Disney Manga: Beauty and the Beast - The Beast'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! Also, if you read my review for Belle's Tale, this will be almost the same review.

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 Beast'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, floathing in nothingness 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 the Beast's thoughts 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.

What bothered me about Beast's Tale was that I war really excited to get a few new scenes with insight into how he feels about all of this. Well, most of the scenes, sans a few of his past when he was still a prince, were directly taken from Belle's Tale. Had I bought it I would've felt quite cheated.

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