120 Minutes, Color Cell Animation, USA, 1940

Written By: see below

Directed By: see below

(As Fantasia is basically a collection of short films, which feature no dialogue and so technically were not “written,” details of direction and story conception can be found at the appropriate parts of the Commentary section of this review.)

Dramatis Personae:

Deems Taylor, renowned composer and music critic, is our host for the evening.

Maestro Leopold Stokowsky and the Philadelphia Orchestra are our program musicians.

Julietta Novis, opera diva, is our featured soloist on Ave Maria.

Mickey Mouse is The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, main character of the piece of the same name, impetuous but well-meaning knucklehead.

Chernabog, Demon Lord of Bald Mountain, and most awesome Disney Villain of all time (bows in reverence), appears as himself.

Commentary:

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to call Walt Disney a visionary. He may have founded his empire on the simple cartoon adventures of a mouse, but when he moved on to bigger and better things, Uncle Walt did not mess around. Everything he did, he did BIG. He created grand visions of artistic expression, whether in theme parks or in animated film. And perhaps his grandest vision of animation is also one of his earliest: Fantasia was only the third Disney animated feature, coming behind Snow White and Pinocchio. It was also their most experimental project: a collection of short films set to Classical music, without dialogue, without a unifying story. It was a radical departure from Disney’s previous films, and indeed remains the most experimental thing Disney Productions has EVER done. And perhaps for good reason: Fantasia was a box office failure, and very nearly bankrupted the company. It wasn’t until the 1960s that the movie, and what Uncle Walt might have been trying to do with it, started to be appreciated, and nowadays we regard the film as one of the great classics. I see it as one of those visions that came before its time: an expression of pure art, an experience composed of powerful sound and vision which, if not appreciated by its contemporary audience, is certainly a thing to appreciate now.

Fantasia opens simply: in silhouette, we see an orchestra assemble in a hall and begin tuning up. It’s not long before Deems Taylor shows up to explain what we are about to see. Eight pieces of Classical music will be played, and will be accompanied by visual interpretations in animated form; essentially, the animators have drawn the pictures that the music conjured up in their minds. Maestro Taylor explains the three basic forms of music – music that tells a definite story, music that does not deliberately tell a story but conjures up definite images, and purely abstract music – and notes that there are pieces of all three types on the program today. This introduction completed, we set off into the first piece in the program:

Toccata and Fugue in D Minor

Composer: Johann Sebastian Bach

Animation Director: Samuel Armstrong

Story: Lee Blair, Phil Dike & Elmer Plummer

A piece of what Maestro Taylor calls “Absolute Music,” this first piece is a purely abstract exercise. It starts with footage of the orchestra, then gradually fades into an animated scene. We’re not given any concrete images here; only flashes of light, waves of color, shapes like clouds and thunderbolts and sunbeams. It’s quite beautiful to watch, but like any piece of abstract art, it’s hard to know how to judge it. Indeed, as a piece of abstract art it DEFIES judgment. It doesn’t tell a story, doesn’t show you an image; it doesn’t intend to. It simply washes over a viewer, leaving no real impression toward its quality. It’s quite evocative in its own way – it feels almost like being in a dreamlike state, seeing what one might see after drifting off while listening to the music. It’s all very avant-garde, to be honest, and a weird way to start off the program. It makes me wonder how the original audiences back in 1940 first received it.

The Nutcracker Suite

Composer: Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky

Animation Director: Samuel Armstrong

Story: Silvia Moberly-Holland, Norman Wright, Albert Heath, Bianca Majolie & Graham Heid

A group of fairies lead a sylvan glen through the four seasons, bring morning dew in the spring, flowers in the summer, falling leaves in autumn, and frost in winter. As they spread their magic, the forest comes to life in unexpected ways, bringing about dancing mushrooms, flower petals, and disturbingly sexy goldfish…

This is one of the stronger entries in the Fantasia program and, dare I say, perhaps the most “Disney” of them. With anthropomorphic plants and animals, graceful and nimble (and naked, at least by implication) female fairies, and a light-hearted overall tone, this segment remains is perhaps the most “kid friendly” of the program pieces. That’s not meant as a criticism; it’s quite charming to watch, and very beautiful. The animators involved filled their palette with bright colors and clever uses of natural shapes and figures. We travel to a different part of the forest with each new segment of the Suite, and are treated to a new performance by surprisingly appropriate performers. The Chinese Dance is performed by mushrooms, whose caps bear more than a passing resemblance to Chinese wicker hats. The Russian Dance is performed by thistles and orchids, rendered to look like Russian men wearing fur hats and women in full babushka. The aforementioned disturbingly sexy goldfish perform the Arabian Dance, their translucent fins serving as veils. Flower petals dance on rushing water, frost fairies skate across frozen ponds, dandelion seeds waltz on the breeze…it’s a ballet of the natural world. And, as Deems Taylor says himself, it tells a completely different story than Tchaikovksy intended; you won’t see a Nutcracker anywhere. I think it’s a perfect example of what they were trying to do with Fantasia: create a pure expression of imagination, without any preconceptions based on musical training or research. What we’re seeing are the visions of a group of animators upon listening to a piece of music, and it has nothing to do with that corny Christmas play.

The Sorceror’s Apprentice

Composer: Paul Dukas

Animation Director: James Algar

Story: Dick Heumer, Joe Grant, Perce Pearce, James Capobianco, & Carl Fallberg

This one’s the flagship piece of the Fantasia program, mainly because it stars our favorite rodent. Based on a medieval folktale, it features Mickey Mouse as the titular Apprentice, in service to the great wizard Yen Sid (get it?). While Yen Sid is busy doing Sorcery, Mickey handles the menial tasks around the lab (Lab? Lair? Shop? What does one call a Sorcerer’s place of business?) like sweeping the floor and fetching water from the nearby well. After a particularly trying day of Sorcery (conjuring up a planetarium-style laser show before lasers were invented has GOT to take it out of you) Yen Sid retires early…and he leaves his magic hat unattended. Impressed by Yen Sid’s conjuring abilities, and feeling a little underappreciated around the place, Mickey takes the opportunity to try his hand at Sorcery while the Master is napping. Plopping on the magic hat, he brings his broom to life, and puts it to work. He commands the broom to head down to the well, fill up two buckets, and bring it back to the house cistern. Mickey is at first quite pleased with himself – he’s done some conjuring of his own and thus made his life a little easier – but it’s not long before he’s standing knee-deep in well water. The broom isn’t smart enough to realize it can stop bringing water once the cistern is full, so it keeps dumping bucket after bucket, and Mickey realizes he doesn’t know how to make it stop. Eventually he is forced to take drastic measures…which only make things worse.

This is the segment that everyone knows and loves, but it’s not one of my favorites. I mean, it’s cute and all, but I just don’t care for it. It’s just so…conventional. The animation is good, definitely on par with the previous film Pinocchio, but there’s nothing really distinct about it (it’s certainly not as bold and experimental as the two pieces that preceded it in the program). The story is very straightforward – Mickey gets himself into a jam, and wackiness ensues – and there’s no real dramatic hook to it. Watching Mickey flail around in the rapidly-flooding building just feels like padding until Yen Sid shows up and sorts this whole thing out. There are some redeeming qualities to the piece, though. The never-ending army of bucket-wielding brooms, marching along to Paul Dukas’s relentless (yet somehow goofy) bassoon march, is one of the iconic images of Disney film. And the scene where Mickey attempts to put a stop to this by chopping the broom up with an axe is actually given a little bit of an edge: the axe gleams murderously for a brief moment before Mickey heads out the door, and all we see is the shadow on the wall of the broom getting dismembered. I could see it being a little scary for a young viewer, and well, the best Art is a little scary. And Yen Sid himself manages to be a quite expressive character, conveying emotions through facial expression and body language better than many of his contemporary animated characters. He never says a word, but his eyes speak volumes.

The Rite of Spring

Composer: Igor Stravinsky

Animation Director: Bill Roberts & Paul Satterfield

Story: William Martin, Leo Thiele, Robert Sterner & John Fraser McLeis

As Deems Taylor explains in his introduction to this piece, Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring was intended to be a portrayal of “primitive life.” That is to say, a series of dances meant to evoke old pagan sacred ritual, dances with religious significance to older, more primitive cultures. The Disney animators, however, took the concept of “primitive life” and went in a completely different direction. Instead of pagan spring rituals, we have a pageant about the origin of life on Earth. We start in the void of space, and come to the young Earth: dry, hot, volatile, devoid of life. We see the planet go through massive volcanic upheavals – mountains shatter, lava flows, noxious gas gets thrown into the atmosphere – then calm at last. Then, in the oceans, the first life evolves. We watch millions of years of evolution condensed into a few minutes, as one-celled organisms grow and divide, becoming primitive chordates, then fish, then finally dinosaurs. We see an artist’s interpretation of what the world was like when dinosaurs ruled it, and possibly what may have happened to them in the end.

The weakest piece in the program, in my opinion. The animation is uniformly good, to be sure, and the subject matter is fascinating (they boldly address the evolution of life on this planet, and accept it as fact; this, nearly 70 years ago), but something just doesn’t work for me. Stravinsky’s music is alternately melancholy and frenetic, and the mood it creates just doesn’t seem to mesh well with the relentless march of time the animated feature presents. The beginning of the piece, dealing with the volcanic and temperamental young Earth, meshes better with the music than the latter half. We seem to suddenly get bogged down in dinosaur-land. Indeed, the piece ends with the extinction of the dinosaurs. No attempt is made to address the time that came after them, that led to the modern era. Perhaps because the animators realized that every little kid loves dinosaurs, and, to a little kid, everything got boring once they died out. The dinosaur segment is actually rather exhausting to watch: every conceivable type of dinosaur gets some screen time. It almost smacks of desperation: “Hey, everyone knows dinosaurs are cool! Let’s get as many into the film as possible!” Not to mention that Igor Stravinsky himself, the only composer featured in Fantasia who was still alive when the movie was made, apparently wasn’t happy with the interpretation. Well, you can’t please everyone, and once again, we see how an outside interpretation of a piece of music can create a vastly different image than the composer may have intended. Plus which, it DOES have dinosaurs in it, and I, like any little kid, think dinosaurs are cool.

Intermission

A brief respite for the orchestra and the audience, where Deems Taylor introduces us to the “soundtrack,” an animated interpretation of a waveform, demonstrating how the sounds various instruments make register as wavelengths. It’s a cute little segment, and provides a nice diversion between pieces.

6^th Symphony (The Pastoral Symphony)

Composer: Ludwig von Beethoven

Animation Director: Hamilton Luske, Jim Handley & Ford Beebe

Story: Otto Englander, Webb Smith, Erdman Penner, Joseph Sabo, Bill Peete & George Stallings

Beethoven’s stately musical tale of a day in the Bavarian countryside is reimagined in an Ancient Greek setting. Here, mythological beasts frolic in lush green fields and amid majestic mountains. We start with fauns and unicorns at play. Then we are introduced to a family of Pegasuses (Pegasii?) out on a day by the lake. From there we see the mating rituals of Centaurs, as the females get themselves ready to receive the dashing males. They are assisted by a flock of cherubs who, like tiny naked chubby Carson Kressleys, offer them free fashion advice. We follow the Centaurs and all of our gathered mythological beasts as they prepare some wine in honor of the god Bacchus…but then Zeus shows up and ruins everything.

Despite the controversies surrounding this piece (see below for a more detailed discussion), The Pastoral Symphony remains one of my personal favorites. It’s colorful and vibrant, managing to have a lot going on without becoming overwhelming. It’s packed full of interesting characters, each one with a distinct appearance and personality. The graceful swanlike Pegasuses, the mischievous fauns and cherubs, the roly-poly drunken god of wine (Bacchus just reminds me of John Belushi here for some reason…). It’s all very charming and delightful. The segment featuring the Centaurs is very sweet, in a quaint Disney sort of way. They have the legs of horses, and the faces and bodies of squeaky-clean malt shop teens. Their courtship sequence is darn tooting and peachy keen, as the girls play coquettes and the boys act gallant. As in the case of Yen Sid, we have some above-average animation, as our characters are called upon to convey emotions without words. Like a silent film, everything is done through looks and gestures. The result is an animation style that manages to be highly realistic, despite being about garishly-colored mythological beasts.

Like The Nutcracker Suite, The Pastoral Symphony is another “kid friendly” piece in the program (although some caution should be taken; those lady Centaurs do have it going on), extremely fun and charming. Up until Zeus shows up and decides to spoil everything with thunder and rain, it’s a portrayal of an idealized day in the country…and once Zeus gets bored and goes back to bed, things get fun again. Maybe not what Beethoven might have had in mind when he wrote the music, but definitely in the same spirit.

Dance of the Hours

Composer: Amilcare Ponchielli

Animation Director: T. Hee & Norm Ferguson

Story: Aurelius Battaglia & Maurice Noble

This piece from Ponchielli’s opera La Gioconda is light on story, but heavy on charm. A ballet taking place over the course of a single day, with each part of the day belonging to a different group of dancing animals. Morning belongs to the ostriches, greedy and skittish creatures. With Mid-day come the hippopotamuses, possessing of surprising grace and poise. In the afternoon, the stealthy elephants sneak in and blow some bubbles in the wind. And the evening belongs to the alligators, dangerous and sensual.

Animator Thornton “T” Hee is something of a legend in the world of animation, and I can see why after watching this segment. It always manages to make me laugh no matter how many times I see it. It was a stroke of genius to feature the most ungainly-looking species of animals doing ballet, and actually doing ballet WELL. There’s just something inherently hilarious about a hippo wearing a tutu, isn’t there? And a hippo ballet diva is doubly hilarious. To watch our lead hippo strut around the courtyard, big and beautiful, is the stuff of big goofy smiles. She’s an inspiration to zaftig ladies everywhere; she knows hotness is a state of mind. When our lead alligator, resplendent in his scarlet cloak and feathered cap, first lays eyes on her, we see in his expression that she is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen in his life, and we cannot help but believe him. The level of personality the animators are able to infuse into these characters is stunning. Even toward the end of the segment, when everything degenerates into chaos, it’s still a whole lot of fun to watch.

A Night on Bald Mountain/Ave Maria

Composer: Modest Mussorgsky/Franz Schubert

Animation Director: Wilfred Jackson

Story: Campbell Grant, Arthur Heineman & Phil Dike

It is Walpurgsnacht, the Unholy Sabbath, and high upon his mountain roost, the demon Chernabog awakes. He summons the restless souls of the dead from the town at the mountain’s foothills, and forces them to dance for his pleasure. The night belongs to him, and all is fun and games, until the coming of dawn, when the tolling of bells and the choirs of the faithful drive him back to the shadows.

This is it, boys and girls. This is the segment you all saw around Halloween, the one that scared the ever-living crap out of you. And it remains one of the darkest and grandest visions Disney every produced. Laugh if you wish, but in my mind, this segment provides one of the most vivid artistic depictions of Hell since Hieronymous Bosch. A demon gathers fallen souls to him, remolds them into whatever form he chooses, and makes them perform, for no other reason than his own amusement. THAT is Hell. From one who knows.

The Hellish scene is further compounded by the animation style. Chernabog himself is rendered in loving, hand-drawn detail, but the ghosts and monsters he summons are rendered in a variety of different techniques: some are photo overlays, others are plain pencil drawings, still others look like chalk doodles. As they gather and flit around the mountain, it creates a chaotic and disturbing scene, and fits perfectly with the chaotic and disturbing nature of the music. Let’s face it: look up “Mad Russian Genius” in the dictionary, and you will see a picture of Modest Mussorgsky there. His musical story of a Witches’ Sabbath is frantic and profane, like something dark and violent from a less rational time. And the animation matches the music. Demons dance in unclean forms, ghosts swarm like macabre flies, harpies soar and dive…and Chernabog presides over it all, a monstrous grin of satisfaction on his face.

It’s therefore quite fitting that this dark, violent vision is counterbalanced by one of light and quiet beauty, in the form of Schubert’s Ave Maria. This piece is simple and understated in comparison to Bald Mountain: a processing of lantern-bearing pilgrims traverses a forest. It’s the simplicity of the piece that makes it work: all it is is a vision of light and natural beauty. There’s no actual church to be seen in this devotional piece. Instead, the trees rise and intertwine in the shapes of Gothic cathedrals. Natural light gleams through them as through stained glass. And soloist Julietta Novis quietly sings the prayer to the Holy Mother. I tell you, few pieces of music can make me weep like an altar boy the way Schubert’s Ave Maria can. Performed by the right soloist, it can sound like the Music Of The Spheres. Julietta Novis is no Leontyne Pryce, but she definitely has some angelic pipes.

When watching Fantasia, one gets the sense that we are watching an artifact of another time and place. A first step into an artistic world that never came to fruition. This was a bold experiment in animation and art, one that unfortunately did not pan out. Walt Disney had big plans for the Fantasia concept: he’d hoped it would be the first in an ever-expanding series of similar films, short films set to classical music. Pure artistic expression, combined with beautiful music. Alas, it was not to be. After the poor box-office performance of Fantasia, Uncle Walt decided to concentrate on more conventional animated features. Those were the ones that made the money, it seemed; art doesn’t pay the rent. To make matters worse, less than a year later Disney animators went on strike to protest layoffs and low wages. Ultimately this strike led to many of Disney’s most talented animators leaving the company, and saddled Uncle Walt with a reputation as an anti-union penny-pinching capitalist, rather than a friend of the artist. Whether the two setbacks were related or not is debatable, but the cumulative effect was clear: Disney Studios never again took so bold a risk as they did when they made Fantasia. Which is kind of sad, as it’s such a powerful vision. Such a moment of artistic brilliance, that vanished as quickly as it came.

Such is the way of Art, I suppose…

Things To Look For:

- Those of you with the dubious good fortune of having an uncut version of Fantasia lying around know of which I speak when I talk of the controversy surrounding The Pastoral Symphony. Sure, it looks charming and mostly harmless…NOW. But when this movie first opened, there was a character that has since been excised from every home video release: Sunflower.

Hoo boy. Yes, that’s a racist caricature. That’s a Stepin Fetchit Centaur. Makes my skin crawl just to ponder. I try to tell myself that it was the 1940s, and they just didn’t know any better. I try to tell myself that it’s a GOOD thing that every re-release of this movie since 1960 has completely excised this character from the film. There are those who find it disingenuous of Disney to have completely removed Sunflower from the movie and to act as thought she never existed. I am not one of those. I mean, come on! Look at her! It’s horrible! Do you really want people to get upset all over again just for the sake of “authenticity”? It was a less enlightened time, people. Even for Disney. We’ve evolved since then. Let’s continue the process, shall we?

- The dinosaurs in The Rite of Spring sequence are actually pretty neat in a quaint and old-fashioned kind of way, at least to those of us raised on the Discovery Channel. To see what people thought dinosaurs were like 70 years ago is enlightening; it’s a good barometer of how much we’ve learned about them since. These are old-school dinos, looking more like reptiles than birds. Swamp-dwelling brontosauruses, big slow-moving herbivores, and a T-Rex that is little more than a mindless red-eyed eating machine (with THREE fingers, no less). It’s remarkable: nearly everything about dinosaurs to be seen in this movie is now widely believed to be wrong. Even the theory of their extinction: the animators went with the prevailing theory of the time, that they were unable to adapt to a naturally-occurring climate change. There’s no Impact Event to be seen; here they just go with time. There is perhaps a subtext here, something to be said about the societal differences between our era and the era of Fantasia and how they might have affected scientific theory…but that’s a whole ‘nother essay.

- Chernabog. Or Uncle Chernabog, as he’s referred to in The Pit. A grand achievement of animator Vladimir Tytla, Chernabog remains one of Disney’s most dynamic animated characters. He is a living, breathing incarnation of pure charismatic evil. His every movement is a wonder to see, as he expresses himself in grand powerful gestures of hands and eyes and muscles. Once again, Disney animators had to create a character that could express himself without words, and as a consequence created a character far more impressive than any before or since. And it helps that Vladimir Tytla drew on his Slavic roots to give Chernabog an appropriately arcane name: named after the “dark god” of Slavic myth, Chernabog is the Lord of Night, who only rules until dawn and must give way to the Lord of Day. He remains perhaps the greatest of all the Disney Villains – he could knock Maleficient on her green ass any old time – and he never spoke a single word.

- There is a very brief moment during the Intermission segment that I find incredibly charming. As the musicians relax between sets, a couple of them start improvising a little jazz number. It’s nothing elaborate, just a bass, a violin, and a clarinet playing around, but it’s just so wonderful. I don’t know if it was planned – and I really hope it wasn’t – but it really speaks to something poignant about the Fantasia project: that these artists involved in creating it were really enjoying themselves doing it. It’s the sheer joy of artistic expression overflowing, and we get to watch.

Written words (c) 2008-2010 Tim o'Brien. Not to be used without permission. Other content, including images, is intended as a Fair Use pursuant to 17 U.S.C. sec. 107.

Date Posted: June 19^th, 2008

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