Fantasia

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Fantasia

A seminal film in the development of animated features, and a cultural cornerstone in leading children to classical music, Walt Disney's Fantasia (1940) has entranced six generations of viewers in America and Europe. Named as one of the American Film Institute's Top 100 Movies of All Time in 1998, it has served as the inspiration for, among others, Bruno Bozetto's Allegro Non Troppo and Osamu Tezuka's Legend of the Forest. Although influential, it remains unique, one of the most masterful combinations of sound and images ever committed to celluloid.

Only the third full-length feature to be made by Walt Disney, at its inception it was one of the Hollywood film industry's most significant experiments since Warner Bros. introduced sound with The Jazz Singer 13 years earlier. The finished film, introduced by Deems Taylor, with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski providing the music, had grown out of a chance meeting between Stokowski and Disney. The famous conductor had expressed an interest in working with Disney; the master of animation was looking to restore Mickey Mouse to his former level of popularity. It was felt that a visual realization of composer Paul Dukas's "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" might do the trick.

Stokowski and Disney were both world-class showmen and in love with technological gimmickry. Stokowski was one of the earliest experimenters in stereophonic sound and suggested that the film's sound re-create that of a concert hall. This was done by recording the orchestra on three separate channels (right, left, and surround).However, recording the sound to the conductor's satisfaction wound up costing more than it would have been possible to recoup on a short subject. Disney then committed to making what he initially called a "Concert Feature," a collection of shorts that would make up a concert. According to Stokowski, he wondered why Disney planned to stop at a short subject; why not a full-length film with several other musical works to suggest "the mood, the coloring, the design, the speed, the character of motion of what is seen on the screen," as he later expressed it. In short, a fantasia, which means a free development on a given theme.

It was decided to open the film with Stokowski's own orchestral transcription of Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor," complemented by visual detailing suggestive of falling asleep at the orchestra. Recalled Disney, "All I can see is violin tips and bow tips—like when you're half asleep at a concert," not, apparently, an uncommon occurrence for the easily bored studio executive. In preparing for Fantasia, Disney subscribed to a box at the Hollywood Bowl where, he told a colleague, he invariably fell asleep, lulled by the music and the warmth of the polo coat he liked to wear. There is also a story that he ridiculed an animator on the film, calling him homosexual for taking a music appreciation class in preparation for the project. However, when the film opened, Disney told the reporter from the New York World Telegram, "I never liked this stuff. Honest, I just couldn't listen to it. But I can listen to it now. It seems to mean a little more to me. Maybe it can give other people the same thing."

The final film, a glorious marriage of sound and image, is not without flaws. Oskar Fischinger, an avant-garde painter who had worked with director Fritz Lang on the special effects for Die Frau im Mond (aka The Woman in the Moon) in Germany in 1929, helped design Fantasia's opening sequence. However, the literal-minded Disney, who denied him credit and had his designs altered, considered his vision too abstract. There were musical compromises, too.

Bach, best experienced with the original instrumentation, was given a bombastic transcription for full orchestra, and Igor Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" was seriously distorted under Stokowsky's baton. (Disney offered the composer $5,000 for his work, pointing out that since Stravinsky's work was copyrighted in Russia, and as the United States had not signed the Berne copyright agreement, he could simply pirate the music). Beethoven's "Pastoral Symphony" was truncated, a problem exacerbated later when a piccaninny centaur was excised from the film on subsequent reissues as being in poor taste. The female centaurs in that sequence were originally bare-breasted, but the Hays office insisted that discreet garlands be hung around their necks.

Other aspects of the film have remained a continual source of delight. The design for the excerpts from Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker Suite," an enchanted forest peopled by mushroom Chinamen and Cossacks as dancing flowers, is a visual and aural feast; "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" starring, as intended, Mickey Mouse, is wonderfully inventive and amusing; "The Dance of the Hours" (from Ponchielli's opera La Gioconda) is a memorably comic sequence, with balletic ostriches and dancing hippopotami lampooning cultural pretensions.

Mussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain," with its gargoyles, demons, and other frightening creatures of the night, remains the high spot of the film, accompanying a visual battle between the forces of good and evil. The spirits of the night rise from the local graveyard and travel to Bald Mountain for a celebration of Evil, a ritualistic bow to Tchernobog, the Black God. The flames transform into dancers, then animals, and then lizards, at the whim of the great Black God, who revels in the passionate exhibition. However, as morning approaches and church bells are rung, the Black God recoils in horror and is driven back until he is vanquished. The music segues into Schubert's "Ave Maria," scored for solo voice by the composer, but here given a choral treatment (with new lyrics by Rachel Field) which blasts the preceding crescendo of magnificent malevolence out of existence.

Bela Lugosi was hired to perform the part of Tchernobog, a figure of ultimate evil. He was photographed miming the actions of the character—the legendary horror star's expressions on the character's face are unmistakable—and his image was then altered and incorporated by Vladimir Tytla, one of Disney's greatest master animators. (Tytla left Disney after the famous studio strike of 1941, brought on by Disney's refusal to allow a union, and went on to direct Little Lulu cartoons, among other things). Disney had been rotoscoping live action figures as guides to animation as far back as Snow White (1938) (despite Ralph Bakshi's claim of rotoscoping as an important innovation in the 1970s), and for Fantasia members of the Ballet Russe, notably Roman Jasinsky, Tatiana Riabouchinska, and Irina Baranova, modeled for the elephants, hippos, and ostriches (respectively) in the "Dance of the Hours" sequence.

The finale after "Night on Bald Mountain" is an anti-climactic version of Schubert's "Ave Maria," which was innovatively filmed as one long continuous take that required five days to shoot. The first time it was attempted, someone had placed the wrong lens on the camera, thus exposing the background on each side of the artwork. A second attempt was made mere days before the film's opening and was briefly disrupted by an earthquake on the third day of filming, fortunately with no ill effect.

Disney had wanted to shoot the film in widescreen and offer it on a reserved-seat basis before giving it a general release; however, his bankers objected and the only innovation Disney was able to offer was "Fantasound," an early stereo process that was available in only a few theaters.

By the time Fantasia opened, Disney had spent a fortune building his dream studio, but World War II shut down his foreign market and a significant portion of his revenues. The banks closed off his line of credit in 1940, and he was forced to offer stock to the public for the first time. Fantasia fared badly on its initial release, trimmed to 88 minutes, pleasing neither the audience (who wanted and expected more films like Snow White) nor the critics (who decried the misuse of classical music). However, Disney and Fantasia both survived, with the latter achieving classic status and more than recouping its costs (about $2,250,000). Until the film became available on video, it remained one of the classic Disney perennials, screened as a staple of children's vacation time.

One of Disney's ideas for the project was to periodically re-release it with the order and selection of musical programs altered. Such tunes as Debussy's "Clair de Lune," Weber's "Invitation to the Waltz," "Humoresque," Sibelius' "Swan of Tuonela," Wagner's "Ride of the Valkries," and Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf" were considered for insertion into future releases. However, only "Peter and the Wolf" reached the animation stage in Disney's lifetime, narrated by Sterling Holloway in Make Mine Music (1938), though the "Claire de Lune" material formed the basis for Bobby Worth and Ray Gilbert's "Blue Bayou" in the same film.

Fantasia stands acknowledged as one of cinema's undisputed works of art, visually, musically and technically.

—Dennis Fischer