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Fantasia
(1940)
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Brief synopsis of Fantasia
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Walt Disney took a big chance with this ambitious anthology of animated fantasies. First, he set them to lengthy classical music pieces, and then he boldly experimented with different forms of animation, sometimes jettisoning any sort of narrative altogether. The result is a sometimes mesmerizing, sometimes hilarious, sometimes frightening, but always beautiful moviegoing experience. A box-office failure when first released, it's now considered a timeless treasure. Highlights include: Mickey Mouse in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," the leaping hippos and alligators in "Dance of the Hours," the rise and fall of the dinosaurs set to Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring," the dancing mushrooms of Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker Suite," and Mussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain," with its fearsome winged demon raging at the heavens.
One of Walt Disney's ambitions for the project was to rerelease the film periodically over the years with new sequences. Though the film was regularly rereleased, it wasn't until 1999 that his intention was finally realized with the premiere of FANTASIA 2000, a lavish follow-up that included a digitally restored "Sorcerer's Apprentice" and a host of new material. The original FANTASIA, however, remains a one-of-a-kind auditory and visual experience that is still, in many ways, far ahead of its time.
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Critics Reviews
Radio Times
A tremendous leap into the light, which won a special Oscar for Walt Disney and conductor Leopold Stokowski, and a mighty innovation in feature-length cartoons as a concert of classical music is made visually articulate — from Bach to Stravinsky to Tchaikovsky. Beethoven's Pastoral gets the kitsch treatment with cute mythology, and Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain is a danse macabre of opened graves and broom-riding witches. Mickey Mouse even appears as Dukas's Sorcerer's Apprentice. Most successful are Bach abstractions, while the dying dinosaurs of Stravinsky's Rite Of Spring is a massive decimation of reptiles — and affirmation for life. A high-voltage masterpiece which showed what could be achieved with a marriage of the technical (multiplane cameras, stereo sound) and the creative.
Time Out
Renowned abstract film-maker Oskar Fischinger, employed in a distant capacity on the Bach sequence, called this Disney...
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New York Times
"...One of the landmarks of American animation, as well as a key document in the popularization of classical music..."
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