Since the Academy Awards began, only three animated films have won Best Picture. Two of them, Toy Story 3 and Up, are seen by many as beneficiaries of the Academy's 2009 expansion of the nominees to ten. The first animated Best Picture nominee didn't need an expanded ballot, it had the juice to take one of only five slots reserved for the very best in cinema, as decided by the people who make it. That was Beauty and the Beast:
After two decades of output that offered more curiosities than classics, the studio returned to making musical adaptations of fairy tales, as it had in the early days with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Cinderella. The Little Mermaid was a hit in 1989, and now came Beauty and the Beast, the "tale as old as time" about a beautiful young woman who, to save her father, offers herself as a prisoner to the owner of an enchanted castle: a prince cursed to live as a beast. Released the Friday before Thanksgiving, it proved to be no turkey. The songs, the canny casting (Angela Lansbury! Jerry Orbach!), the animation, the writing, all of it struck a chord with audiences and critics. It wrapped up the year as #3 at the box office and won two of its six Academy Award nominations. The success inspired a live-action Disney Channel pre-school series, a Broadway musical, a straight-to-video spinoff (with Tim Curry and Bernadette Peters!), and, eventually, a not-as-good live-action remake.
We'll get more into it when we discuss the Best Picture nominees. Meanwhile, that entire Autumn is full of instant classics and off-the-beaten-track masterpieces:
