Entertainment

'Beauty And The Beast' Trailers Side-By-Side Are Very Similar

by Jordana Lipsitz

When you first laid your '90s kid eyes on the live-action Beauty and the Beast trailer you might have felt a sense of déjà vu. Well, it's not surprising, as the two trailers — the animated '90s one and the new one starring Emma Watson as Belle — are actually very, very similar, as revealed by a YouTube video from Oh My Disney that compares the two side-by-side. And the trailers are practically exactly the same, image-for-image with a few necessary animation-to-live action transitional differences. It's almost as if the team behind Disney's marketing thought long and hard about the importance of a trailer for the reboot, and the idea they came up with was that it's best not to ruin a classic — and they're not wrong.

From Belle's fashionable wardrobe choices (the iconic yellow ballroom gown always has my heart), to Gaston's mirror obsession, to the super scary wolves that attempt to take down Maurice and later Belle and Mr. Beast, the images are almost identical. The whole trailer will touch your bill-paying, heavy-duty adult-ing heart.

One notable, and also really, really, adorable difference is the addition of Belle giving out the benefit of book-learning to a young resident of her "poor provincial town." A sweet gag in the original movie saw Belle chilling at a fountain reading a book while accompanied by her only village friends, the sheep. Instead of reading to sheep like in the animated trailer, Belle is now taking on the task of teaching a young village girl her ABCs. She really is a socially conscious and well-read girl, that Belle.

The one inevitable difference between the two trailers, and by that regard also the two movies, is that the live-action Beauty and the Beast feels quite a bit darker and more intense. There's just something about a realistic-looking talking teacup that makes it seem way more important for said teacup to be turned back into a human. Meanwhile, with actual humans dealing with mean guys named Gaston or getting stuck on erratic horses in the dead of night, the story feels a lot more real. The stakes are higher with real humans appearing visually in the roles, even if they are only actors.

We already knew Beauty and the Beast would play at our nostalgic heartstrings, but I don't know if anybody knew how deep it went — all the way down to the trailers. Now that is Disney magic.