day 123: Beauty and the Beast

Hola Damas y Cabellros,

So that title there isn't an analogy for anything...I totally just rewatched Beauty and the Beast today. Why? Because I only had one class to teach today (on stereotypes, discrimination, and anger… I was supposed to have a teacher in the class with me and that totally did not happen… I honestly think that I’m just playing substitute teacher but ah well, I’m okay with that for now. Hopefully that just gets me a foot in the door when I want to do my other projects and things!). So anyway, I watched it.

It was definitely one of those moments where everything just clashed with my childhood memory. As a kid, I loved Beauty and the Beast. The Disney female characters that I identified with the most where: Belle, Pocahontas, and much later, Mulan. As a child, my friends were books. I read and read and read (my mom blames the fact that I wear glasses on books since I read everywhere- even secretly so that I wouldn’t get caught and chastised for reading when I was supposed to be sleeping or eating; I even read as I walked, which made some people nervous when I was crossing streets and traversing the neighborhood with a book firmly planted in front of my face). For that reason, I loved Belle. She was a bookworm like me! However, I never noticed the little things about that movie… like the fact that it’s set in France.

What?

Yea. They speak English, but I always remembered that Lumiere had a French accent and a thing for that French maid duster. I thought it was just because Beast was really rich and had a whole bunch of foreign staff… Like if I had that kind of money and a castle, I’d totally have an English butler. Just because.

Anyway, the beginning scene has Boulangerie in it for the bread maker, who’s demanding the baguettes brought forward, and there are random French phrases scattered throughout. Considering I took French for a year in college, I just found it all surprising because I never noticed it as a child and never made the connection as I grew older.

Actually, now that I mention the Beast, that’s another thing that I didn’t think about as a kid but find weird now. The Beast’s big problem is that he’s… well, a giant scary monster who no one will love... in short, a beast. That there is a pretty big problem. Take the fact that if he doesn’t get someone to fall in love with him by the time he turns 21, he’ll be stuck that way forever and you’ve got yourself a really REALLY big problem. So why the eff is he called “Beast”? Why would he take on a nickname that just keeps pointing out his worst issue? Why doesn’t he use his real name? What IS his real name?

This I find interesting because I’m in Perú, where your most obvious physical trait is often used as a nickname to describe you. Based on your skin color (gringo, negro, moreno, cholo, etc) or your eyes (they call me chinita all the time and tug at their eyes to pull them back… seriously, but it’s not at all meant to offend) or your weight (flaco, gordo are used all the time) or any physical attribute at all. So this might be set in France, but the name thing seems Peruvian to me. Come on, Beast? Belle? Please.

The other thing is, they do this little montage to show Belle and the Beast’s time together and a montage always makes me feel like a lot of time has passed. BUT IT HASN’T! Belle’s dad leaves to get his invention into a contest, but he gets locked up that night by Beast. The next day, the horse appears and Belle realizes that something has happened to her father. The horse seems to know where the dad is and Belle goes and gets him released after promising to take his place. The dad gets back to the village later that night and rants about the beast, and then leaves to go search for them again. While that’s happening, Belle is refusing to eat dinner with the Beast and we got the greatest song in the entire movie: “Be Our Guest.” Then she goes to the west wing after being told, don’t do it by a big scary beast that is keeping her as a prisoner (kind of dumb, imho) and she runs out after being yelled at. Beast saves her from the wolves and they go back so she can treat his wounds.

So, so far it’s been 2 days.

The next day, Beast claims that he has “never felt this way about anyone.”

What!? Ok. Maybe because he’s been alone with a talking clock, a lamp, and kitchenware, he’s allowed to be a crazy and fall in love with a girl after trading her for her enslaved father, treating her like crap, and then saving her form some wolves…

So, he gives her his library, and she goes hardcore Stockholm. They have breakfast together (I can’t decide if it was the same day as the library, or the day after). Anyway, in the song “something there that wasn’t there before,” the idea of “a few days more” is mentioned. But then the next scene is Cogsworth reporting that they have 12 hours, 36 minutes and 15 seconds and that they must fall in love that night if they ever want to be human again. The castle is cleaned, Belle and Beast have their dance and then Beast releases Belle from captivity to go see to her ailing father, who’s gasping on the floor of the forest.

Ok, so the dad went searching for this castle. He doesn’t have the horse, so he must be on foot. He’s also ill, so he’s probably not travelling very quickly. Still, he passes out pretty quickly and he isn’t more than halfway between the castle and the village (if he were closer to the castle, I assume that Belle would have taken him to the castle, but since she returns to the village, he must be close enough to the village that she knows they’re close) so I’d say he’s been travelling for a day.

That means it’s been another day.

DID THEY JUST FALL IN LOVE AND GO THROUGH ALL OF THAT IN 3 DAYS TIME? 

Seriously. It’s a cartoon, but COME ON. How did I not catch that as a kid? That damn montage in the middle of them after that amazing library, that’s how. I would kill to have a library like that, and the montage threw off all sense of time.

But 3 days is all it took for them to meet, experience Stockholm crazies, tell each other they love each other, and then he got magic-ed with light shooting out of his toes and fingers and became human. Oh, and it’s raining but no one gets wet. Cause it’s magic. Fireworks erupt when they kiss and boom- magic, IT’s DAY TIME! Also, everyone’s transforming back again. Ah, and Gaston’s dead, but no one cares about that.

And he's 21! She's probably younger, Gaston has been trying to get her to marry him, I have no idea how old Gaston is, and all of this is alright because it's love, not Stockholm Syndrome, not insanity, not any of that... it's love! twoo luuuv... 

Weird… 

Weirder still is that I had time to watch a Disney movie and actually be annoyed by it. 

and that was what my day consisted of today…

Well, now I’m off to an APFA meeting (like the Peruvian equivalent of a PTSA in the states) to go an experience what that’s like.  I’ll report back soon.

Love and Peace, y’all.
Love and Peace.

edit: APAFA meeting was mad boring. It was literally some people up front, reading a sheet of paper that describes how funds were being used... a paper that everyone in the room already had... it took an hour. Now Perú is playing Chile and I'm gonna bet that things get nuts later tonight (there's bad blood between Perú and Chile, so this match is going to be interesting and how the Peruvians react to the final score will be even more so...) 

Ah well, VIVA PERÚ! VAMOS PERÚ!!!