SOURCE: Pauly, Rebecca M. “Beauty and the Beast: From Fable to Film.” Literature Film Quarterly 17, no. 2 (1989): 84-90.

In the following essay, Pauly offers a comparison of Cocteau's film version of Beauty and the Beast with the original fairy tale ostensibly written by the Frenchwoman Jeanne-Marie le Prince de Beaumont.

The role of the artist is thus to create an organism having a life of its own drawn from life, and not destined to surprise, to please or displease, but to arouse secret feelings in reaction to certain signs which represent beauty for some, ugliness and deformity for others.

—Cocteau, Démarche d'un poète

The 1946 Jean Cocteau film Beauty and the Beast is ostensibly an adaptation of a classic French fairy tale written in 1757. As the accompanying chart shows, Cocteau made numerous additions, deletions and transpositions in his rewriting and reworking of the eighteenth-century original text (changes often...