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Film Review: Beauty and the Beast The new live action version of Beauty and the Beast is not very good. The film's best moments come directly from the 1991 animated version, which I once named the  best animated Disney film of all time . It seems so preoccupied with recapturing what made that movie so great that it forgets to make this one unique or different in any way. At every possible chance director Bill Condon has to establish an interesting visual look for the film, he defers to the animated film and copies its look. What is the point of making a live action version of an animated movie only to make it look like its animated? Beauty and the Beast never answers that question, and the result is an uninspired retread of a classic story.

A Complete Ranking of All 54 Walt Disney Animated Films In late 2013 while trying to come up with article ideas for the blog I was intending to start, I came up with the idea to rank all the Disney films. It seemed like an easy enough task, but I soon realized there were several Disney films that I had never seen, or had not seen in years. To accurately be able to rank all of them, I decided I would watch every film in the Walt Disney Animated Classics series in the order which they were released. I watched a film a week for the entire year of 2014. It was a great experience, as I got to see not only the evolution of animation as an art form, but the highs and lows of Disney as a studio. Each week I would learn something new about the films I thought I knew every about. After a year and a half of research, here is how I ranked them:

"Pinocchio" (1940) Based on the children's novel "The Adventures of Pinocchio", "Pinocchio" was supposed to be Disney's big follow-up to their big hit "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves". Released in February 1940, and despite positive reviews from critics, the film was a major disappointment at the box office. Maybe this was because the film couldn't open in certain markets because of World War II, or maybe the box office returns just seemed disappointing because the unprecedented success of "Snow White..". Either way, most people wouldn't expect a film that's so well remembered today to have bombed during its initial release. But, thankfully, how "Pinocchio" preformed in 1940 has nothing to do with the quality of the film. The film was everything people expected, and more.

"Snow White and the Seven Dwarves" (1937) Not only was this Walt Disney's first feature length production, but this was the first feature length animated film ever made. A huge risk at the time, people begged Disney not to make it.  But the risk payed off, and the result is one of the most loved animated classics of all time.