It’s no secret that Walt Disney Pictures has a sure-fire recipe for cinematic success in turning entries from their Classic Animated Canon (55 films strong and still going) into live-action pieces of pageantry and special effects. Ever since 1996 when Glenn Close of “Fatal Attractions” fame found a new niche in portraying (comical) evil as Cruella de Vil for “101 Dalmatians”, Disney has had a pretty good batting average with every live-action conversion they’ve done: “Alice in Wonderland” (2010), “Maleficent” (2014), “Cinderella” (2015), and “The Jungle Book” (2016). But now they’re really taking things up to a higher level with the live-action adaptation of the first major Disney animated feature of the 90s, none other than “Beauty and the Beast”.
Disney fans had plenty of reasons to be super happy on Monday November 14 – as the Hollywood Reporter tells it – when the first official trailer for the film was released on “Good Morning America”, expanding upon and elaborating on the first teaser from last May. It contains quite a remarkable preview of the major characters in the film, most especially those portrayed with makeup prostheses or through CGI magic.
Now we already know the role of Belle the Beauty is played by Emma Watson, formerly Hermione Granger from the epic “Harry Potter” film series from Disney’s counterpart Warner Brothers. Also figuring in the May teaser were the voices of Ewan “Obi-Wan” McGregor as Lumiere the candelabra and Ian “Gandalf/Magneto” McKellen as Cogsworth the pendulum clock, but the trailer is the first time we ever catch a glimpse of how Disney’s SFX teams have rendered them, with rather impressive results.
The same goes for the debut preview appearance by the matronly teakettle Mrs. Potts, played by Angela Lansbury in 1991 and this time around by Emma Thompson, and then there’s the masculine malevolence of the original film’s big bad Gaston the hunter, here portrayed by Luke Evans. Rounding off the primary cast are Kevin Kline (who voiced Captain Phoebus in 1996’s “Hunchback of Notre Dame”) as Belle’s papa Maurice and Dan Stevens as the more humanly proportioned but still horned and leonine Beast.
As is expected of Disney, the trailer effectively transforms most everyone who sees it into a prospective member of the audience for the premiere night and beyond, and those who still remember the 1991 original will totally appreciate the re-enactment of some of the iconic scenes in the animation, from the dance to Gaston’s mob, so on and so forth.
The live-action Disney “Beauty and the Beast” film is inviting everybody to Be their Guest starting March 17, 2017.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqQvZ_VUtg8
Photo Credit to http://screenrant.com/
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