I Have Some Questions About Beauty and the Beast

If you are like me, you greeted the trailer for the live action Beauty and the Beast with sentiments along the lines of “Okay, they’re doing this now. This is a thing they are doing.” But then you went and saw it anyway, and its attempt to translate the original story into a kinda-sorta-maybe more realistic world left you with questions you did not have when you saw the animated version. (Never mind that you were nine when you saw the animated version and that your thought processes at the time were more focused on Tiny Toons than anything else.)

Here are those questions, in no particular order.

How many people live in this goddamned castle?

Like, are there just scads of servants-turned-talking furniture laying dormant until it’s time for the “Be Our Guest” number? And are they otherwise allowing most of the talking and moving to be performed by Cogswoth and Lumiere and the other A-list furniture?

Even then, wouldn’t this caste would have to be mostly bedrooms under normal, non-sentiment furniture circumstances?

Doesn’t it seem like someone would have spoken the Beast’s real name at some point?

Like, if I left the theater being fully aware that Belle’s horse was named Philippe, because it’s mentioned several times, shouldn’t I have also heard what the Beast’s name was, pre-curse?

Do you think Belle and the Beast had to go out and buy new housewares after all their stuff reverted back to humans?

Or do you think there was, like, an old set of dishes that the Beast put in storage upon arrival of the sentient dishware?

Would sentient dishes be pleasant to use? Or would that be weird?

Wouldn’t it make more sense to maybe use the old dishes as dishes and not eat food off your friends and coworkers?

Do you think the castle servants developed some really weird fetishes while being used as furniture and housewares and all that?

Do you think that, for example, someone who had been turned into a couch would subsequently feel compelled to make people sit on him for long periods of time?

Why wasn’t there a singing toilet?

If there had been a sentient toilet, do you think Belle would have used him? Or would she have maybe gone to the bathroom outside, just because she felt bad about it?

What if the toilet begged Belle to use him?

What if Belle only found out months into her imprisonment that the toilet was sentient after all, and she was all, “Wait, why didn’t you say anything?”

Why was the singing wardrobe given narcolepsy as a character trait? Is there some connection between wardrobes and sleep disorders that I’m not getting?

What if when the Beast reverted to the human form, Belle broke up with him because it turns out she was only into guys who were covered in hair and had horns?

What if that water buffalo fetish maybe made more sense, seeing how the Beast’s personality is generally terrible?

Wouldn’t Mr. Potts have just gone out and married someone else if he’d forgotten that he had a wife?

Wouldn’t people in town have wondered why they had, for example, clothes and personal effects in their house that didn’t belong to any family member they could remember?

So if the enchantress has crazy magical powers and can distort reality, why is she spending her spare time living like a bag lady?

Not but really—what possible reason could the enchantress have for dressing like she’s homeless and hanging out in a town that is defined by being mundane and provincial? Unless she’s watching the townspeople go about their fake lives and not remembering the loved ones who are trapped in the Beast’s castle and have been transformed into sentient furniture?

Wouldn’t it be a hundred times more interesting to hang out in the castle with all the magical talking furniture?

Wouldn’t it also give her a better perspective on the Beast and how well he’s dealing with the curse that was specifically designed to punish him for his bad behavior?

Wait a fucking minute—if this enchantress is in in the business of punishing people and also hangs out in town, wouldn’t she do something about that asshole Gaston? Like, wouldn’t she use her magic to punish the vain man who treats everyone badly, since doing exactly that is what cursed the Beast and transformed the servants and made the town forget the castle existed and, you know, propelled the whole plot?

Why do you think the writers of this film made the effort to explain away one of the potholes from the first movie—that no one in Belle’s castle seemed to remember that big honkin’ castle that was a day’s horse ride away—but then wrote into the story an enchantress who can control reality but just inexplicably choses to do nothing for almost the entire movie?

And finally (and most importantly), how did this film rob an impressionable young minds of a live-action glimpse at Gaston’s chest hair?