10 Animated Movies That Should Have Won The Oscar For Best Animation (But Didn't Because The Award Didn't Exist Yet)
4. Beauty And The Beast (1991)
The year was 1991 and the film was Beauty and the Beast. The first animated film ever to be nominated for Best Picture by The Academy.
What Beauty and the Beast represents is a shift in how animated movies were seen by the establishment. No longer were they just an off-shoot of those Disney shorts from the '30s, or the Warner Brother's cartoons of the '40s and '50s. Now they were a viable artform.
A fairy-tale from 1740, with the story sticking very closely to the 1946 adaptation of said fairy-tale, Beauty and the Beast became a huge hit for Disney and along with The Little Mermaid, marked the start of a new era for the Mouse House.
Its now-classic songs have remained iconic, and the film's use of computer-assisted animation started a trend that a few years after would see an entire film made with computers (three guesses what that was).
The movie garnered six Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Original Score, Best Original Song (with three different songs nominated) and Best Sound.
It won Best Original Song on the night for the titular Beauty and the Beast. It wasn't until Up was released in 2009 that another film was to share the honour that Beauty and the Beast was given of a Best Picture nomination, followed the year after by Toy Story 3 in 2010.