Beauty and the Beast became the first animated feature ever nominated for best picture.

Leonard Maltin, a prominent American film critic and historian, made this observation in the context of discussing Disney’s early-1990s resurgence and the awards impact of the studio’s animated features. The remark points to the 64th Academy Awards (honoring 1991 films), when Disney’s Beauty and the Beast received a Best Picture nomination—an unusual breakthrough for animation in the Academy’s top category at the time. Maltin typically uses this fact to underscore how the film’s critical reception, box-office success, and perceived artistic legitimacy helped animation gain greater standing within mainstream Hollywood awards culture.

The statement highlights a watershed moment in the relationship between animation and Hollywood prestige. By noting that Disney’s Beauty and the Beast achieved a Best Picture nomination, Maltin underscores how the film broke through a long-standing bias that treated animation as a lesser, primarily children’s form. The remark also implicitly situates the movie within the early-1990s “Disney Renaissance,” when feature animation regained cultural centrality through ambitious storytelling, Broadway-influenced music, and high production values. The significance lies less in the nomination as an award outcome than in what it signaled: that animated features could compete—artistically and commercially—on the same stage as live-action cinema.