Critical Analysis Of Beauty And The Beast

On November 15, 1991, the movie Beauty and the Beast was releases for limited viewing. That weekend alone, the movie made $162,146 between two theaters. One week later, the movie opened up for its wide opening weekend to 977 theater’s and made $9,624,149. Throughout its time in the theater, the movies Domestic Total Gross was $145,863,363, and throughout its lifetime of 25 years the movies Domestic Lifetime Gross: $218,967,620. The movie was nominated for six Academy Awards and won two of the awards. One of the wins was for best original score for the song “Beauty and the Beast.” Now looking at charts of Beauty and the Beast’s success, the movie is ranked number three of all movies in 1991 for Domestic Total Gross and World Total Gross. The movie is ranked number nine for Domestic Grosses by MPAA ratings for a G rated movie which is six spots higher then Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs which is the next Disney Princess movie on the List (Box

She does not just meet a Prince and marry him, she meets a Beast and changes him and then falls in love with him and lives happily ever after. She also loves books and is not amused by Gaston, the rude, masculine and most eligible bachelor. She is very different than other classical princess. Then why are theorist and critics saying that she is not as feminist as she seems to be? One major theorist is Cummins who, “rebuts critics’ claims that Belle ‘[breaks] the sexist mound of its fairy-tale heroines’, and says that the film ‘encourages’ the belief that ‘true happiness for women exists only in the arms of a prince’ (Cummins, 1995: 22). Another theorist says that Belle is just like the rest of the princesses who deal with monstrous masculinity (Craven 2002:128). Belle is a powerful and interesting character who looks as if she is a powerful feminist character but in reality Disney has just created another simple princess who has the illusion of