Ranking All Of The Live-Action Disney Remakes

For all of the live-action remakes of classic Disney films that have come in the last few years, none have handled their source material quite as brilliantly as Bill Condon's Beauty and the Beast.

First off, it makes the excellent choice to not only keep every one of the songs from the original film, it even brought Alan Menken back to do the score and provide additional songs for the film. And the film uses this kind of care and love of the original in every choice it makes, from painstakingly recreating entire sequences from the original shot-for-shot, to digging even deeper into the mythology of the story.

But perhaps the smartest thing Condon does with his film is to craft a meta-narrative within the film directly addressing the nostalgia the film is fueled by. Here, Belle is driven by her desire to know more about her deceased mother and to see her father happy again. In a lesser film, these added elements could have just been superfluous backstory.

But here, Condon uses them to reframe the story as being a parable about the dangers of nostalgia and its influence on viewers. And how sometimes, much like Belle and the residents of the enchanted castle learn, the only way to move forward is to come to peace with the past.

Between this, its stellar cast, great music, and Condon's powerful direction, Beauty and the Beast is a powerful remake that walks the line between lovingly retelling its story and updating it, in astonishing fashion.