编者按：即将登陆中国的迪士尼电影《美女与野兽》早已吸引了众多目光。然而，BBC对它的评价好像并未顾及影迷们的心情。

Disney has recently been remaking its hits with the industrial efficiency of a car manufacturing plant, but most of these updates have had their own identity. Maleficent turned the villainess of Sleeping Beauty into its heroine, for instance. But the ‘new’ film of Beauty and the Beast is the first of these Disney remakes to take the opposite approach, and to copy its source material in every possible way.

The story is the same as it was in the much-loved 1991 cartoon, the characters are the same, even Belle’s costumes are the same: blue dress and white blouse at the start, yellow ball gown later on.

There are two obvious differences between the two versions, however. The first difference is that the current film is live-action, so there are lots of rococo sets and intricate digital creations to look at. The second difference between the two Beauty and the Beasts is that the new one is longer than the old one. The director, Bill Condon, has taken a fairy-tale romance which skipped along for 84 minutes and made it into a drama which trudges along for a tiresome 129.

But the film-makers’ other efforts to fill in the cartoon’s blanks are much less welcome. Beauty and the Beast follows the tedious example of the latest Batman and Bond blockbusters by explaining every last facet of its characters’ history and psychology - and, as in Batman, the deaths of parents are a major factor. The result is that there are several speeches, along with several new songs, which serve only to make the whole enterprise slower and gloomier.

Its very fidelity to the cartoon is what will appeal to some viewers, however. Just as young fans of the Harry Potter novels judged the first films not on how well they worked in cinematic terms, but on how slavishly faithful they were to the books, young fans of Beauty and the Beast may be pleased to see so many of their favourite moments recreated – and with Hermione in them to boot.

But while the new film isn’t terrible, it’s difficult to see what the point of it is as long as the cartoon exists. Beauty and the Beast is simply a cover version of a chart-topping song, played with such anonymous competence that Condon’s motto must have been, “It ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Another motto might have been better: “If it ain’t broke, don’t remake it.”