IGOR STRAVINSKY’S RITE OF SPRING –Part Two

As it stands however, Disney’s scenario for The Rite of Spring depicted fairly accurately the scientific theories current at its time.

…the animators knowingly took some creative liberties — the climactic battle between a Stegosaurus and a Tyrannosaurus rex could never have happened, since those animals lived in different eras…[1]

Disney’s fearsome beasts in Fantasia are relatives very far removed from vaudeville performer/animator Windsor McKay’s 1909 Gertie the Dinosaur, who ate out of her master’s hand and did tricks akin to a circus seal’s!

Animators studied comets and nebulae at the Mount Wilson Observatory and observed a herd of iguanas and a baby alligator that were brought into the studio.[2]

Scientific luminaries were impressed…

Dr. Edwin Hubble of the Mt. Wilson Observatory and Dr. Julian Huxley, the author and biologist… expressed their appreciation of the Studio’s efforts on behalf of prehistoric authenticity…[3]

In 1955 this segment of the film was isolated and a narrated 16mm version was shown in science classes all across America. It was significantly instrumental in popularizing the dinosaurs and their apocalyptic fate.

Among the kids who have credited Fantasia for helping introduce them to dinosaurs was Stephen Jay Gould, who went on to become one of the century’s great evolutionary biologists.[4]

I myself was also one of those mesmerized kids. I remember collaborating with my fifth-grade best bud in an ill-conceived endeavor to replicate a life-sized Tyrannosaurus out of a barrelful of papier maché. Plop! What a mess!

Master of Ceremonies Deems Taylor begins to introduce “The World Is Born” segment, but then…

The roadshow version of the film features a humorous moment omitted from the general release version. When Deems Taylor announces the title of the work, there is a sudden loud crash in the percussion section, and we see that the chimes player has accidentally fallen against his instrument. He sheepishly gets up, to the amused chuckling of Taylor and the other musicians.[5]

Perhaps this was a sly forecast of the dissonant chaotic percussive music to come. The emcee continues where he left off before the “accidental” interruption:

“When Igor Stravinsky wrote his ballet, The Rite of Spring, his purpose was – in his own words – ‘to express primitive life.’ And so, Walt Disney and his fellow artists have taken him at his word. …they have visualized it as a pageant – as the story of the growth of life on earth: a coldly accurate reproduction of what scientists now think went on…during the first few billion years of this planet’s existence.”

The segment begins with the longest longshot ever. It zooms in from somewhere out in the Universe about 4.5 billion years ago, through starry vistas and hurtling comets toward the distant Milky Way Galaxy, through star clusters then finally trailing a meteorite right down to the crusty surface of the roiling embryonic Earth. Chaos! Fire! Smoke! Lava eruptions; massive lurching, shifting, crumbling tectonic plates; buffeting whirlwinds. Another virtuoso display from the Effects Department! And so perfectly depicted on the screen that one might easily imagine Stravinsky’s music were composed to accompany these images rather than the other way around.

All these boisterous fireworks herald the first appearance of the entire movie’s main character, the Mighty Mountain, emerging from its birthing agonies like a gigantic flaming pustule on the primitive landscape, its blistering crater overflowing with lava. Here we see it as a newborn, a volcano, and in its most naturalistic guise.

Helping to correlate the vastly divergent segments of Fantasia this monumental character appears twice more in the film: next at the peak of its beauty as mythological Arcadia in the “Pastoral” segment accompanied by Beethoven’s only major excursion out of strict Classicism into dreamy Romanticism, then finally once more at the end of the film in its decayed decadent brooding craggy old age as Bald Mountain accompanied by Mussorgsky’s orgiastic tone poem. In his book about Fantasia, John Culhane extends this observation even further:

The podium as a mountainlike dais, giving prominence to whoever [sic] occupies it, is a motif that will recur throughout the film – the actual conductor’s podium up which Mickey Mouse runs to shake Stokowski’s hand; the mountaintop from which Mickey conducts the stars and planets; Bald Mountain, from which the devil conducts the Walpurgis Night dance of the damned. Real or fanciful, it is the central image of Fantasia.[6]

---

[1] Gabler, Jay: op. cit.

[2] disney.fandom.com/wiki/Fantasia

[3] Culhane, John: op. cit., p. 22.

[4] Gabler, Jay: op. cit.

[5] disney.fandom.com/wiki/Fantasia.

[6] Culhane, John: op. cit., p. 35