Beauty and the Bestiality
The half-buried truth about Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” is that, in the end, the prince is a letdown. At the end of the 1991 cartoon, when the enchantment is lifted, he looks incomplete, vaguely embryonic—a smooth-skinned creature with maidenly bedhead and a tentative smile. Even for a viewer too young, as I was, to grasp the psychosexual undertones of a tale as old as this one, the Beast’s physicality—the big buffalo head, the wolf’s tail, all pathos and silly roughness—seemed less like an obstacle in the love story than its central object.