Review - Beauty and the Beast 3D

Aiming to take a load off my awards-addled mind – something I recommend everyone do this time of year – I spent the afternoon taking in the 3D resurrection of an old favourite. Springboarding from the surprisingly profitable release of The Lion King last fall, Disney is giving their timeless musical romance Beauty and the Beast the same treatment in hopes of drawing in audiences over less-than-compelling January fare.

It didn't take much to get my butt in a seat. The film is, in my opinion, a high watermark for Walt Disney Animation. While The Little Mermaid is justly adored and credited with being the game-changer for the struggling studio in 1989, Beauty and the Beast must be acknowledged as the film that refined the new formula to the point of near perfection, approaching the love story with more emotional maturity and the musical format with more sophistication than any of its many predecessors in the Disney canon. It won unanimous critical praise and a cool Best Picture nomination as reward. That it continues to charm new generations of movie lovers to this day is merely a verification of the "instant classic" status that was bestowed upon it in 1991.

Sunday Top Ten: Alan Menken songs

This past Friday marked the 62nd birthday of a man whose legacy has left a lasting impression on anyone who grew up with the Disney renaissance of the 1990s. I refer, of course, to the awesome Alan Menken, the master of melody whose tuneful compositions earned him a whopping fifteen Oscar nominations and eight wins between 1987 and 1998.

I can't tell you how tricky and frustrating it was for me to try and pare down his accomplished repertoire of songs to just ten for this list. Ask me again tomorrow and as many as five of them could be replaced by songs that don't appear on it today! I also tried to be as equitable as possible to the many projects to which Menken has contributed his music, but still wound up giving a couple of titles multiple spots on the list while many others got shut out completely. Sigh. Such is the bind of a top ten list: you can only pick ten. So I'll start things off by giving a shout out to the likes of Newsies, A Christmas Carol, Enchanted, and Tangled, all of whom came close to finding representation alongside these ten unforgettable ditties: