Beauty and the Beast

Finally I got to see Beauty and the Beast on the big screen, as I never had the chance, being a wee baby when the movie first came out. Timeless and effortlessly enchanting, the second Disney feature from their Renaissance period is a wonderful musical romance with great animations to please the eye.

Book-smart Belle knows she doesn’t fit in with the rest of the townspeople and can’t stand the affections of vain brutish Gaston. En route to a fair, her father Maurice winds up in an enchanted castle where he’s imprisoned by the Beast, who later accepts Belle’s deal to let him go in exchange for her sentence to stay. As their time together grows, so does their relationship, leading to the hope that the Prince, cursed into his form, will gain a mutual love and reverse the spell.

Belle is strong, and the heroine of her own story, Lumiere is a comic sleaze and Gaston is delightfully smarmy, and of course the songs are strong and catchy. Be Our Guest will forever be one of my favourites, and seeing it at a cinema looks amazing as the dining room zings to life. Belle opens the film in a chorus-y manner setting the story just right and The Mob Song, which I’d forgotten, is dark and fitting for Gaston’s villainous motives.

With regard to animation style, this love story hasn’t aged in the slightest and is fully deserving of being the first animated movie to be up for Best Picture at the Oscars. The key moment that glistens is the ballroom dance, which combines the lovely hand-drawn images of Belle and Beast with first time computer animated designs for the background, giving a pleasant sweeping motion throughout the sequence.