The Best Animated Feature category was the brainchild of Bill Littlejohn and June Foray, two longtime animation organizers and Academy governors who had been petitioning for years to recognize feature animation. Then, in 2002, the medium was finally given its due. The films could squeak into the original-songs and scores categories, but Best Picture remained out of reach.

By the end of the ’90s, feature animation looked as cutthroat as the rest of Hollywood - but not at the Oscars. And Katzenberg, who sat next to Hahn the night Beauty and the Beast lost, left for DreamWorks and poached Disney’s top animation talent. Erstwhile Disney dissident Don Bluth made Anastasia at 20th Century Fox ( also not yet a Mouse subsidiary). Pixar (not yet a Mouse subsidiary) made Toy Story. Kirk Wise, director of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ The word that me and a lot of my colleagues use is ghettoization. “So you get Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” Both films, despite their heavier subject matter - colonization, discrimination, religious zealotry - failed to drive Oscars attention in major categories. “The executives really wanted to make these serious movies that would get them taken seriously by the Oscars,” says animation restorationist Garrett Gilchrist. But Hahn never forgot the sentiment behind Eisner’s request: that even as they anticipated a landmark moment for the medium, Eisner was thinking less about the achievement than he was about commercial opportunities.įor years, Disney tried to get back on that stage with animated films that appealed to mass audiences, earned boatloads of cash, and re-established the company’s reputation, which had stagnated in the post-Walt era. Beauty and the Beast lost to The Silence of the Lambs. To him, sitting at the Oscars was like being “at the United Nations, because everyone comes from around the world to celebrate film.” But Eisner had understood that the event was prime real estate for product placement. “ Really, am I going to do this?” Hahn remembers thinking. “Could you say, ‘Thanks, everybody that worked on the film - and now I’m going to Disneyland’?” Eisner assured Hahn that the company would send a donation to the charity of his choice as thanks. “If you win, could you do the following?” Eisner asked him. Before the ceremony, Disney CEO Michael Eisner had called with an unusual request. It was 1992, and the film’s nomination was historic - a first for animation - but another thought raced through Hahn’s head. The Beauty and the Beast producer sat in the seventh row of the 64th Academy Awards, next to Jeffrey Katzenberg and behind Sylvester Stallone, listening as Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman announced the winner. Don Hahn remembers the night he lost the Oscar for Best Picture.

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