Thanks to Roger Ebert’s Twitter feed, I recently read a terrific article in which writers and filmmakers discuss their most memorable moviegoing experiences. Now this isn’t the same thing as writers and filmmakers discussing their favorite movies. Sometimes the key factor is a great movie, but other times it’s the audience, the theater itself, or some personal realization the viewer comes to while watching the film. Not all of the experiences are positive and in one case, the movie in question was truly awful. It was a fascinating read and it got me thinking about what my most memorable moviegoing experience was.
Though I don’t make time to see movies in theaters as much as I used to, I have had my fair share of memorable moviegoing experiences, not all of them good. I’m still not sure whether I dislike Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back because it wasn’t a very good movie or because the theater was packed by the time we got there and we ended up sitting close to the front and way off to the right, which made for very awkward viewing. The Grudge was not a good movie, but an audience of people talking at full volume through the whole movie and people yelling at the people talking at full volume to shut up didn’t help matters. But I’ve also had plenty of positive moviegoing experiences. Not surprisingly many of them are animated. I think my earliest memory of seeing any movie is a fragment of Disney‘s Peter Pan. Peter was trying to find Tinker Bell and I was asking my mother what was going on. My favorite memory from one of the theatrical re-releases of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was of a little boy a few rows ahead of me yelling “Go! Go! Run! Run!” at the screen as the huntsman was urging Snow White to do the same. I dragged my family to an opening day showing of The Lion King back in 1994. When Scar answered his nephew’s comment that Scar is “so weird” with a sly “You have no idea,” my parents – possibly the only two people in the theater to have seen Reversal of Fortune – were the only two people in the theater to burst out laughing. More recently, I first saw The Incredibles at a midnight show with a very receptive audience. I completely missed whatever Syndrome said after “And you got BUSY!” because the line was completely drowned out by the audience’s laughter. It didn’t matter; I was far too caught up in the excitement and humor of the moment to care.
Out of all these and many others, which was my moviegoing experience that stood out the most. After some contemplation, I finally decided which of my movie theater memories was strongest in my mind. Coincidentally, the movie associated with that memory happens to be my favorite movie.
For reasons that deserve their own article, Beauty and the Beast is my all-time favorite film, animated or otherwise. Right now, let’s just say that I was completely in love with this movie when it came out. I saw it more than twenty times in theaters. (This was when a movie’s theatrical run was much longer and not just a stepping stone to a home video release, so the feat wasn’t that hard to accomplish.) This included two of the more unusual movie venues I have attended: an outdoor showing at my local recreation center and a drive-in double feature with the far less memorable Honey I Blew Up The Kid. Still, the viewing I remember most was my first one.
I went with my whole family – my parents and my younger sister – plus my best friend. I was too young to demand that we go on opening day and midnight showing were out of the question. So we probably saw the film on a weekend afternoon, either in later November or early December. I was already extremely interested in animation in general and Disney in particular thanks to the release of The Little Mermaid one year earlier, so my anticipation was high. I remember reading a positive review of the movie in Newsweek and getting even more excited. I can no longer remember which theater we went to. We lived within reasonable driving distance of a couple of different theaters and exactly which one we patronized that day is lost to the ages.
I only remember snippets of that first viewing. Most of what stands out in my mind are the big laugh moments: scenes with Cogsworth and Lumiere or where Belle hits the Beast with a snowball, causing him to drop the enormous snowball he has constructed on his own head. I remember the whole theater applauding at the end of the movie, myself included, of course. I don’t remember anything from the death of the Beast, which I would like to think means the audience was reacting with shock and grief that they were expressing silently. But the one moment that I’m never going to forget comes during the ballroom scene.
Oddly, my greatest moviegoing memory isn’t of the famous and groundbreaking shot where the camera sweeps down from the ballroom’s painted Rococo ceiling and rotates around the unlikely couple as they dance. It’s not the Beast’s nervous gulp as the dance begins, though I’m sure that was another big laugh moment. It’s not even the part when Belle nuzzles her head against the Beast’s enormous chest and he reacts with a look of pure joy while Cogsworth and Lumiere cheer him on from the sidelines. The moment I remember best comes at the very beginning of the scene, when Belle appears at the top of the stairway, wearing her stunning golden-yellow ball gown for the very first time. The reason I remember this brief shot better than anything else in all the films I’ve ever seen in theaters is because at that very moment, the entire audience let out a soft, appreciative “Oooooooh.”
I don’t remember how long it took, but it wasn’t until sometime later that I realized the significance of that moment. Not one person in the audience that day – child or adult – was thinking “Isn’t that a beautiful drawing?” or “Wow, look at that great colored linework” or anything like that. They were thinking “Belle looks so beautiful in that dress.” What eventually hit me was that it was the exact same reaction they would have had to the same scene in a live action film with Julia Roberts or Juliette Lewis or any other actress putting on a beautiful dress for the first time. Never mind that that dress was literally designed to look stunning on Belle. Never mind that the artists were free of real-world concerns like how the material would look in different lighting or whether the dress would hold up during multiple takes or whether the thing would be comfortable to wear. Never mind that Belle herself was little more than a series of drawings in synch with a voice. None of it mattered. For those eighty-four minutes, Belle was just as real as any character played by a live actress. I realized that the adults in the audience were not longer just watching a cute kids’ movie with some funny party they could laugh at. This was a story that they could become completely immersed in, enough to have an immediate, emotional reaction to seeing a young woman put on a beautiful dress to spend an evening with someone she has grown to care about.
I don’t go out to see movies as often as I used to. Rentals by mail and streaming directly to my computer or TV make watching movies in the comfort of my home all the easier. I still make the effort for films I’m really excited about, but more and more are leaving theaters before I get around to seeing them. It’s partly because of all the factors that make for memorably unpleasant moviegoing experiences: bad seats, interminably long commercials, projection problems, and noisy kids who could care less that there’s a movie playing, just to name a few. But part of what makes me leave the comfort of my living room to see those few films I can’t wait to see is the power of that shared experience, of sitting with an audience of mostly strangers and going through the same emotions as you watch the same story unfold together. I probably would have loved Beauty and the Beast no matter where I saw it. But thanks to that audience I shared my first viewing with, I think I loved it just a little more.
So that’s my most memorable moviegoing experience. What’s yours?
All images in this article are copyright Disney.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Katrina Britt, Sara Franks-Allen. Sara Franks-Allen said: New IPC! My favorite moviegoing experience! http://j.mp/aq86Eu [...]
My favorite moviegoing experience is actually quite recent, and it was whem my brother and I (and maybe my father–I’m not too sure on that point) went to see “Speed Racer”. From the moment it began, I could Not. Stop. Smiling. From the “Hot Wheel” tracks to the Dick-Tracy like mobsters, to a detective called Inspector Detector, the movie is just so much fun. It’s also the kind of movie that requires watching in a theater, since all the color and details would too easily get lost on a smaller screen. The movie was critically panned almost everywhere–although, notably, Time Magazine’s film critic liked it a lot and included it his top ten movies of the year–but I can’t help but love it–even if I’ll probably never watch it again.
[...] I’ve mentioned before that Beauty and the Beast is my favorite movie. So of course I was excited to learn that a new “making of” book would be coming out to coincide with the film’s first Blu-Ray release. Beauty premiered too early in Disney’s resurgence in animated features to receive a large, hardcover “Art of” book. I do own the edition of Bob Thomas’ Disney’s Art of Animation in which the latter half of the book covers the making of Beauty and the Beast, Disney’s latest film at the time. But neither that nor the bits of information about the movie I gleaned from other sources were enough. I always wanted more. Animation historian Charles Solomon is no stranger to my reference library, having written books such as The Disney That Never Was and my favorite general reference on Western animation, Enchanted Drawings: The History of Animation, so I knew I would be in good hands with him guiding me through the history of Beauty and the Beast. And the book became available a few weeks before my birthday. Perfect! [...]