The Big Cartoon Database has the info on a study recently conducted on how mental illness is treated in Disney animated features. “The researchers discovered that almost all the features contained characters shown as ‘crazy’, ‘mad’ or ‘nuts’, and who were, therefore, shunned and disparaged”. Andrea Lawson, the study’s principal investigator, said “Mental-illness words are used constantly and frequently within almost every single Disney film that I looked at. Overwhelmingly, in the majority of the films, those terms are used to denigrate the characters toward which those terms are directed”. Beauty and the Beast was singled out for criticism. “Belle and Maurice become heroes at the end of the story, ‘but the implication is that the only way that they become the heroes and the heroines is their sanity is vindicated, everyone finds out they’re not mentally ill. The message is, they deserved that treatment when it was thought that they did have mental illness, and they’re only vindicated because their sanity is reassured'”.