Belle's Tale

★★/☆☆☆ 2 Stars for this almost step-by-step copy of the new Disney movie.

First of all, a big thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for giving me a free digital copy to read and give a honest review.

Just a small warning if you don't know the fairytale of haven't watched the movie, my review will contain some minor spoilers!

I was very excited when I saw this manga on Netgalley and already looked forward to writing a pretty review. The cover is beautiful and I really like the story and the new Disney movie. Alas, my excitement waned quite a bit when I started reading Belle's Tale. The art looked half-hearted on a lot of pages, some were very nicely done with pretty backgrounds but a lot of pages only had the characters in them and it felt very lifeless.

Except for some scenes it mostly felt like scenes directly taken from the movie, sans background, with little insight into Belle's thought which was what the manga promised. Belle's thoughts and feelings were flat and made her appear even more lifeless than the missing background did. In fairytales the background is important to me, because it conveys the feeling of the world being magical with the right setting but let's move on from complaining about the white backgrounds.
The art itself was pretty, give the author a few more years to practice and it will be absolutely wonderful!

What also bothered me was that some scenes where missing and the dialogue made them out to be there. If you know the movie that's no problem but if not it's a bit weird. For example when the Beast says, “Be my guest, go ahead and starve!”. End of scene. And Belle later replies and being offered dinner by one of the enchanted servants that, “But he said if she doesn't eat with me she doesn't eat at all.” He did say it in the movie but that scene was simply missing in the manga.
Another scene that appeared to be not as thought through was the one where Belle is chased by wolfs. Belle stands in one panel in front of the horse when she spots the wolfs, it's the scene that's used in picture books and it's also in the movie, but in the next panel she's on the horse again. The panel doesn't make that much sense in the spot it was placed because the scene is from when a wolf bites the horse's leg and Belle falls of.

All in all I didn't really enjoy reading it, mostly because I missed the character depth, Belle's innermost thoughts, but the few times the reader is given one of Belle's thoughts they feel flat. The other thing that really bothered me, as anyone who read my review knows, were the multiple blank backgrounds and characters floating in nothingness.