Beauty and the Beast (1991)

Gary and I saw this in its original theatrical run... then again and again on VHS tape, not to mention the musical numbers in the "Sing Along Songs" tapes that our boys watched growing up. We were wowed by it -- we dreamed of Gary becoming an animator so that he could work on something this amazing.

So I was extremely surprised that, upon rewatch for the first time in probably 18 or so years, this just doesn't hold up. I'm not even talking about the problematic misogyny (though, yeah, that's not cool) -- it's the animation. It looks as janky as a Scooby-Doo episode most of the time. Immediately after this viewing, we cued up Cinderella to make sure it wasn't just an overly-critical eye expecting something that wasn't possible in the early '90s -- but, nope. Cinderella is more carefully executed than this was. Belle's features shift size from scene to scene and characters in the background often look as though the illustrators had 10 minutes to draw a dozen.

The live-action remake will probably be my go-to from here on out.

B-