It's impossible to separate Beauty and the Beast from the Disney version, but wow it's so much cooler as a gothic romance.
The first half which chronicles the downfall of a foolish banker is drenched in so much foul atmosphere you can smell the bubbling swamp and fog covered trees. Everything is dead and dying, the spector of colonialism haunting crumbling forests and towns held together by greed and theft. When we finally get to the beast's mansion, it's a corpse of a more opulent time, now just eroding statues and overgrown gardens. I love this rendition of the beast as a vaguely vampiric, anthropomorphic hawk. The internal conflict between animal and man hits so much harder when survival means becoming a blood sucking murderer (indulgent sidenote: I couldn't help but see similarities to Tobias's arc in the Animorphs books, as he struggles to remain human and resist the urge to hunt while trapped in the body of a hawk). The inclusion of a Green Goblin tormentor also adds a heavy theological angle, paralleling Christ's temptation in the desert as he urges the beast to give into his animalistic instincts. Every movie needs an evil little freak.
The second act of Julie living in the mansion and slowly getting to know the beast - who's name is Netvor, though I don't think it's ever said - is quite a bit less compelling. I'd be fine with the slow burn romance if Julie was a character, but she exists only to characterize the men around her, be that her father or Netvor. The ending is a pat, "leaving my father for marriage" arc, and I kind of expected more given how dark this version is otherwise. Julie's two selfish and vain sisters are more interesting in how they reflect Julie's subservient personality, particularly in a late scene where we watch her be smothered by their envy at her new dress and jewels (which, poetically, turns to ash after she leaves the room).
A lot of scenes have a strange disorienting quality to them. I'm not sure if this was intentional to play up the dreamlike structure or just bad screenwriting, but it often feels like we come in after a scene has already played out. Sometimes it works great and leaves the viewer to figure out how they got from A to B, but other times skips over important exposition. Very unusual experience that I found compelling even when it didn't work.
Put Netvor in Kamen Rider, he's already got a cape and flying attacks.
Content warnings: animal slaughter