Cocteau v. Beaumont: The Narrative

The first thing I noticed while watching the Cocteau film was how there was not a narrator (except for the writing in the beginning). The film was presented using first person from each of the different characters' points of view. In Beaumont, the reader ventures through the story through the voice of the 3rd person narrator and is thus given a distinct point of view from which to create images of what the characters look like, namely the beast. The reader is also able to "hear the thoughts" of the characters in the story. While Beaumont provides a brief description of the beast as being "a hideous monster" with no intelligence, Cocteau's beast gives us a full image of what the beast "looks like" (whether we want to use our own imagination or not). But we cannot see (or read) what is actually going on in the characters' minds. The audience sees the beast when he is first introduced to the father and we hear his description only after we have seen him for ourselves. While this may merely be a result of making a film from a tale and thus not under the director's control, I felt as if the difference in narrative changed the way the characters were perceived.