Written by Hani Zarina Zaharudin
It has been a great scene and noise about the releasing of Beauty and the Beast in Malaysia. As most people knew, there have been havocs on the gay scenes that local censor sought over four minutes of edits involving “gay moments”. On the other hand, Disney insisted not to cut any scenes from the movie or it will not be released in Malaysia at all.
Let me lead you to the chronology of how this noise of releasing this movie started. The movie claimed to have the gay moments, Josh Gad’s portrayal of LeFou as smitten with the handsome cad Gaston (Luke Evans). As we know, Malaysia does not support LGBT and those scenes can only be depicted if it is represented in a negative way. So, it has been a pending review from Disney since they refused to cut any scenes from the movie as this is the first time they are releasing a movie to feature an ‘exclusively gay moment’.
To simplify the drama, the movie is finally released on 30th March 2017 in Malaysia and rated as PG 13 rating. After all the hoo-ha, I strongly believed that it is essential that our censors take good responsibility on managing and controlling all the movies before they are released in Malaysia. Overall, reviews mentioned that the gay scenes in the movie have been too much hyped rather and making Malaysians more interested and curious to watch the movie to know what’s in for them for all the hyped gay scenes. Anyways, all issues have come to the end, hope to see a lot more of Disney remake movie in the future.