I've been meaning to write a post about Disney's Beauty and the Beast (or, as Jason calls it "Booty the Beese") for a while now. Three months ago it was one of Jason's favorite movies, and we watched at least a few minutes of it several times each day. As always, though, procrastination managed to steal away the relevance of the topic to my daily life, and now Jason is much more into Cars and Toy Story.

I had a bunch of little bullet points to develop, but the main idea I had for the article was to talk about how unsettlingly close to a Stockholm syndrom sort of scenario the movie is. Need to find a woman to love you so you can undo your pesky curse? Easy enough: just grab the first pretty face that comes by, hold her prisoner with no hope of escape, scream at her, and threaten to starve her and she'll come around. Yep, that definitely sounds like "the most beautiful love story ever told."

You can imagine my dismay, then, when I saw this video linked by one of my Facebook friends this afternoon:

Same point and funnier than I could have done it. So I guess that idea is out the window. All that's left is a few of those leftover bullet points:

• Somehow, the animation in Beauty and the Beast doesn't seem to hold up as well as the animation in The Little Mermaid, despite--or perhaps because of--the fact that it's so obviously more technologically advanced. The ballroom scene, of course, seems pretty dated now, but even the more traditionally animated scenes seem less impressive than their older counterparts. If nothing else, the cels seem to stand out more from the backgrounds.
• I do have to admit, though, what they accomplished with the backgrounds in terms of parallax processing and simulating a rotating camera is pretty darn impressive.
• Comparing the two movies again, it's interesting how much more like a Broadway musical Beauty and the Beast is than The Little Mermaid, both in terms of the songs and the voice acting.
• Angela Lansbury's performance of the title song may be the best, most affecting song performances in any Disney movie. She was 65 when that movie was in production, already over 40 years into her film career and more than 80 credits under her belt. It's a pretty song to begin with, but hearing the age and experience in her voice adds a poignancy that gets me in a way I wasn't able to understand when the movie was new. I tell you what, Peabo and Celine have got nothing on her.