France cancels modern ‘Beauty and the Beast’ for schoolkids
Cartoons depict the heroine with dark Mediterranean features, the Beast as a comic toothy hair ball, and her selfish sisters as addicted to their smartphones.
Text size
Share
Cartoons depict the heroine with dark Mediterranean features, the Beast as a comic toothy hair ball, and her selfish sisters as addicted to their smartphones.
Share
PARIS (AFP) — France’s education ministry has canceled an order for “Beauty and the Beast” with modern illustrations, saying a cartoonist’s 21st-century version including a police sniffer dog and smartphones was inappropriate for tweens.
Julien Berjeaut, whose pen name is Jul, had been asked to illustrate an 18th-century version of the famous fairy tale for a government scheme to give 800,000 primary school graduates a revamped classic to read for the summer holidays.
A digital copy of the book intended for publication showed the original 1756 text by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont.
Jul’s accompanying cartoons depicted the heroine with dark Mediterranean features, the Beast as a comic toothy hair ball, and her selfish sisters as addicted to their smartphones.
To illustrate Beauty’s father exploring the Beast’s castle after “a few glasses of wine,” according to the 18th-century text, Jul draws him drunk, clutching a bottle and singing a famous French song.
Beside the book recounting his business woes and him being “put on trial for his goods,” he draws a ship arriving from abroad and police officers with a sniffer dog inspecting boxes unloaded from his car.
“It’s a modern rewriting. We have a father coming from Algeria, who must have committed fraud and is stopped by police,” Education Minister Elisabeth Borne said on Thursday.
“Perhaps in a setting with teachers, we could explain this,” she told the CNews/Europe1 broadcaster. “But it’s a book that is supposed to be read on holiday with the family.
“It is certainly an interesting work, but not for this educational setting,” she added.
Jul said he received a letter from the education ministry on Monday explaining the themes of his illustrations — such as alcohol and social media — “would be more appropriate for older pupils at the end of middle school or start of high school.”
The ministry on Thursday said these “complex realities” included “trafficking counterfeit goods” and “police controls.”
The illustrator criticized what he called “a political decision” and “censorship.”
