The problem I have with most "Beauty and the Beast" adaptations (apart from the 80's show which included George RR Martin on the staff) is that the moral of the story is that someone who looks beastly may still be a decent person who is worthy of love on the inside. However, in a move that still features in teenage fiction and movies (I'm still smarting over the end of "Pretty in Pink"), it's not enough to be a good person, you have to be attractive. So "the beast" transforms into a handsome prince (and Andy picks Bland over Ducky).

I'm not recommending it (I wasn't impressed), but at least in the recent Japanese "Once Upon A Crime"

SPOILERS BELOW

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED

the prince stuck with his "hideous" true love even after she had gained a scar. OK, after a makeover you hardly saw the scar and she looked gorgeous, but at least she wasn't magically turned into a beauty.

Great GREAT point. That’s probably the biggest source flaw, that ugly is ugly. And for the story to end happy it requires a transformation to handsome. That’s very much in line with the original story’s twist that Belle turns out to be a princess. Ugly & poor are unworthy of happiness. Everyone must get transformed to handsome descendants of royalty.

I didn’t read past your spoiler warning for Once Upon a Crime because I’ll probably end up checking it out. I’m a big fan of Japanese films because they often buck the trope by portraying average or even lowbrow characters as the triumphant hero.

But yea I’m glad you pointed out that huge flaw in the original story. Let’s face it, the majority of children’s fables are terribly flawed. That’s probably because simple morality plays have to rely on simple stereotypes to define right & wrong. Handsome vs Ugly.

On that note it’s interesting in this version that Cocteau did add the character Avenant. The character Avenant is played by the same actor who plays the Beast, except Avenant is a selfish scoundrel who is handsome on the outside. There’s a reversal at the end when Avenant becomes ugly while the Beast becomes handsome. But at the same time Belle reveals that she’s bothered by the fact that Beast now looks like the handsome Avenant.

So maybe that was another one of Cocteau’s subtle attempts to address the original source flaw and throw a twist on the handsome/ugly stereotype?

You have forgotten that in the original story the 'Prince' was turned into a 'beast' by an evil fairy for turning down her advances. Only by finding true love, despite his ugliness, could the curse be broken. Also, it really shouldn't be called 'incest' as they were only 'cousins' in the original story.

Marriage between cousins is incest in half the USA, illegal and certainly sketchy at best. But that's not the main point really; the point as Philippe pointed out is the ridiculous way of portraying good = handsome, rich, royal blood, whereas evil = physical unattractiveness, poverty and 'low breeding'. The original story ended in a way that was tantamount to Aryan racism: even after true love 'saved' the Prince, they couldn't get married because Belle wasn't of pure royal blood. Until magically it turned out that Belle and the Prince are cousins! I call that awful writing, don't you?

lmao this is a fun read: 25 Dark and Disturbing Original Children's Fairy Tales

Highlights include:

Sleeping Beauty - It's not a kiss that awakens her. She actually gets raped by the King while she's asleep, then she gives birth (while asleep), and her baby sucks a splinter out of her finger which is what wakes her up.

The Frog Prince - It's not a kiss that turns the frog into a prince, the princess chops the frog's head off. Talk about ugly shaming!

Mulan - Mulan comes home to find her father dead, her mother remarried, and she (Mulan) is sold into prostitution (made into the Khan's concubine). She kills herself.

The Fox and the Hound - absolutely nothing about friendship, the hounds chase the fox who's being hunted to death, the fox lures a hound onto the train tracks where the hound is run over, then a 2nd dog chases the fox until the fox has a literal heart attack and dies. The dog is so tired that the dog's master shoots him in the head.

😬😬😬

Maybe it's a good thing we have Disney after all....

Re: Cousins, it is acceptable in many parts of the world, plus the term can include people who are less directly related. Also, amongst "royalty" it has been accepted from at least Ancient Egypt (who went closer than cousins). Got to keep those bloodlines "pure"!

Re: "Once Upon A Crime", I didn't hate it, but it had way too much of the mugging "acting" that seems common in East Asian media for my taste - particularly one of the witches, who seemed to have graduated from the Rita Repulsa School for OTT Performing Arts.

If you want a slightly better revisionist fairly tale, I still have a soft spot for the early episodes of "Once Upon A Time" before everyone "woke up" (and it was way better when Prince Charming was still in a coma). If you read comics, Bill Willingham's "Fables" are well worth a read apart. I think it features probably the only "wedding scene" in media to bring tears of joy for the happy couple to my eyes. The "Everafter" spin-off where he really leaned into the whole "It's OK to do bad things to people if you are doing it to protect the 'good' side" was a bit distasteful, though.

Ooh! Just read new issues were due for release last year. Will have to track them down.

P.S. Fables was in development as a TV show at NBC, who dropped it and went on to make "Grimm". Then ABC took it up, but decided to go for "Once Upon A Time". Hmmm...

@M.LeMarchand said:

Re: Cousins, it is acceptable in many parts of the world, plus the term can include people who are less directly related. Also, amongst "royalty" it has been accepted from at least Ancient Egypt (who went closer than cousins). Got to keep those bloodlines "pure"!

Re: "Once Upon A Crime", I didn't hate it, but it had way too much of the mugging "acting" that seems common in East Asian media for my taste - particularly one of the witches, who seemed to have graduated from the Rita Repulsa School for OTT Performing Arts.

If you want a slightly better revisionist fairly tale, I still have a soft spot for the early episodes of "Once Upon A Time" before everyone "woke up" (and it was way better when Prince Charming was still in a coma). If you read comics, Bill Willingham's "Fables" are well worth a read apart. I think it features probably the only "wedding scene" in media to bring tears of joy for the happy couple to my eyes. The "Everafter" spin-off where he really leaned into the whole "It's OK to do bad things to people if you are doing it to protect the 'good' side" was a bit distasteful, though.

Ooh! Just read new issues were due for release last year. Will have to track them down.

P.S. Fables was in development as a TV show at NBC, who dropped it and went on to make "Grimm". Then ABC took it up, but decided to go for "Once Upon A Time". Hmmm...

Which turned out to be pretty 'grim', as in pretty dreadful!

@rooprect said:

lmao this is a fun read: 25 Dark and Disturbing Original Children's Fairy Tales

Highlights include:

Sleeping Beauty - It's not a kiss that awakens her. She actually gets raped by the King while she's asleep, then she gives birth (while asleep), and her baby sucks a splinter out of her finger which is what wakes her up.

The Frog Prince - It's not a kiss that turns the frog into a prince, the princess chops the frog's head off. Talk about ugly shaming!

Mulan - Mulan comes home to find her father dead, her mother remarried, and she (Mulan) is sold into prostitution (made into the Khan's concubine). She kills herself.

The Fox and the Hound - absolutely nothing about friendship, the hounds chase the fox who's being hunted to death, the fox lures a hound onto the train tracks where the hound is run over, then a 2nd dog chases the fox until the fox has a literal heart attack and dies. The dog is so tired that the dog's master shoots him in the head.

😬😬😬

Maybe it's a good thing we have Disney after all....

The title of that article is a bit confusing. Dark and disturbing, perhaps, but not all original.

For example, Mulan as described in the article is Chu Renhuo (褚人穫) version which was published in 1695 during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912 AD/CE). It is not the original one. The story of Mulan can be traced back to the "Ballad of Mùlán" (木蘭詩) which is from the Northern Wei Dynasty (386-534 AD/CE) and this has a happy ending.

@bratface said:

Which turned out to be pretty 'grim', as in pretty dreadful!

Yeah, at that time I'd try to give most "genre" stuff quite a few episodes, but that lasted 2 or 3. Oddly, I do know people who love it who don't seem to watch a lot of things. (Maybe they have nothing better to compare it to?)

@M.LeMarchand said:

The problem I have with most "Beauty and the Beast" adaptations (apart from the 80's show which included George RR Martin on the staff) is that the moral of the story is that someone who looks beastly may still be a decent person who is worthy of love on the inside. However, in a move that still features in teenage fiction and movies (I'm still smarting over the end of "Pretty in Pink"), it's not enough to be a good person, you have to be attractive. So "the beast" transforms into a handsome prince (and Andy picks Bland over Ducky).

LATE BREAKING UPDATE

Hey I’m jumping back to this point because I just read Cocteau’s release notes, and he does address this flaw very deliberately. Like I guessed above, the scoundrel character “Avenant” and the Beast’s transformation to the image of Avenant was Cocteau’s way of turning the handsome/ugly stereotype on its head. Like Belle, the audience is supposed to be left uneasy & preferring the Beast’s ‘ugly’ self over the new handsome prince.

It’s the perfect way of correcting the story’s flaw without changing anything: turn the ‘happy ending’ into an ironic one. Not enough to seem like a rewrite but just enough to make us prefer the Beast (like Belle does) and maybe on a deeper level make us question why ‘handsome’ is supposed to be better.

Here are Cocteau’s own words:

“My story would concern itself mainly with the unconscious obstinacy with which women pursue the same type of man, and expose the naïveté of the old fairytales that would have us believe that this type reaches its ideal in conventional good looks. My aim would be to make the Beast so human, so sympathetic, so superior to men that his transformation into Prince Charming would come as a terrible blow to Beauty, condemning her to a humdrum marriage and a future that I summed up in the last sentence of all fairytales: ‘And they had many children.’ ”

It's good to know that Cocteau was aware of the "problem", but I do wonder if his solution would have been understood by the average moviegoer. That said, Belle does look disappointed that she's lost "The Beast". Did they have Furries in 1946? ;o)

Yup. If the message is lost on the audience, no matter how well done, then the film fails in its objective to awaken minds. This same phenomenon happened with Veerhoven's excellent anti-war film "Starship Troopers" where much of the audience missed the satire and took it as a serious "pro-war" action flick. 🤦Or more recently there's Weird Al's scathing satire of rock biopics which flew over the heads of some of the audience--they thought he was being serious and hated the 'documentary' for not being true 🤦🤦🤦

Not sure if we should blame the artist for being too esoteric, or if we should blame the audience for being thick as a brick.

In that same note by Cocteau (which is here in its entirety: "Once Upon a Time"), he did report some success but mostly just with young girls.

"The trick worked. When the picture was released, letters poured in from matrons, teen-age girls and children, complaining to me and Marais about the transformation. They mourned the disappearance of the Beast" - Cocteau

But he also implies that most of the European crowds missed the point, and he hopes that American audiences will be more perceptive since America is the home of Poe and at the time more progressive toward new & challenging ideas (my how times have changed)!

"There are three reasons why I have high hopes that Americans will readily grasp my intention. First, America is the home of Edgar Allen Poe, secret societies, mystics, ghosts, and a wonderful lyricism in the very streets. Second, childhood remains longer within the soul than it does here in France, where we try to suppress it as a weakness. Third, the America that now influences French literature is already ancient history for you, and the American is looking forward to something other than what astonishes us but no longer astonishes him." - Cocteau

I was trying to think of an example of a film that I hear people raving about because it shows x that I always think, "Erm... I pretty sure that it's actually saying something quite different". "Starship Troopers" is a great example.

Interesting that Cocteau felt his intentions hadn't been fully grasped.