Fantasia

Directed by Samuel Armstrong; James Algar; Bill Roberts, Paul Satterfield; Hamilton Luske, Jim Handley, Ford Beebe; T. Hee, Norm Fergusen; Wilfred Jackson
Story Development by Lee Blair, Elmer Plummer, Phil Dike; Sylvia Moberly-Holland, Norman Wright, Albert Heath, Bianca Majolie, Graham Heid; Perce Pearce, Carl Fallberg; William Martin, Leo Thiele, Robert Sterner, John Fraser McLeigh; Otto Englander, Webb Smith, Erdman Penner, Joseph Sabe, Bill Peet, George Stallings; Campbell Grant, Arthur Heinemann
Featuring Deems Taylor and Leopold Stokowski & The Philadelphia Orchestra
USA, 1940
Rated G

B+

Fantasia, one of the great achievements in animation, is a perfect example of the power created by these two mediums joining. Deems Taylor, whose narration now seems out-of-place and insubstantial, explains the film like this: "What you're going to see are the designs and pictures and stories that music inspired in the minds and imaginations of a group of artists." Fantasia captures lightning in a bottle; it gives us a collection of visceral, visual reactions to famous pieces of classical music, and so the film becomes a personal spectacle. Though this was a collaborative effort, it merges the ideas of these "groups of artists," so we feel like we have come upon something secret and special.

Is Fantasia really a movie? What is a movie? These questions are terribly irrelevant, but this is not a traditional film. It has no solid stories to tell; its seven sequences are just explorations of fantastical landscapes and creatures. The sequences don’t have narrative backbones. They are like today’s music videos. Walt Disney made animation a popular art. He made people take it seriously. With Fantasia, he strayed from narrative films to try something different, and the movie is alive with his passion and the passions of its directors, animators, writers, musicians, and, of course, its featured composer geniuses, which include the likes of Bach and Stravinsky. Because the segments are freed from plot and are meant to give us only impressions of the music and the strange worlds painted in the animation, they often have the sprightly quality of short cartoons kids make in the margins of their books. Unfortunately, Fantasia is too serious and too Hollywood to completely distill that sort of simplicity, fun, and roughness.

The first segment of the film is Bach’s "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor," and it is certainly a minor segment. It is a perfect opener because it has a translucence and a fuzzy insignificance that is beautiful and quietly grand. Images of clouds, hills, and golden towers in the sky may not be how you imagined the Bach piece (it’s certainly not how I visualized it), but they fit. The next sequence is arguably the most dazzling. Fairies enchant a forest with their dust, mushrooms cutely hop about in an almost Russian manner, flowers dance down waterfalls, and fishes twirl in the water with long, elegant fins that look like ballroom dresses. This is all hitched onto Tchaikovsky’s twinkling, magical masterpiece, "The Nutcracker Suite," and the animation is fittingly fanciful.

The most famous sequence in the film is "The Sorcerer’s Apprentice," which stars Mickey Mouse, who, I’m sure, has saved the world in a tiny way with his lovable, silently idealistic naiveté. Here, Paul Dukas’ music booms in waves of merriment and child-like guilt as Mickey, whose fiddling around with his master’s tricks and spells has gone awry, falls into a starry dream and awakens with the consequences of his dreams.

"The Rite of Spring" (Igor Stravinsky) sequence is a bit of a great folly. It is epic, and bases its images on the theory of evolution. The colors are gloomy and brown, and the sequence is dramatic and ambitious, but is also a bit clumsy. "The Pastoral Symphony" (Ludwig van Beethoven) contrasts with its perky Greek myth roots, with the courtship of boy and girl centaurs aided by adorable little cupids. "Dance of the Hours" (Amilcare Ponchielli) makes ballerinas out of hippos, elephants, and caped alligators. The finale of Fantasia, which is probably the greatest segment in the film, marries Moussorgsky’s frightening "Night on Bald Mountain" and Schubert’s delicate, hymn-like "Ave Maria," for a thematically ambitious sequence about the war between, as the narrator says, "the profane and the sacred." A luminous gargoyle-bat beast towers over the night as ghosts play and drift about in decadence, but the ringing of church bells ends the orgy of gothic delights, as a procession of inspirational, anonymous figures appears. Its darkly, though somewhat patronizingly, moralistic, and it’s a scary, wonderful spectacle.

Fantasia is the stuff of dreams, and, with each sequence, we feel we have peeked at the private lives of these mythological creatures. Instead of there being a score for images, there are images for seven scores. The film is an elegant mess of paint and music notes, and they crash together splendidly. But is Fantasia consistently compelling? No, not really. Minds are apt to drift at spots, and a few sequences, namely "Toccata" and "Dance of the Hours," are lackluster in my eyes. And has Fantasia ruined our ability to create our own images when listening to these eight classical pieces? Maybe. That’s one of the negative repercussions when images put to music sink into the popular consciousness. Our thoughts during our listening to these pieces become dictated by what we’ve seen. However, we are allowed to witness what others have seen with their minds, and that’s what it means to share art. It’s magnificent. MTV owes a lot to Fantasia.

By Andrew Chan

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