The real heart of “Beauty and the Beast”

©Disney

I’ve always loved “Beauty and the Beast.”

It was an obvious choice for my favorite Disney movie growing up, since I had brown hair and a serious reading habit. I, too, was the girl with the “dreamy far off look” and “my nose stuck in a book,” and if I ever starred in a musical there would absolutely have to be a song where everyone talked about how weird they thought I was. I was also insanely curious, and just like Belle would have immediately investigated the creepy, shut-up part of the house I had been forbidden from going anywhere near.

I identified with the Beast just a much. No, I wasn’t extremely tall and furry, but I was angry and brooding and almost completely lacking in social skills. It was hard to see him as a monster when I could sympathize so completely with him, and it wasn’t like Belle needed the defense – when he roared at her, she yelled right back at him. And he was so eager to learn how to be a nicer person, even though he stumbled sometimes.

The only part of the movie that really tripped me up was the end. As much as I loved the Beast, I had zero interested in the human he turned into at the very end. I didn’t see anything that connected him with the guy I loved – he had a pretty face, and a soft voice, and he was never onscreen long enough for us to see any sign of the anger and awkwardness that had been so much a part of the Beast. Even though he’d been working hard to become a better person, things like that don’t just disappear the moment you get a makeover.

A lot of people see the transformation as the entire point of “Beauty and the Beast.” For them, the moral of the story is that love “fixed” the Beast, making him the metaphorical handsome prince instead of the supposedly scary monster. In its more dangerous aspect, it’s the idea that a good woman is enough to “save” a man (“Fifty Shades of Grey” is really just “Beauty and the Beast” in its most annoying form).

For me, however, I wish the transformation never happened. Or if it did, that the movie made it clear we were getting the same angry, awkward man in a slightly different body. The change that mattered had already happened, the slow transformation of an isolated man into someone who cares enough about others to put their needs before his own. That was the man Belle had already fallen in love with, the man that the weird, awkward dreamer inside her had recognized and responded to. She had been just as alone as he was, surrounded by people who couldn’t see past how different she was.

They were both beasts, in their own way, just like they were both beautiful where it mattered. What they looked like didn’t matter – the fact that they had found each other at all was the real happy ending.