One of the greatest animated movies and one of the greatest movie musicals ever made.

Rating: 10/10 (8 July 2017)

With the release of director Bill Condon's live-action remake already among us in DVD and Blu-Ray form, I figure that it'd be appropriate to look back at the original animated musical released in 1991 and directed by Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise. The Disney Renaissance was just kicking off with the releases of "The Little Mermaid" (1989) and the wildly underrated "The Rescuers Down Under" (1990), the latter not being a musical. Regardless, those two movies, along with the invention of CAPS (Computer Animation Production System), opened up a new wave of motion picture animation that would give Disney's animation studio a new breath of life after a long slew of mediocre successes and failures at the box office, their biggest flop being the animated fantasy film "The Black Cauldron" (1986). It wasn't until 1991 when their next project really pushed it to the limit.
Based on the French fairy tale, "Beauty and the Beast" first opens up with a prologue about a selfish prince and his refusal to help an old woman in need. It turns out that old woman was really an enchantress, who decides to teach the prince a lesson he would never forget. How? Turn him into a hideous monster, of course, with his subordinates who also live in his castle sharing the punishment. Then we cut to Belle, a young country girl who's the talk of the town, and the vying target of local hunk Gaston (our villain). Belle's father, an inventor heads off to the fair to show off his work, only to be ambushed by a pack of wolves. He becomes the prisoner of the prince, now a beast, after seeking shelter in his castle, and when Belle gets wind of her father taken captive, she goes to try and free him. She offers to be his prisoner in exchange for her father's freedom, and as we soon find out later in the picture, she's his only hope of breaking the enchantress' spell if the Beast plays his cards right.
Looking at this film in 2017, this movie still holds up just as well as it did back when it was first released 26 years ago. The animation is still as crisp, smooth, and as impressive today as it was back then. Keep in mind that this was a time where artists still had to draw frame after frame, even though they used computers. The ballroom scene in particular is still one of the most iconic scenes in cinema history. The songs and score by Alan Menken and the late Howard Ashman, who also worked on 1989's "The Little Mermaid" and 1986's "Little Shop of Horrors", are some of their best work to date, with the title song (sung by Angela Lansbury) and "Be Our Guest" (sung by the late "Law & Order" star Jerry Orbach) being the highlights.
Being a child of the '90s, I had the opportunity of seeing this film at a rather young age. After all, I was a hardcore Disney kid, and I remember this as being a spectacle at the time. I wasn't alone in that regard, as this movie was turning the heads of both audiences and critics, including the late Roger Ebert, who quoted it as "one of the greatest movie musicals ever made". Even the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (a.k.a. the Oscar people) made an exception to the "no animated films for Best Picture" rule and made it a nominee in that category for 1991. Let's just say that if your animated movie can change a rule that the A.M.P.A.S. set in stone, you've done something right.
Overall, this is a movie worth looking at again before the release of the live-action remake starring Emma Watson later this month. In my opinion, though not my number one favorite Disney film, it is one of their greatest animated pictures and in a spot somewhere in my top five. It is a must-see for any film lover, and even if you're not a fan of these kind of movies, there is something you can at least admire about it.