Most Overrated Disney Film Ever Nominated for a Best Picture Oscar

Rating: Null/10 (16 December 2006)

When I was told that this was (and is, to this day) the only Disney animated film ever nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, I said to myself- "I have to see it again." By this point, I was obviously a Disney completest. So I bought it (on VHS), and watched it. What can I say? It's a joke! Let's try to take it, scene by scene. First, we are told of the story of the selfish Prince with no love in his heart. A beautiful, magical Enchantress turns him into a Beast (a furry animal, human-sized, with monster teeth and claws) when he dismisses her on the basis of what he perceives as her surface ugliness. Okay, good story. Makes sense. Decent set-up - "for who could ever love a monster?" the story asks at the end.
Well, we're going to meet her (the One who could love a monster). Her name is Belle, and she is a misfit in her small provincial French town. She reads books all the time while the townspeople feel beautiful girls should spend all their time waiting for a handsome man to make them wives and mothers. So, next we meet the handsome man who wants to be her husband, Gaston. He's conceited and arrogant - a real jerk, but a fairly accurate product of the time, with less than ideal views on independent, free-thinking women. Which Belle is. This is an okay establishing scene. We're told a lot. The characters are definitely a little flat, but the only real problem is, perhaps, that the woman singing (and speaking) Belle's part has a sort of grating voice. I'm not kidding.
So, her father is an inventor who gets lost in the woods on his way to a convention and after being chased by the unsavory creatures in the woods to the Beast's Castle, he is imprisoned by the Beast in his tower. Belle is lead to the castle by the father's runaway horse, and when she finds him, she meets the Beast, who is just the biggest creep in cinema history, once we know it's actually that selfish Prince. Nice to know being this Beast hasn't taught him a thing about humility. Belle begs for the Beast to release her father, but he refuses. So she offers to take her father's place and that... SUDDENLY melts the Beast's heart... A little. He agrees, the father is taken back to his home by a Spider Carriage, and Beast offers to give her a more comfortable room.
Now, by this time is where we start to get really worn out by the huge plausibility and character flaws. Belle is the woman, who is given the film's title of being "so Difficult" (important to remember), but it's Beast who is the moody one. Which is understandable, since he was turned into a Beast. But isn't the least bit understandable, given all we've learned about Karma. If you are a bad person, bad things happen to you. Beast got what he deserved, and it's incredibly selfish of him to expect that the work he has to do to become human again will happen on it's own. But the filmmakers have convinced all the people who like this film that it's not a problem. Because they've FLUFFED it up, by just tossing it to the side and saying, "oh, he's just got a bad temper." What does that mean? It means, Beast is still a bad person waiting for Love to make him human. So in effect, he'll still be a bad person when he's human, only he'll be human.
Perhaps I'm reading too much into it. Because Beast, over the course of the film, learns to love Belle and becomes a hero. But right from the get-go, we are not supposed to like Beast. Then, under some extremely disturbing circumstances, Belle is thrown into the Castle and through some lame musical numbers (again, I'm not kidding, these musical sequences are not up to the standards of The Little Mermaid and Aladdin), we are manipulated into believing "oh, look, they fell in love so quickly!" Another example of this type of insulting manipulation is the scene where Gaston is convincing the townspeople that the Beast is evil. He sings 1 stupid song and suddenly, everyone in the town is storming the castle, Frankenstein-style (big points for originality there).
This film is just one big sappy, unconvincing mess. If anything, it offers some extraordinary colors, 1 funny song ("Gaston" has it's riotously hilarious moments - "and every last inch of me's covered with hair!"), and Jerry Orbach (yep, that crusty detective from Law & Order) is fantastic in his role as a Parisian candelabra, with an impeccable accent. But other than that, this movie just caters to girls and women, assuming that if you dumb it down for them, they'll love it. I hate seeing that happen, but it looks like the ladies (and some gay people) fell for it. Two Thumbs Down.