I could sit around all day and list the virtues of the first Disney Beauty and the Beast – it had beautiful visuals, a (comparatively) acceptable role model for little girls, a brilliant soundtrack, and it kickstarted my lifelong obsession with stained glass windows. So many great points that I’ve always been willing to excuse the fact that the story didn’t make any sense. Why doesn’t anyone know about the gigantic castle less than a day’s ride from the local village? Why hasn’t anyone noticed that their leader turned into a giant cat? Why does a prince have to answer his own front door, why is he still a prince if he doesn’t seem to have any parents, and why does everyone else in the castle get a significantly worse punishment than he did? And most importantly, how could a bookstore possibly stay open in a town where no one knows how to read?

I don’t know and I don’t care. It’s a movie about a living candlestick trying to play matchmaker with a furry and his hostage bookworm. It was never supposed to make sense, it was just supposed to be ridiculous fun that occasionally keeps you from sleeping at night. But then the live-action decided to take itself seriously and try to explain all the plot holes, forcing me to recognize both that they exist and have somehow been made worse.

I’ll give them replacing the bookstore with a bookshelf, but every other answer they provide just builds up the supposedly heroic Enchantress into a sadistic monster. Not only does she crash the prince’s party and punish him for being a “bad host,” she removes ALL memories of him and his servants from the minds of their loved ones. Her curse is justified by the servants having somehow “allowed” their king to be a bad parent, so obviously they all deserve death (or, worse, having their conscious souls trapped in completely inanimate objects for all eternity) if the Prince can’t get the girl by the end of the movie.

And that’s the extent of the Prince’s emotional journey; he never learns a lesson about true beauty coming from within, as he falls for the hottest girl available while believing his own ugliness makes him an unlovable monster. Even the movie doesn’t pretend to care about that moral; it spends a max of about two minutes on the Beast’s origins and moral quandary before deciding to spend its extra runtime on the completely unexpected and completely pointless mystery of “how did Belle’s mom die.”

The answer has absolutely no effect on the plot, except that to get there the movie introduces a magic book that can transport you ANYWHERE ON THE PLANET. The Beast claims it’s just extra punishment from the Enchantress, but really it just makes it ridiculous that he never made any attempt to either break the curse himself, track down another magic user to do it for him, or use it to help Belle’s dad in the climax.

It’s just another example of this movie trying to innovate on the original and coming off as unnecessarily bloated. The songs are longer and weaker for it, Belle gets more character scenes without development of her character, the added flashbacks don’t add to or explain the plot, Gaston does more evil but somehow still feels less reprehensible. Any interesting additions are cut completely short; the potentially game-changing book, the “exclusively gay moment” that lasted maybe two easily missable seconds, the truly fabulous makeup the Prince was wearing in the prologue, the brilliant Evermore as the movie’s only song from the lead who could actually sing. Beauty and the Beast did a great job of cashing in on everyone’s nostalgia, but not on that much else. After the hype dies down, if this movie is remembered at all, it’ll be as an ill-conceived footnote to the legacy of the original.