A look inside Hollywood and the movies. : MOUSE HOUSE II : There Was This Fairy Tale, a Movie Studio and a Little Guy Named Oscar

Timing is everything, they say, and Disney’s hoping that its animated extravaganza “Beauty and the Beast” is coming at just the right time.

Because of the company’s rough spell at the box office and the aforementioned media attention to its troubles, there does seem to be a calculated move to end the year on a high note. “Katzenberg is feeling pressure these days and this is his baby,” an industry observer says. “He’d like to finish this year in a blaze of glory.”

So, how do you jump-start these high hopes?

For starters, “Beauty and the Beast” wasn’t even finished before it was offered to the recent New York Film Festival. This was unusual because the film was far more mainstream than the normal New York fare and the festival had never featured an animated film or a work-in-progress.

Yet the fairy tale drew not only critical acclaim but a standing ovation when it was screened for the cinephile crowd at Alice Tully Hall on Sept. 29. “It was the most eccentric choice and the most popular--a real masterstroke for the festival and for Disney,” says a New York critic who attended one of the two screenings.

Encouraged by the response, the studio has taken out a two-page ad in today’s Los Angeles Times, inviting motion picture academy members to a “one-time-only screening” of the movie--with about 35% of its 150,000 frames in various stages of the animation process--on Saturday at the newly restored El Capitan Theatre. “Beauty and the Beast” will debut in New York and Los Angeles on Nov. 13 and 15 respectively before opening nationwide a week later.

“The movie will have a life of its own life as a commercial enterprise in movie theaters,” says Katzenberg. “Then we’re in the hands of the movie gods, who will either shine down and give us good fortune or not. But before we head down that path, we want people to view it as a work of art rather than a work of commerce. And ‘art’ is what the film festival and the academy are about.

“People take for granted what’s involved in creating animation,” he continues. “Six hundred artists worked four years on this project--and on a good week the average animator produces three seconds of footage.”

No one at Disney is officially calling the academy screening an Oscar push, but the studio--whose films have been more successful with the public than with the academy over the years--is clearly eyeing a best-picture award. The battle, they concede, is an uphill one.

“No animated film has ever been nominated for best picture, though ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ did get a special Oscar in 1937,” observes a Disney spokesman. “If we can help people understand that animation is more than cute, colored pictures up there, maybe a nomination is not an impossibility.”

Before ascending into Fantasyland, however, Disney must cope with the reality of Amblin’s “An American Tail II”--another animated release that will be distributed by Universal and open on Nov. 22. The original “An American Tail” beat Disney’s re-release of “Lady and the Tramp”(grossing $47 million domestically to “Lady’s” $31 million) when they faced off in 1986. Still, Katzenberg denies that the studio’s decision to push “Beauty’s” New York and Los Angeles openings ahead a week was influenced by the competition.

“We’ve competed with Amblin before and learned that there’s enough room for both,” he insists. “These movies aren’t mutually exclusive. There’s a big market out there. The success of one doesn’t depend on the failure of the other.”