10 / 10
Official trailer
Beauty and the Beast is one of the great Disney animated films and the first animated feature ever nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. The film was released in November 1991 during the peak of the Disney Renaissance. It grossed approximately four hundred forty million dollars worldwide on a budget of twenty-five million dollars. The film won the Academy Awards for Best Original Song and Best Original Score. The Best Picture nomination was historic.
The film lost to The Silence of the Lambs but the nomination itself established that animated features could compete with live-action productions at the highest awards level. The 10/10 is honest.
This is the Disney film I’d hand to anyone who thinks animation is kid stuff. I think it’s as close to perfect as the studio ever got: every song deserves its place, the villain is frightening because he’s the popular one, and the romance moves slowly enough that I believe it. The 10 comes easy for me here, and the only fight I’d pick is with the remake.
Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise directed. The two hadn’t directed a feature before Beauty and the Beast. The studio gave them the project after it replaced the production’s original director. The decision to give the production to relative newcomers reflected the studio’s confidence that the development work had reached a point where competent execution could deliver the result the material needed. The confidence was justified. Trousdale and Wise delivered a carefully calibrated animated feature. They’d later codirect The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Atlantis: The Lost Empire.
The Production
The project had been in development at Disney since the 1930s. Walt Disney himself had considered adapting the Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont source. Multiple development phases produced different versions that never reached production. The eventual greenlight came after the commercial success of The Little Mermaid in 1989. The studio had reestablished animation as commercially viable. Beauty and the Beast was the production that would show whether the renaissance could be sustained.
Howard Ashman served as creative producer alongside writing lyrics for the songs.
Ashman had been the central creative force behind The Little Mermaid. He brought Broadway musical theater discipline to the Disney animation department. He died from AIDS-related complications in March 1991, several months before Beauty and the Beast was released. The film is dedicated to him. The dedication reads: “To our friend Howard, who gave a mermaid her voice and a beast his soul. We’ll be forever grateful.”
The dedication is one of the more honest acknowledgments any major studio has made about a creative collaborator’s contribution to the work.
James Baxter developed the animation for Belle and Glen Keane for the Beast.
Both animators were among the most accomplished in the Disney studio system. Baxter brought European training to his work on Belle. The character animation captures specific body language and facial expression that gives Belle dramatic interior content beyond what the dialogue delivers. Keane developed the Beast character through extensive study of buffalo, lion, wolf, and gorilla physiology.
The Beast’s specific design combines multiple animal references into a coherent creature that audiences read as beastly without losing the human emotional content the role requires.
On the technical side, the film also pioneered major computer-assisted animation. The Computer Animation Production System replaced the traditional ink-and-paint cels with digital coloring. The ballroom sequence used CGI to create the three-dimensional ballroom that Belle and the Beast dance through. The integration of CGI and hand-drawn animation set techniques that the studio would build on across the following decade. The ballroom dance is a technical high point for Disney animation.
The Source
The source is the 1740 French fairy tale by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve as abbreviated by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont in 1756. The Villeneuve original is considerably longer and contains extensive backstory about the prince’s transformation, the fairy who cursed him, and the family politics that produced the situation. The Leprince de Beaumont version is the simplified fairy tale most readers know.
The Disney adaptation preserves the central beauty-meets-beast structure while considerably developing the supporting cast.
The Beaumont version doesn’t contain Lumiere, Cogsworth, Mrs. Potts, or any of the enchanted household objects as fully developed characters. The Disney version expanded the household into a full ensemble. The expansion is the central craft decision that distinguishes the film from the source material. The Beaumont version has approximately four characters. The Disney version has approximately ten major and supporting characters. The expansion provides the comic and dramatic content the runtime requires.
The Cast
Paige O’Hara voiced Belle. The performance is one of the great Disney lead voice performances. O’Hara brings real theatrical training to both the spoken dialogue and the musical sequences. She was the first Disney lead voice actress to perform both functions herself instead of being split with a separate singing voice actress. Belle is more developed than previous Disney princesses.
The character reads books and resists the marriage proposals her village considers right for her. She chooses to remain in the Beast’s castle as her father’s substitute prisoner.
Belle is the dramatic engine of the film, and O’Hara drives it hard. I like Belle more than any Disney heroine before her because she reads, says no to the village’s idea of a good match and picks her own prison to save her father. O’Hara makes every one of those choices sound like hers.
Robby Benson voiced the Beast. Benson had been a teen heartthrob in 1970s American film. By 1991 his career had moved toward voice work and stage productions. The Beast performance combines wounded vulnerability with real threat. Benson plays the character as a man whose curse has trained him to expect that everyone will reject him because of his appearance. The character’s gradual recognition that Belle isn’t rejecting him drives the emotional arc the film depends on. Benson’s vocal work was processed with growl effects but the underlying performance is fully his.
Richard White voiced Gaston, and he’s my favorite Disney villain by a wide margin.
Gaston is the village’s most admired man, and the admiration has given him unlimited self-regard. He’s dangerous because he’s popular, and the villagers follow him because they like him. White plays that popularity with real commitment, and I think the slide from admired suitor to murderous mob leader is the best-built villain arc Disney ever drew.
The character demonstrates how popular figures can become dangerous when their self-regard is challenged.
Jerry Orbach voiced Lumiere. Orbach was a Broadway veteran whose theatrical timing translated perfectly to the candlestick character.
The French accent and the romantic tone that Lumiere requires were delivered with the kind of comic precision that the character depends on. David Ogden Stiers voiced Cogsworth with properly fussy English butler tone that contrasted with Lumiere’s continental smoothness. Angela Lansbury voiced Mrs. Potts with the kind of warm motherly authority that the character carries through the runtime.
Lansbury also delivered the title song “Beauty and the Beast” at a level that later recordings have struggled to match. Bradley Pierce voiced Chip, the young teacup who’s Mrs. Potts’s son. The vocal performance was true to the character’s age. That gave the character the kind of real childhood tone that adult voice actors approximating children can’t achieve. The character provides additional supporting cast warmth that the wider ensemble develops.
For Writers
Through Gaston, Beauty and the Beast shows how to construct a villain whose threat emerges from popular admiration instead of from supernatural power. Gaston isn’t a wizard. Gaston isn’t a king. Gaston isn’t a monster. Gaston is the village’s most admired man. The threat the character represents is institutional instead of supernatural. The villagers will follow him because the villagers like him. When Belle’s rejection challenges his self-regard, the popularity becomes dangerous.
The mob he eventually leads to the castle is composed of villagers who don’t personally know the Beast and who accept Gaston’s claims because Gaston has spent years establishing his credibility with them. The lesson for writers is that dangerous figures in real social systems are often the popular ones instead of the obvious villains. Popularity produces social capital that can be deployed in dangerous directions when the popular figure’s interests are threatened. Write your villains accordingly.
The most dangerous villains are often the ones the community would defend instead of the ones the community recognizes as villainous.
The Beast’s Castle
The castle environment is a great animated set.
The exterior is dark Gothic architecture with grotesque statuary, ornate ironwork, and the kind of European medieval menace that the original fairy tale structure requires. The interior contains elaborate ballrooms, libraries, dining rooms, and bedchambers that each receive specific decorative development. The castle feels like an actual residence instead of a set built for the film’s needs.
The library sequence in particular delivers some of the most ambitious environmental animation Disney had attempted to that point. The Beast reveals the castle library to Belle. The space contains thousands of books, multiple levels, vertical sliding ladders, ornate windows, and detailed architectural ornamentation. The reveal is structured as the moment the relationship changes. Belle has been a reader since the opening sequence. The Beast offering the library is the gesture that signals his recognition of who Belle is. The animation matches the dramatic weight with environmental scale.
The ballroom sequence is the most famous environment in the film, and it’s the scene that convinced me to give the film a 10.
The integrated CGI and hand-drawn animation follows Belle and the Beast as the camera moves continuously through three-dimensional space, a rare feat for animated cinema at the time. What impresses me is that the technology never upstages the moment. The dance is where the two of them first admit what the relationship has become, and the music, the animation and the drama work together.
The Score
Alan Menken composed the music. Howard Ashman wrote lyrics. The songs include “Belle,” “Gaston,” “Be Our Guest,” “Something There,” “The Mob Song,” and “Beauty and the Beast.” The musical content is one of the strongest collections in any Disney film. The integrated musical structure that Disney had refined across The Little Mermaid reached full maturity in Beauty and the Beast. Each song serves specific narrative function. No song interrupts the dramatic flow.
“Beauty and the Beast” won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. The Angela Lansbury performance is the original recording. Celine Dion and Peabo Bryson performed a single version that became a heavy commercial hit. The song’s emotional content matches the dramatic content of the ballroom sequence where it appears. The integration of song, animation, and dramatic moment is the example case of what Disney musical animation could accomplish at peak execution.
“Be Our Guest” is the showstopper, and I grin through every second of it. Lumiere and the household objects stage an elaborate musical entertainment for Belle, with choreographed kitchen utensils, dancing dishes and the kind of integrated ensemble work later productions have rarely matched. The sequence runs about four minutes and packs in some of the densest choreography Disney drew in the 1990s. Jerry Orbach sells it like the Broadway veteran he was.
“Gaston” is one of the great Disney villain songs. The character celebrates himself with vocal accompaniment from the tavern villagers who admire him. The song establishes Gaston’s specific brand of dangerous self-regard while functioning as comic showpiece for Richard White’s vocal performance. It also shows how the character’s eventual mob leadership is consistent with his existing relationship with the village. The villagers were always going to follow him. The song establishes the foundation that the third-act mob scene depends on.
The Best Picture Nomination
No animated feature before Beauty and the Beast had earned a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Picture.
The 1991 nomination was historic. Animated features hadn’t previously been considered for the main Academy Award categories. The nomination acknowledged that Disney’s renaissance period had reached a point where the studio’s animated work could compete with major live-action productions at the highest awards level.
Best Picture went to The Silence of the Lambs. The Silence of the Lambs won five Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay.
The competition was real. Beauty and the Beast wasn’t embarrassed by the loss. The film delivered Academy recognition at a level animated features hadn’t previously achieved. The Best Animated Feature category was eventually created in 2001 partly in response to the recognition that animated features needed dedicated recognition instead of competing with live-action productions in categories that consistently favored the live-action work.
The nomination changed how Disney positioned its animated features.
The studio understood that it could produce Academy-quality work if the production resources supported it. Disney calibrated the later Disney Renaissance productions including Aladdin, The Lion King, and Mulan for the kind of awards-worthy ambition that Beauty and the Beast had shown was possible. The 1991 nomination shaped Disney’s animation strategy for the next decade.
The 2017 Live-Action Remake
Bill Condon directed the 2017 live-action Beauty and the Beast. Emma Watson played Belle. Dan Stevens played the Beast. Luke Evans played Gaston. Josh Gad played LeFou. The film was released in March 2017 and grossed approximately one billion two hundred seventy million dollars worldwide on a production budget of approximately one hundred sixty million dollars.
The commercial success was serious. The critical reception was mixed. The remake is one of Disney’s commercially most successful live-action conversions while being one of the less artistically distinguished.
The casting was the central problem. Emma Watson is a competent actress whose specific qualities didn’t match what the Belle role required. Watson’s vocal performance was processed with considerable auto-tune in ways that later audio analysis has documented.
The processing was necessary because Watson didn’t have the trained singing voice the musical sequences required. The reliance on processing produced vocal performances that lacked the warmth the original Paige O’Hara recordings had delivered. Watson’s spoken performance was also restrained in ways that limited Belle’s emotional range.
The character should be intelligent and curious and resistant. Watson played the character as observably dutiful instead of as actively engaged.
The Beast character was rendered through motion capture with Dan Stevens performing the role.
The CGI Beast is technically competent. The face captures Stevens’s expressions adequately. The character also lacks the weight that Glen Keane’s hand-drawn animation had given the original Beast. The CGI character looks like a man wearing digital fur instead of like a creature with its own internal physicality. The result is a Beast who reads as costumed actor instead of as the beastly creature the original animation had delivered.
The household objects are the visual disaster of the remake, and they drive me up the wall.
The photorealistic CGI versions of Lumiere, Cogsworth, Mrs. Potts and the other enchanted servants sit in uncanny valley space the rendering can’t escape. The originals were charming because the animation embraced cartoon physics. These look like real antiques being jerked around by a computer, and I spend every household scene wishing somebody had drawn them by hand.
Beyond that, the film added political content that the original didn’t contain.
Disney reframed LeFou as its first openly gay character. Disney deployed the reframing as marketing material. Multiple international markets banned the film over the LeFou content. The reframing didn’t serve the story. LeFou functioned in the original as Gaston’s comic sidekick. The 2017 version maintains the comic sidekick function while adding gay subtext that the dramatic content doesn’t require. The addition was political signaling that didn’t improve the character.
Belle also got expanded backstory in the film, including the death of her mother from plague during her infancy.
The backstory wasn’t in the original because the original didn’t need it. Belle’s character motivation in the 1991 version is established through observable choices instead of through traumatic backstory. The 2017 version added the trauma to provide the kind of contemporary character motivation that modern audiences supposedly require. The addition didn’t improve the character.
The addition replaced the original’s confident character establishment with the kind of explanatory backstory that contemporary screenwriting has been overusing.
The commercial success of the remake shows that audiences will pay to see Beauty and the Beast regardless of whether the production is good. That success is evidence of the property’s lasting appeal and says nothing about the remake’s quality. Audiences interested in Beauty and the Beast should pursue the 1991 animated original. The 2017 remake is one of the less essential Disney live-action conversions despite the commercial reception.
For Writers
The 2017 Beauty and the Beast shows the problem of adding backstory to characters who functioned in their original versions without backstory. Belle in 1991 was established through observable choices. The character read books and resisted village suitors. She chose her father’s freedom over her own. These specific choices communicated who Belle was without requiring exposition about her childhood. The 2017 version added childhood trauma to provide the kind of explanatory motivation that contemporary screenwriting has been overusing. The addition is unnecessary. The character was already complete.
The addition is example of the wider contemporary tendency to over-explain character motivation when the character’s behavior had already established the motivation through action. The lesson for writers is that characters who function through action don’t need backstory exposition. The action is the establishment. Adding backstory to such characters typically weakens them instead of strengthening them. Trust action over exposition. Most readers don’t need to know what happened to your character at age six. Most readers need to see your character making choices in the present.
Craft Note
Craft Note
If you want the example case for what Disney animation could accomplish when every element of the production was calibrated for sustained craft excellence, it’s Beauty and the Beast. The directing brought disciplined narrative pacing. The animation delivered character work that later productions have built on consistently. The voice cast provided performances that have remained iconic across three decades. The music produced songs that have become permanent reference. The technical innovation with the Computer Animation Production System and the ballroom CGI established techniques that the medium would refine across later decades.
The thematic content engaged with adult emotional material at levels that family animation typically avoids. The produced the first animated film to receive Best Picture recognition at the Academy Awards. The recognition was earned instead of inherited from existing property recognition. The lesson for writers is that recognition typically follows craft instead of precedes it. Productions that aim for sustained craft excellence across every element generate the kind of cultural standing that later generations continue to recognize.
Productions that aim for commercial success without comparable craft investment produce work that lasts only as long as the immediate commercial cycle. Beauty and the Beast made commercial money and won awards because the craft was major. The two outcomes weren’t separate. The craft produced both.
Is Beauty and the Beast as good as people say?
A 10/10. Beauty and the Beast is one of the great Disney animated films and the first animated feature ever nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture.
The film delivered sustained craft excellence across every element of the production. The directing, the animation, the voice cast, the music, the technical innovation, and the thematic content all combine to produce work that’s remained essential viewing across three decades.
It’s one of the foundational achievements of the Disney Renaissance and one of the foundational achievements of feature animation as a serious dramatic medium.
The 2017 Emma Watson live-action remake is one of Disney’s commercially most successful live-action conversions while being one of the less artistically distinguished.
The Watson casting was problematic. The Beast CGI is competent but lacks the weight of the original animation. The household objects in photorealistic CGI occupy uncanny valley space. The added political content didn’t serve the story. The expanded backstory replaced confident character establishment with explanatory exposition. Audiences interested in Beauty and the Beast should pursue the 1991 original. The remake is skippable despite the commercial reception.
So the 10 stands, and it’s an easy call. Every piece of the 1991 film pulls its weight, from the songs to the castle to a villain built out of village applause, and I can’t point to a scene I’d cut. The remake made more money, and I’d still pick the hand-drawn version over it without a second thought.
