Realization during Beauty and the Beast today
During the opening narration, the enchantress casts a spell on a prince, turning him into the Beast. The spell will become permanent on his 21st birthday, when last petal from the magic rose falls (which, if you’ve seen it, you know happens not long after Belle’s arrival). However, during “Be Our Guest”, Lumiere says, “Ten years we’ve been rusting…” That means that the prince was a maximum of 11 years old and possibly only 10 when he was cursed. If that lady was going around cursing every pre-adolescent boy that was rude to her, there must have been a lot of cursed beasts in whatever quasi-French kingdom this was. Gaston is made out to be the villain in the movie, but I think the real villain is the psychotic witch who’s creating a race of angry, talking buffalo-lions.
