A review by harukoreads
The Beauty and the Beast by Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve

2.0

I consider myself to be a pretty big Beauty and the Beast fan but I’d never read the original story, so I was very excited to finally get my hands on the illustrated MinaLima version. But uh… I have to say I’m pretty underwhelmed? Both with the story and the graphic elements, unfortunately. 

Let’s start with the story:

• This translation is from the 1800s, and it has the same wordy complex sentence structure that Jane Austen has. This does give the story a certain gravitas, but it’s also pretty dry at times. 
• Beauty has surprising agency and intelligence! I did really enjoy that. She is well reasoned when she speaks and more practical than I expected for a fairy tale hero.
• That being said, it’s weird that all her male family members are apparently great, but the narrator makes sure to mention over and over how much her sisters suck. I guess the myth of female competition existed even in the 1700s. Also Beauty has 6 brothers and 5 sisters - I can see why retellings pare this down so much.
• Beauty goes home for a full two months - again I can see why retellings cut this down to a week or three days because that's just so much time that slows the story a bit.
• That said I do like the detail of Beauty traveling via twisting her ring on her finger - it feels much more magical than the typical horseback travel.
• The story most of us are familiar with is actually only about half the page count. The other half devolves into fairy politics and stories of hidden identity and magic. It’s somewhat interesting, but mostly jarring since this all happens AFTER Beauty and her beast get engaged and the beast transforms back. I know this was written before fairy tale story structures were modernized but man it’s an extended denouement. 
• Beauty is secretly adopted? And actually cousins with the prince????
• Beauty’s adopted father owns enslaved people???????
• Also there are a lot of birds and monkeys in the palace. That is the height of enchantment, apparently. I'm not surprised this is left out of most modern interpretations because it feels really random.
• Beauty is a theater kid who spends most her time watching different plays and operas in the castle. Fun but random - I guess this could reflect what French 1700s society considered a luxury? 
• There is briefly a moment where Beauty’s worthiness as the Prince’s wife is called into question since she isn’t royalty, and they try to have a moral lesson about the quality of her character being worthy enough, but then it turns out she’s secretly a princess so it’s fine and no moral is learned. And then the same lesson happens again with her mom being secretly a fairy. I thought we were going to have a really modern moral here but I guess questioning the monarchy is a bit daring for the 1700s.
• Also, despite the illustrations clearly taking heavy inspiration for the beast's look from the 1991 Disney movie, the beast is never given a clear written description - we just know he has "scales", "paws", and apparently a trunk???

And then the graphic elements:

• I really love a lot of MinaLima's work, but many of these illustrations felt underdeveloped and plain. They lacked the detail and care of the cover art. 
• Often they copied and pasted the same elements multiple times in the same image which felt lazy? I don’t know what the budget or timeline for this project was but I was just expecting a bit more lavish detail from a book with a gold embossed cover that costs over $35. 
• Some of the interactive elements were fun (I liked the ring that you could spin just like Beauty to go between the castle and her house! That felt plot relevant!) but most of them were unnecessary or unrelated to the book. At one point there’s a fairy book you can open but it opens to a single page that is exactly the same as the cover. Did that really need to open? Also the maps in particular were weirdly underwhelming - there are two in this book and neither of them truly look like maps so much as half-hearted tableaus.
• Also the character design was inconsistent and lacked detail or personality. Maybe that’s just not MinaLima's strength, but why illustrate a character-focused story then? 
• Also there are far more illustrations in the first half of the book than the last - it almost feels like the artist got bored at the denouement just like I did, but only one of us was getting paid to read and illustrate it and I expected more embellishment in this section after the first half had almost an illustration every page. The latter had more like one illustration for every eight pages. It made it even harder to get through, which is WILD to say about a fairy tale.
• Overall the drawings and interactive elements just felt phoned in. They lacked whimsy. 

I’m still glad I read this book finally, but I’m underwhelmed. I will be keeping my copy because it is nice to have the original text, but when I first got this I thought that the illustrations would be the main event and the story more of a nice extra, and this turned out to be the opposite. I guess that's the risk when you buy a book that is cling wrapped closed!