Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise's 1991 musical retelling of the French fairy tale follows Belle as she trades her freedom for her father's release and slowly reconsiders the beast holding her captive. Written from a completed script by Linda Woolverton and scored by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, it became the first animated film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Trey Parker and Matt Stone expand their Comedy Central series into a full musical: four boys learn a stream of profanity from an R-rated movie, a parental panic follows, and the United States ends up declaring war on Canada. Made for $21 million and released by Paramount, it took $83 million worldwide and became the highest-grossing R-rated animated film at the time, earning an Academy Award nomination for the song Blame Canada.
The Iron Giant drops a fifty-foot alien robot into small-town Maine in 1957 and lets a lonely boy's friendship with it, rather than its destructive potential, carry the film. Brad Bird's feature debut, made by Warner Bros. on roughly half the budget and schedule of comparable animated films, was a box-office failure on release but has since become a byword for a cult classic.