Why did Disney cast a bunch of nobodies?

to me, it is not important to have big names in it, but too bad the singing skills in this film are far from good

Ah Angela Lansbury has been acting for years. She was in Murder She Wrote as Jessica Fletcher,Anastasia as Grandma Marie and many more films. Jerry Orbach worked with Lansbury in one episode of Murder She Wrote so technically the cast in the original Beauty & The Beast were well known. Paige O Hara made her movie debut here as she went on to be in Broadway shows and made a cameo in Enchanted as Angela the TV actress. As for Robbie Benson he was a 70s heartthrob back in the 1970s (according to some interviews I seen).

This is the polar opposite of the usual reaction to the use of celebrities, and as said, there are already performers there..basically using "nobod/voices/cildren/non celebs" is the usual demand for a lot of fans (like, even though Jimmy Stewart, etc. had a distinctive voice, Bugs Bunny/Mickey Mouse/etc. didn't have famous voices.)You are complainiong from the other hand, that you want famous people when there already are :D

They were casting based on talent rather than name recognition. I wish they had done the same with the recent live-action remake.

Angela would have been FAR better to reprise the title song over the end credits than the Whiney Houstink like early Celine Dion (who'd toned down and been far better six years and another Oscar for best song later by Titantic)

At the time, the company was being more daring after their success with Little Mermaid, and it's a common gamble movie studios do where they take talented nobodies for cheap, market them as characters in the movie, and if they do it right, all those nobodies turn into instant stars and earn the studio a good profit.

See, it isn't always a good idea to cast only famous people for roles, because the more famous an actor is, the more you have to pay THEM, as opposed to the rest of the people working on the film. Plus, having them in the film isn't a guarantee that it'll be a hit. I could name a number of movies that were total flops, regardless of what big celebrity names were in them. It's cheaper to cast lesser known actors to start with, and if the film does well, it looks good on everyone's resume, not just the producer's.

It kind of all boils down to money, really.

Lansbury was an MGM supporting star of Golden-Age musical films, and a Broadway superstar. Orbach was a big Broadway star and a prominent character actor in films and television for decades. Neither was "second rate".

As far as everyone else being "some yahoo", they were all experienced professionals. What did you want, Eddie Murphy? Hiring celebrities to voice cartoon characters is a relatively recent phenomenon. Chances are, few people could name the voice actors in Disney classics like "Snow White" and "Pinocchio", other than Cliff Edwards, a pop music star of the 1920s and 1930s who played Jiminy Cricket.

When it comes to marketing their new movies and releasing them to the market Disney always makes sure to get the best actors to voice characters. Beauty And The Beast is one movie that proves it and by adding new actors and big celebrity stars Disney knows this mix works well. Take for example Paige O'Hara who voiced Belle went on to have a successful singing career before she retired and Robby Benson was a successful actor who provided voices for computer games after Beauty And The Beast. Another movie that does this is A Bug's Life and aside from David Hyde Pierce Bonnie Hunt Kevin Spacey and Denis Leary the only actor that was known was Dave Foley who voiced Flik because before A Bug's Life was released Dave Foley was on Newsradio and Kids In The Hall and Disney was lucky to get him. But when you look at the general picture Beauty And The Beast also had David Ogden Stiers from MASH and he is still huge in Disney movies today. But if you watch any Disney movie today you can bet that celebrity voices can guarantee fame from one animated voiceover after another