Beauty And The Beast: A love letter to Disney’s masterpiece | Retrospective Review | SWITCH.

By Daniel Lammin

This article was originally published on www.maketheswitch.com.au.

This is going to be a love letter. I make no apologies for this, because there’s no other way I was going to be able to write anything about this film. One as culturally and historically important as this deserves innumerable commemorations and celebrations, as it has received over the course of this year for its twenty-fifth anniversary, but if I were going to contribute something to that celebration, it was always going to be something from the heart. After all, that seems to have been where this film came from.

I was five years old when my parents took me to see Disney’s ‘Beauty and the Beast’ back in 1991. I was suffering from some sort of tummy bug, and yet I was so determined to see it that I still insisted on going, even after I’d vomited all over the steps outside. I don’t remember actually sitting in the cinema, but I know that afterwards I wasn’t the same.

‘Beauty and the Beast’ isn’t just my favourite Disney film, it’s one of my favourite films of all time, up there with ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ and ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. I could justify this by sighting its perfect construction, its breathtaking and cinematic animation…