While his two older spoiled daughters give him a long list of expensive things to bring back for them, Belle asks only for a rose.

On the way home, he gets lost and stumbles upon the castle of the Beast, where all of his needs are magically met, including food, the items his daughters had asked him for and his injured horse, cured.

She has a dream, revealing the prince's past; he enjoys hunting, but often ignores the Princess who loves him but is lonely.

The prince is after an elusive golden deer and when the princess asks him to stop hunting it, he promises to do so if she will give him a son.

While dying, the deer transformed into the princess, revealing she was the Nymph of the Forest who became human because she wanted to experience love.

Principal photography took place in Germany, at the Babelsberg Studio in Potsdam-Babelsberg, from November 2012 to February 2013, on a production budget of €35 million.

Le Monde evokes a "luxurious facelift that smooths and models the tale to bring it up to date with techno-ecological standards".

[14] Télérama describes a film with "chic pompiérisme", filled with "flat dialogues", that we watch "without being moved".

They praised the colours and contrasts of the landscape, which they said recalled the work of American painter Maxfield Parrish, and the visual style, which they compared to films by Mario Bava and Tsui Hark.

They also noted that Gans had successfully differentiated the film from the source material and prior adaptations, while keeping the "spirit" of the original story.

[18] Laurent Pecha of EcranLarge remarked that while the film was "far from perfect", it was "so ambitious" compared to the "doldrums" of French cinema that Gans won her over.

He said that it "plays wonderfully on contrasts" and praised Seydoux for her "charm and tenderness" and Cassel for providing "brutality [and] weakness.

[22] Jessica Kiang of IndieWire thought the film was "immensely, crushingly boring" and Seydoux wasted in a role that required her to do little more than "heave her breasts and fall over things prettily.