation of Larks instead. Turns out that the collective noun (or “term of venery”) for a collection of rooks is a building. I wasn’t far off by guessing that they were called a house of rooks. I adore English; it’s such an illogical language. A book like An Exultation of Larks is just the kind of etymologial feast that I love to sink my beak into.

Now, if I could just find Perdido Street Station…

ALSO READ:
I’ve been polishing off books like After Eights. Books I’ve swallowed recently which didn’t get Current Reading mentions all their own were Light-Bearer’s Daughter by O.R. Melling, Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland, and Element of Fire by Martha Wells.