Continuing Disney's early-Renaissance streak, Beauty and the Beast was the first animated film to be nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award, and for good reason; it's a marriage of artistic style, music, animation, and story that comes together with a fantastic sense of unity and cohesiveness as it redefines a classic fairy tale for the modern age.
In crafting the film's aesthetic, the animators delved straight into the original story's French origins, rendering both lush, picturesque countryside landscapes, and expansive Gothic architecture for the Beast's castle. The attention to detail and atmosphere in the castle is such that it almost becomes a character unto itself, especially in early scenes: the dimly lit, massive rooms feel at once vast and suffocating. As for the characters themselves, they're an excellently varied cast. Belle manages to stand out among the crowd of Disney princesses by being unashamed of being intelligent and wanting more out of life than her backwater town can provide. The Beast himself stands as a triumph of character design, combining aspects of various animals into a whole that isn't recognizable as any existing creature, but manages to embody the definition of the word "beast" with perfection, while Robby Benson's performance as a bitter, angry, childlike creature succeeds in adding complexity and humanity to what could be a generic animal-man character (he is not, as one commentator termed it, "Disney's Wolverine"). Gaston, meanwhile, emerges as a uniquely sinister villain: he's a supremely arrogant boor who believes that his masculinity entitles him to women's affections, and whose driving goal is to domesticate an independent woman - in short, he's the kind of misogynist we all know.
The animation sequences, meanwhile, are bolstered by a more liberal use of CGI to have masses of characters and objects moving in concert (witness the spectacularly choreographed "Be Our Guest"), as well as to add a new cinematic dimension to sequences like "Beauty and the Beast," with the camera free-flying throughout the ballroom. And on the subject of the music, it's another standout of the film, with Alan Menken and Howard Ashman crafting a set of songs that move the story forward, while still leaving space for showstoppers like "Be Our Guest" and "Beauty and the Beast." (Incidentally, the song "Human Again," cut from the original film and restored for the Special Edition, would be better left out; the lyrics are subpar by Menken and Ashman's standards, and the sequence as a whole is too similar to "Be Our Guest.")
Beauty and the Beast is, much like Sleeping Beauty, an absolutely beautiful film, but while Sleeping Beauty embodies storybook elegance, Beauty and the Beast delivers a more modern, diverse beauty, peppering in Gothic regality, timeless love story tropes, mystical intrigue, and moments of humor. If fairy tale films are the meat of Disney's canon, Beauty and the Beast represents their pinnacle.
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