Beauty and the Beast (1991)

Beauty and the Beast (1991)

This Walt Disney Feature was the first animated film to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture; in fact it was the only one until the category was expanded to 10 nominees in 2010 (the studio’s Up (2009) and Toy Story 3 (2010) have subsequently been recognized; both of these won Best Animated Feature Film of the Year as a consolation prize). The movie did win for Best Music Original Score; its title song won for Best Music Original Song. The songs "Be Our Guest" and "Belle" also received nominations as did the film’s Sound and the film was added to the National Film Registry in 2002.

It’s a beautifully realized version of the classic story involving a pretty and misunderstood loner of a girl (Paige O’Hara is Belle) that ultimately falls in love with a huge hideous beast (voiced by Robby Benson). It is learned that the beast was once a spoiled self-absorbed prince whose character traits were so ugly that he was turned into a physical representation of his personality by a spell which can be broken only when the beast finds mutual love. A wilting rose in a glass case represents the time limit that the beast has to find someone to love and someone to love him; if its last petal falls before this occurrence the prince will remain a beast in perpetuity. The likelihood of this happening is slim since the beast’s castle is a forbidding fortress hidden in the woods; it’s also enchanted in that its former servants were similarly changed by the spell into elements of furniture etc.. Jerry Orbach is the romantic Lumiere formerly the head waiter but now a candlestick David Ogden Stiers (also the narrator) is the stuffy butler Cogsworth now a clock whereas Angela Lansbury is Mrs. Potts the cook as a teapot and Bradley Pierce is her son Chip a chipped teacup. Two other key characters are the muscle-bound town bully-champion hunter Gaston (Richard White) who covets Belle’s love and the Beast’s head for his mantle and Belle’s misfit inventor father Maurice (Rex Everhart) who first got lost in the woods and was captured by the beast saved only by Belle’s selflessness to take her aged father’s place as a permanent prisoner in the castle.

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