IGOR STRAVINSKY’S RITE OF SPRING — Part Three

At this point in the segment, Life has yet to emerge. Then-current scientific conjecture about Life’s origin suggested that the settling and cooling of the seas might have provided a catalytic atmosphere propitious for this eventuality. So with a final quick look backward at that massive volcano, it’s underwater we go, where hot lava makes its steamy rendezvous with mollifying H²0 and cools down into a “primordial soup”. In this sequence the evolution of life through its early eons – that is, from single-celled amoebae through its reptilian emergence out of the briny deep onto land – is brilliantly conjured in another of Disney’s amazing underwater animations. Vast passages of time are indicated by murky sludge stirred up from the bottom to fill the entire screen and then to disperse again revealing the next epoch’s biological advancement. Again, Stravinsky’s music seems the precisely perfect accompaniment!

Once it has slithered onto terra firma, animal life progresses apace, a BIG pace! As the camera pans across the now thickly-foliated terrain we are treated to depictions of other various forms Life has taken, principally numerous species of reptile, the dinosaurs, as they engage in their mundane activities, mostly eating.

While scientists have been able to reconstruct the skeletons of the dinosaurs so that we have an accurate picture of their size and shape and weight, it was not until the Disney artists combined their study of the skeletal remains with their animators’ knowledge of balance and weight that anyone had an educated visualization of how these creatures might have moved.[1]

Disney even anticipates the evolution of birds from feathered reptiles, a theory much under debate at the time of Fantasia’s production and only fairly recently confirmed by archeologists. These fascinating, sometimes mildly humorous observations meander along accompanied by comparatively sedate passages in Stravinsky’s score until suddenly they accelerate and crescendo into one of the most electrifying sequences in the entire film: the life-and-death battle between a fearsome Tyrannosaurus rex and a cumbersome but well-armored Stegosaurus against the background of a pelting thunderstorm.

Though Deems Taylor suggested The Rite of Spring as an alternative to the initial choice, The Firebird, it was Stokowski himself who suggested this reptilian confrontation. Maybe he was attempting to align Disney’s animated version more closely with the ballet’s original concept of ritual sacrifice. Said Stokowski,

“Perhaps we could in some way retain the idea of a sacrifice. The jungle is full of sacrifice, animals preying upon each other, and being preyed upon – that is life. If we could put that on the screen and end with the most terrific and terrifying of the animals fighting and eating each other, people would gasp.”[2]

And gasp they did! Directed by another of Disney’s “Nine Old Men” Wolfgang “Woolie” Reitherman (1909-1985), and animated to one of the most violent, bombastic dances in The Rite of Spring, “The Adoration of the Chosen One”, this sequence locates the spectator right amidst the adversaries in this encounter between the two behemoths. Among supervising animators, Reitherman’s specialty seems to have been the animation of massive forms in conflict. Of note before Fantasia, he was responsible for Monstro the Whale in Pinocchio. Among his subsequent work were the harrowing dogfight in Lady and the Tramp, the dispatching of the giant grizzly in The Fox and the Hound and the climactic dragon-slaying in The Sleeping Beauty.

Whenever heightened tension is needed in a Disney feature, it seems a thunderstorm is conjured up to provide that boost. For example, in the studio’s first venture into sci-fi, a live-action feature 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) based on Jules Verne’s 1870 novel, the film’s highpoint, a head-on battle with a giant squid, was first filmed against a benign sunset on a becalmed sea. Blah! No excitement. In this first take, the real struggle turned out to be the conflict of the action against its benign atmospherics. So the whole scene was reshot with a tumultuous storm and hurricane-force gale behind it et voilá, breath-taking!

And so it is that these two Fantasia dinosaurs get pelted with rain throughout their deathmatch. At its conclusion the Tyrannosaurus’ victorious roar is punctuated with stark flashes of lightening before it settles down to feast. Timed to one of the most magnificent themes in Stravinsky’s ballet, “The Evocation of the Ancestors”, now the camera pans from the tip of the spiked tail of the immense, mortally-wounded Stegosaurus slowly along the length of its body, raindrops splattering all over it, to its head. In transit we see its killer behind and already gorging on the viscera of its prey. Still alive, the defeated creature raises its head with a final feeble appeal to the heavens as though for mercy. The camera backs off, revealing other onlooking beasts, horror-stricken but now relieved in the knowledge that this time they were the ones who were spared.

For me, this is the most sobering moment in all of Fantasia: a very gut-wrenching indictment of Nature, itself, with its evolution of a dog-eat-dog survival-of-the-fittest method of regeneration. The magnificence of this gargantuan dying Stegosaurus, washed in steady weeping rainfall, combined with the grandeur of Stravinsky’s majestic theme evokes from these moments a deep misgiving that such has become the modus operandi of Life here on Earth, that a more enlightened and humane alternative is even to this very day neither foreseen nor sought after. Yes, Nature is indeed exceedingly beautiful – as so sublimely illustrated in the Nutcracker segment – but at the same time it is monstrously cruel.

That Tyrannosaurus does get its comeuppance however. The penultimate sequence of this segment visualizes a reptilian “trail of tears” as the climate change that occurred 70 million years ago at the end of the late Cretaceous Period scorches the planet dry. A caravan of various dinosaur species, lumbering miserably across the blistering terrain in search of water, collapses one-by-one into the dust, expires and disintegrates into sun-bleached skeletons.

The reptile king’s demise is pointedly emphasized. As a blast of hot dust enshrouds its head, first we witness its own miserable parched appeal to the heavens – a far cry from this King of the Tyrant Lizards’ previous triumphant roar and more akin to the Stegosaurus’ last gasp. Then after its parched stumbling collapse over a dry desert dune – how the mighty have fallen! – at last the camera pans across its skeletal remains up to its skull (as it did with the Stegosaurus) and finally zooms in for a quick spooky close-up of its boney cranium. Eventually, a falling rock comes crashing down and smashes that into smithereens.

After a brief quiet respite showing the eclipse of the sun, this “Birth of the World” segment concludes with a reiteration of those cataclysms that initiated it: the lurching eruptions and riftings of the earth, the roiling of the seas, the whirlwinds and inundation. Even a few animations from the earlier sequence are inserted again. All skeletal signs of Life get shattered, crushed and buried in yawning crevices. In the final moment – unexpectedly mild, even serene – a becalming ocean settles over all and the still-eclipsed sun slowly sinks behind the deep. Which brings us back into the concert hall for a fifteen-minute intermission.

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[1] Culhane, John: op.cit., p.121.

[2] As quoted in Culhane, John: op. cit., p.108.