oskar

Whenever my friends and I discuss movies (which is often), and we approach the subject of animated features, I passionately start to sing the praises of what I consider to be an enormously underrated movie, Beauty and the Beast from Disney. It’s gotten to the point that this has become a running joke with my friends, and they tease me about it often. I figure it would make a good subject for my first Feministing-community blog-post.

(I should make it clear that it is actually not my favorite animated movie, that honor belongs to Grave of the Fireflies . It is, however, my favorite American animated movie, and my favorite animated movie that doesn’t make me want to kill myself, which Grave of the Fireflies does)

(By the way, this essay is going to be somewhat lengthy. Apologies for that. As I said, I’ve argued this many times, so I tend to ramble on. And I do belive it’s interesting, but I guess I’ll let you be the judge of that.)

Why do I love this movie so much? Well, it has all the traditional elements that the classic Disney-features should have: the songs are great, the artwork stunning, the characters engaging and the jokes are funny. In my opinion, it does all those things better than pretty much any other Disney feature in existance. That alone would make it pretty fantastic.

However, the main reason I love it so much is because of the feminist message ...