Beauty and the Beast (1991 film)/Awesome

• The Ballroom. Just the Ballroom. even after 20 years it can still compete with today's CGI. the fact that Belle and the Beast are perfectly animated to go along with the 3D camera certainly helps.
• Belle has revealed the existence of the Beast to save her father from being institutionalized, which was really Gaston's ploy to force her to marry him. She then defends the Beast, and Gaston says "If I didn't know better, I'd think you had feelings for this monster." Her reply to a man who has the rest of her village wrapped around his finger: "He's no monster, Gaston. You are!"
• During the battle at the Beast's castle, when LeFou is melting Lumiere, Cogsworth appears at the top of the stairs, dressed in British Admiralty regalia and wielding a pistol and scissors, and, laughing hysterically, slides down the banister and saves Lumiere. It's particularly awesome considering how much of a stiff jobsbody he was before, and how antagonistic his relationship with Lumiere was.
  • Lumiere's Moment of Awesome has to be when he saves his beloved Babetté by scorching the backside off of the villain ripping her apart!
• The Beast gets his when he reduces Gaston to a sniveling wretch:

Gaston: Don't hurt me, please! I'll do anything! ANYTHING!
The Beast: Get Out!!

• • The entire latter half of the fight counts. After seeing Belle has returned to him the Beast regains his will to live and utterly dominates Gaston, with the size and strength of a grizzly bear combined with the intelligence and agility of a human.
  • The Beast has multiple Moments of Awesome, but this troper agrees that his cold delivery of those two words takes. the. cake.
    • His very design is a Moment of Awesome, up until them every version had been some variation of "man with an animal's head." Disney's character is a completely new chimera who can simply be described as a "beast." He is his name.
      • Another moment for the design team: the way they mix his voice with animal noises. It adds an extra bit of power to his voice and emphasizes just how utterly terrifying he can be when he's angry.
• I think Gaston gets a Moment of Awesome when he manages to temporarily hold his own against the Beast, who has the size and strength of a grizzly bear combined with the intelligence and agility of a human.
• I cannot BELIEVE the wolf sequence in the forest scene hasn't been mentioned yet. Belle's attacked by a bunch of wolves. She defends herself well, but there are just too damn many of them. Wolf leaps, she goes down, another wolf leaps, looks like the end. Cue the Beast grabbing the wolf and ROARING in it's face as the music goes berserk, then proceeding to rip the entire pack apart. Epic.
• Finally, there's the moment when it becomes clear Belle has done much more than invoke a Disney Death for the Beast: the transformation sequence. This was also a Moment of Awesome for The Beast's animator, Glen Keane. He had less then a week to make the transformation scene. What we got was one of the best pieces of modern Disney animation.
  • That's nothing compared to the transformation in the Broadway show. Absolutely breathtaking.
• Gaston's rousing "Mob Song" where he paraphrases both The Bible ("If you're not with us, you're against us") and William Shakespeare ("Screw your courage to the sticking place!") to rally a, well, mob to, as the song is also known as, "Kill the Beast".
  • Doubles as a Funny Moments when you hear some of the other lyrics in the song.

Mob: We don't like
What we don't understand
In fact it scares us
And this monster is mysterious at least

• • • Also,

Here we come, we're fifty strong
And fifty Frenchmen can't be wrong...

• When Gaston tries to get Belle's dad into the crazy house because he tells everyone about the beast, unless Belle marries him, Belle comes to the rescue and shows everyone the beast in her magic mirror and says that he's her friend. Gaston, who sees that his plan isn't going to work anymore, wants revenge on Belle and then tells everyone that the beast is going to attack them, eat their children etc. and that they should go and kill the beast, which all men of the village are going to do afterwards. This troper found the evilness of that extremely awesome.
• What? No one's mentioned the fact that this is the first ever animated movie to be nominated for Best Picture? Sure it didn't win, but it did what was considered to be impossible for animation at the time and establish it as a medium of story-telling and not kid fodder.
  • The Oscar for Best Animated Feature was added a decade later. Some have speculated that the Academy added this category specifically to prevent animated movies from having a shot at the Best Picture award.
• Alan Menken's SONGS.
  • On that note, this troper thought the way the choreography of the furniture's dancing during "Be Our Guest" was a Moment of Awesome.
  • Menken's incidental music between the songs also had its awesome moments. When Belle discovers that her father may be dying out in the cold, the Beast looks at the wilting rose and, in a moment of utter anguish, decides to let Belle go anyway, knowing it will probably doom his only chance to remove his curse. The music that plays at that moment is utter Awesome Music.
• And one must not forget: Menken's songwriting partner since practically the start of his musical career, Howard Ashman. Some time before The Little Mermaid won Oscars for Best Song and Best Score, Ashman was diagnosed HIV-positive. When he was put to work for Beauty and the Beast, Ashman was noted to be irritable and would soon not even be able work in the studio. But did he give up his work? Not at all; he would instruct recording sessions via telephone even when he was weak and he wrote what are probably some of the most memorable songs in cinema, period, during the last year of his life (the title song's lyrics undoubtedly being his Magnum Opus). Even though he never lived to see the finished film, Ashman's sheer dedication to his work counts as this trope, a Tear Jerker, and a great Heartwarming Moments. Dedications often refer to him as the man 'who gave a mermaid her voice and a beast his soul'.
• Yet another out of character example: Angela Lansbury recorded the title song in a single take.