Bad Singing, Bad Pacing, and No Concept of Time. But the Animation is Pretty

Rating: 4/10 (22 March 2017)

Beauty and the Beast follows a woman who, after trading her life for her father's, is imprisoned in the castle of a beast. Ultimately, they fall in love.
The animation is beautiful. It's all hand drawn, and it opens with a beautiful scene right away, immersing the audience into the movie without so much as a line of dialogue or anything. And this continues. The animation stays beautiful, and unfortunately that beauty doesn't transfer into the rest of the movie.
Before we get into it, I'll also say that most all the voice acting was great. Those who voiced these characters were almost all perfect, and gave just enough to make their characters believable and more interesting.
Also, as far as music goes, the instrumental is great. Can't say the same for the lyrical aspect, but the instrumental alone is something I can see myself returning to. It's pleasant and it's fun, and that doesn't tend to be a bad thing. In addition, Paige O'Hara has a lovely voice. Unfortunately she sings no more than twice in the entire movie, but when she does it's a real treat.
In continuation of the music, the rest of the cast sucks at singing. It was truly horrible to listen to every lyric, and even worse knowing that these wretched voices were distracting from a beautiful score. I hated listening to every single one, and honestly couldn't wait for them to end. Even when Paige O'Hara sang, she was accompanied by trash singers. As such, most every song is practically unbearable.
Earlier I said the voice acting is mostly great. Where does it falter? Paige O'Hara. That's right. The only cast member who can sing can't voice act. She's either overdone or underdone, and she never hits the happy medium that everyone seems to have reached with relative ease. And moreover, her voice just doesn't suit Belle's character. So basically her singing is cancelled out by her acting, and everyone else's acting is cancelled out by their singing. So where does that leave us?
The pacing makes no sense. Not that it's boring, it moves rather quickly. Too quickly, actually. So much so that none of the characters receive any real development, and as such none of them are that interesting. And the relationships that form are even worse. The ones that matter aren't focused on enough, and those that aren't as much simply aren't important. And moreover, the timeline of the movie makes no sense. We're left to assume at one point (for example) that either Belle lived in Beast's castle for several days and that another character lived in the woods without food or water for those several days, or that Beast and Belle were together for all of one day and formed a relationship through that, meanwhile the other character runs around the woods. Really? There are plenty of these problems throughout the movie, where logic simply ceases to exist because plot convenience. I get that animations like this were hard to make longer because each panel is hand drawn, but at that point maybe Disney should have just avoided a story requiring development and good pacing.
Overall I really didn't enjoy Beauty and the Beast. I know I'm the minority here, but regardless, the perks of this film are cancelled out by it's flaws, and ultimately it settles at being less than average in my eyes. In the end I wouldn't recommend this movie. It makes me wonder just how low standards were in 1991 for this to be nominated for Best Picture, or even considered to be a great movie.