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▶︎ Disney’s animated and live-action
Beauty and the Beasts are available to stream on Disney+ and to buy on Blu-ray and DVD.
▶︎ Jean Cocteau’s
The first Beast was the god of love, Eros. The many successive versions of the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale have continued to develop him in this role, and the new Disney Beauty and the Beast is no exception.
In the romance the Alexandrian writer Apuleius interpolated into The Golden Ass, Eros makes love, invisibly, to a mortal Beauty – Psyche – who rivals his own mother Aphrodite in seductiveness. Psyche is forbidden to see him; her sisters goad her, warning her that her lover must be a monster, a cannibal, whose “favourite food is a woman far gone in pregnancy”.