‘Beauty and the Beast’ Reveals Belle’s Reinvented Backstory and New High-Res Images

While we continue to wait for a full trailer (ahem, Disney, let’s do this already) for Beauty and the Beast, Disney has released nine new high-res images from the upcoming live-action remake. The stills (which you can view in the gallery above) feature beautiful, detailed looks at Emma Watson’s Belle, Dan Stevens’ Beast, Luke Evans’ Gaston, and all those charming animated household helpers. And although Bill Condon’s film looks pretty faithful to the original animated version, Watson has revealed that they made at least one significant change to the story — Belle’s backstory, specifically.

Disney released high-res versions of the images that debuted earlier this week in Entertainment Weekly, which featured a full cover story on Beauty and the Beast — including an interesting tidbit from Watson about the one change they made to Belle’s backstory. The animated film depicted the character as a bookworm and doting daughter, and though it wasn’t necessarily an offensive portrayal, it was fairly thin, so Condon found a cool way to give Belle’s story a little upgrade:

In the animated movie, it’s her father who is the inventor, and we actually co-opted that for Belle. I was like, ‘Well, there was never very much information or detail at the beginning of the story as to why Belle didn’t fit in, other than she liked books. Also what is she doing with her time?’ So, we created a backstory for her, which was that she had invented a kind of washing machine, so that, instead of doing laundry, she could sit and use that time to read instead. So, yeah, we made Belle an inventor.

Beauty and the Beast also stars Kevin Kline as Belle’s father, Maurice, Luke Evans as Gaston and Josh Gad as Le Fou, with Ian McKellen as Cogsworth, Ewan McGregor as Lumiere, Emma Thompson as Mrs. Potts, Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Plumette, Stanley Tucci as Cadenza and Audra McDonald as Garderobe. Disney’s latest live-action remake arrives on March 17, 2017.