By JAMES CROOT – The Press
Last updated 05:00 14/08/2010
It’s hard to believe now but once upon a time animated films came without celebrity voices and songwriting, weren’t littered with pop culture references and were hand-drawn rather than computer designed.
And in Beauty and the Beast’s case they nearly won Oscar’s Best Picture (it was beaten to that honour in 1991 by The Silence of the Lambs) but did get the consolation of winning the Golden Globe for Best Picture (Musical or Comedy).
Now almost two decades on, Disney’s 30th animated feature, has returned to the big screen for a limited time in 3D. Inspired by the 18th century fairytale, it’s the story of Belle (Paige O’Hara) a bookish outcast who dreams of life beyond her quiet village.
However, she gets more than she bargained for when her inventor father gets lost in the nearby woods and winds up captive at a castle owned by the hideous yet mysterious Beast (Robbie Benson). When Belle eventually tracks him down, she agrees to trade places with her father in order to secure his freedom.
With its deep, lush visuals Beauty is in someways an ideal film for a 3D makeover with Belle’s exploration of the castle and the woods greatly enhanced by the added dimension of depth (the constant bad weather provides a particularly good showcase of what 3D can offer) and that first computer-animated scene in the ballroom finally getting the full effect it deserves. However, in other ways it seems a little pointless given the two dimensional nature of the hand-drawn characters.
But gimmick aside it is rare opportunity to see not only one of cinema’s greatest animated movies but also one the best movie musicals. While it didn’t have a stand out pop hit like The Lion King’s Circle of Life or Aladdin’s A Whole New World, it has a clutch of fantastic songs by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman from the scene-setting Belle, to the battle cry Kill the Beast (which rivals anything in Les Miserables) and the showstopping Busby Berkeley-esque Be Our Guest.
Lyrically they are outstanding with the humours Gaston a standout (“No one plots like Gaston, Takes cheaps shot like Gaston, tries to persecute harmless crackpots like Gaston”) It’s easy to why the film became one of Broadway’s longest running shows. And that is another masterstroke by the film’s creators.
Rather than populating it with known actors, Mash’s David Ogden Stiers and Murder She Wrote’s Angela Landsbury are the only names, the cast is instead dominated by Broadway singers like the honey toned O’Hara (who makes Belle Disney’s finest “princess”, both winsome and strong willed) and the gravel voiced Benson.
Incredibly the work of 12 writers (usually a bad sign), the story mixes visual and verbal humour (“If It Ain’t Baroque, don’t fix it”) with some genuine scares that hark back to Disney’s golden era of Pinocchio and Snow White. That and the requirement of 3D glasses may mean its not suitable for the littlest of cinema goers, but for all other ages Beauty is that rare beast an animated film that can be enjoyed by the whole family. Plus it has one the best last lines in cinema history: “Do I still have to sleep in a cupboard?”
The movie that restored animation’s, and in particular Disney’s, fortunes, watching it again on the big screen only reminded me what an endearing and enduring classic Beauty is. And I still had a tear in my at the end.