While the new Beauty and the Beast is still a fantasy, it also attempts to portray real characters with real motivations and treating Le Fou more like an animated character would have been counter to that idea.
One of the characters who went through the biggest change was Josh Gad’s version of Le Fou who became a much more complete character.
While Beauty and the Beast was a remarkably faithful adaptation when you compare it to its animated predecessor, they did change a number of things.
From there, however, things expanded a great deal.