Along with The Lion King, this is one of the Disney animated films from the 1990s that made the strongest impression on my generation, purely as a consequence of when it was released. Nostalgia is indeed a powerful thing and so even I confess to feeling a frisson of anticipation when the teaser for this opened with just the image of a rose and the opening notes of its famous main theme. Inevitably no modern remake can ever live up to childhood memories but this one at least makes no major missteps and is probably as good an effort as can be expected.

Belle is a girl in a small French town whose love of books causes her to be looked at strangely by the other townsfolk. The local hero who loves himself just as much as all of the girls in town adore him Gaston wants to woo her for her beauty and because she’s the only one who resists his charms. One day while her father Maurice is on a business trip, he gets lost in the woods and finds himself at a seemingly derelict castle. This is of course the home of the Beast, a prince who was cursed into a monstrous form and his household servants transformed into furniture and other objects. Maurice flees upon seeing the animated objects, thinking that the castle is haunted, but tries to take a rose for Belle. The Beast apprehends him as a thief. When his horse returns without her father, Belle goes in search of him and naturally offers herself as a prisoner in exchange for his freedom.

I wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about this as I found the early village scenes to look overly garish and the choreography for songs like Belle to be uninspired and by the numbers. As my wife notes, you can tell how lacking in energy the scene feels, especially when we can use much better musicals like La La Land and The Young Girls of Rochefort as comparisons. Fortunately it improves when they get to the castle as the animators let themselves go crazy with the antics of the household objects. The side characters like Cogsworth and Lumiere really steal the show here, providing most of the fun and entertainment. Gaston is pretty great as well and Luke Evans looked like he had a great time playing him. The Beast doesn’t emote much and there’s no real spark between him and Belle. I did like the new scene which delves into the past of Maurice and Belle’s mother as it was genuinely heartfelt. But apart from that, the moments between the two that are patently meant to be magical simply come across as being rote.

Director Bill Condon tries to update the film in some minor ways as well, by making Belle a bit more competent and confident in rejecting Gaston’s advances for example or dropping hints that LeFou is gay. Still by remaining so faithful to the original I suppose it entrances old fans but at heart it remains a fairy tale that now feels hopelessly out of date. Short of subverting it completely there’s not much that can be done here. This film is a solid, fan-pleasing effort and as good as we can reasonably expect. But it can’t compare to the more modern animated films that far more sophisticated in their themes and more relevant to our times.