Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas

A typically low-rent direct-to-video Disney sequel, Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas unfolds during the period when Belle (Paige O’Hara) was still being held captive by Beast (Robby Benson) and follows the character as she attempts to bring Christmas cheer to the gloomy castle. There’s simply never a point at which Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas is wholeheartedly able to justify its existence, although, to be fair, the film is relatively well made and does benefit from the return appearances of the first movie’s various voice performers (including Angela Lansbury, Jerry Orbach, and David Ogden Stiers). The less-than-enthralling atmosphere is compounded by the inclusion of several uniformly forgettable songs, with the film’s most overtly incompetent element undoubtedly the appearance of its villain (Tim Curry’s Forte) – as the character, an enormous pipe organ, has been rendered with some of the crudest computer animation ever committed to film and seems as though he’d be more at home within a cutscene from a mid-’90s video game. And while it’s hard not to derive some amusement from the kvetching axe (“again with the chopping!”), Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas is, in the final analysis, nothing more than a shameless cash-grab designed to capitalize on the original film’s success.

** out of ****