Beauty and the Beast
Disney returned to the realm of fairy tales and magic to tell a “tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme,” Beauty and the Beast.
Taking a few liberties with the classic French story, the studio used
music, song and recent advances in computer animation to create a love
story set around a small 18th-century village in France.
Plucky beauty Belle is the book-loving daughter of “crazy old
Maurice,” an inventor. Local stallion Gaston (every last inch of him’s
covered with hair) tries to woo Belle, but she wants more than this
provincial life. When Maurice gets lost and captured on his way to a
fair, Belle goes into the woods in search of him. This leads to an
encounter with Maurice’s captor, the large, hideous Beast, a former
prince cursed with his current looks until he can find true love.
Belle offers to take her father’s place in the Beast’s castle, a
Gothic mansion filled with animated inanimates—a candleabra named
Lumiere, a clock named Cogsworth, a motherly teapot named Mrs. Potts
and more. If the Beast can win Belle’s heart, the entire castle will be
freed from its curse; but if he can’t control his temper and
selfishness, the curse will remain forever.
With stunning animation, a moving score and characters with more depth than most “children’s movies,” Beauty and the Beast
was a new Disney masterpiece, an instant classic. The Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences recognized the studio’s achievement by
nominating the film for a Best Picture Oscar, the only animated film to
date to receive that honor.
The film was dedicated to the late Howard Ashman, lyricist for both this film’s and The Little Mermaid’s songs. Ashman won a posthumous Oscar with composer Alan Menken for Beauty and the Beast’s title song.
The film remains one of the studio's proudest achievements, and
Belle and company continue to appear in direct-to-video adventures like
Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas and Belle's Magical World.
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