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. 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. The half-buried truth about Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” is that, in the end, the prince is a letdown.
