Walt Disney was never one for giving credit where credit was due. His was the signature on the films coming out of the studio, and his were seven hundred or so awards and honours that came by return. Things are better since his death, but even so, much of the credit for 1991's blockbusting Beauty and The Beast rightfully belonged not to the mega-rich US company but to this tiny, French classic. Disney's protagonist is an exaggerated cartoon of Jean Marais's carpet-faced Beast.

However well (or possibly not) Jean Cocteau's films have travelled in the interim, few would deny his two masterpieces: the remarkably authentic dreamscape Orphee (1950) and this poetic take on the old Mme. Leprine de Beaumont fairytale. It's a relatively straight take on events too, upping Beauty's (Josette Day) family background - her abusive sisters, rather dopey boyfriend - but leaving the essentials well alone. The essentials, though, are more than enough in this, surely the most surreal of all fairytales.

It's a simple tale - girl meets Beast, girl falls for Beast despite everything - simply told. Cocteau reputedly encouraged his cinematographer Henri Alekan (who would go on some thirty years later to photograph The State of Things and Wings of Desire for Wim Wenders) to light and shoot everything as plainly as it would allow. The result is an 18th. Century realist fantasy, but one struck with astonishing sights - the disembodied arms that serve Beauty's every need; the magical gauntlet that allows her to travel between the castle and her father's house.

The Beast's castle seems to consist essentially of two rooms, it's so-called "metaphorical decor" - Beauty's bedroom, and the formidable, echoing hall - which Cocteau would arrange himself, but saw him lay praise on art director Christian Berard for realising "that vagueness is unsuitable to the fairy world and that mystery exists only in precise thoughts." For the austerity of immediate post-war France (it premiered at Cannes 1946) it was brave indeed.

Performances are strong, but shorn of his rug - as both beau Avenant and the Prince - Marais is less sure of himself. Cocteau makes moves at the end to acknowledge the essential contradiction of the piece - since Beauty has fallen for the Beast, why would she now be satisfied with this untested, rather effete new suitor? - but ultimately it makes little difference. Beauty And The Beast is defiantly anti-PC, unlike the Disney challenger, and it doesn't have all those damn songs either.

This is also effectively the second 90s revival of the Cocteau picture. Avant-garde minimalist Philip Glass recently toured these images, played to an entirely new soundtrack by his ensemble and singers. Both versions - the other from Georges Auric - integrate supremely with Cocteau's remarkable phantasm. Buy the Glass (it's available in a lavish double CD set) and decide which it's to be. Either way, this is one of the most poetic pictures ever made.