An Orgy of Color, Sound and Imagination
An absolutely singular accomplishment! Upon the film’s release Otis Ferguson of The New Republic described Fantasia as “…one of the strange and beautiful things that have happened in the world.”[1]
Fantasia premiered November 13, 1940, at the Broadway Theater (originally The Colony) in Manhattan, the same cinema that debuted Mickey Mouse in Steamboat Willie only a dozen years before. It ran there for more than a year and almost as long at The Carthay Circle Theater in Los Angeles. Writing after the film’s 1941 debut at Chicago’s Apollo Theater, the Chicago Tribune’s cinema reviewer “Mae Tineé” (a composite pseudonym) wrote, “Certainly only genius could concoct such an anomaly and I am of the opinion that only genius can understand it…” While I disagree that only genius can understand it, I certainly concur with the “only genius could concoct it” part as well as the rest of her assessment:
“The screen has never before erupted [with] anything even remotely resembling this offspring of a musician’s and cartoonist’s brainstorm union…” [2]
“Never before” in those very early years of film-making, but what about since then, since 1941?
Indeed, to what can this animated feature even now be compared? The sequel created under the guidance of Walt’s nephew Roy, son of his long-suffering CFO/brother, and released in 2000, is a sad conglomeration of brilliant animation but fails to come close to the original’s scope, profundity and shear magnificence. Deems Taylor’s authoritative commentaries introductory to each segment in the original film are counterparted in this sequel with deplorable “interstitials” – poorly-scripted embarrassing routines performed by an assortment of celebrities like comedian Steve Martin, magicians Penn and Teller, actor James Earl Jones, et al. Only Broadway star Angela Lansbury’s turn is barely redeemable. Italian film-maker Bruno Bozzetto’s (1938-) Allegro Non Troppo (1976) – an amusing parody of the original Fantasia – boasts some excellent animation in an exotic pastiche of styles and succeeds in its goal of good-naturedly lampooning Disney’s accomplishment and even his method of achieving it. (Bozzetto posits a beleaguered single animator seated at his drawingboard right on the concert stage next to the musicians where he madly scribbles away hopelessly struggling to keep pace animating in time with an orchestra of elderly ladies who perform the classical music!) Unhappily this often surreal spoof has gone largely forgotten. Aside from these there is just nothing else like the original Fantasia.
“Walt Disney took LSD,” averred Apple Corporation’s techno mastermind and CEO Steve Jobs (1955-2011) during his 1982 address to the American Academy of Achievement. How the techno giant acquired this information, who knows? Perhaps he just inferred so upon his own viewing of Fantasia. After all, this movie is rife with psychedelia!
Then came 1969, and a new generation embraced the film, at least partially for new reasons. The twenty-nine-year-old film was now seen as a psychedelic experience.[3]
Animator Ollie Johnston recalled that young people “thought we were on a trip when we made it…every time we’d go to talk to a school or something, they’d ask us what we were on.”[4]
Perhaps that is why Chicago Tribune’s Ms.“Tineé” found it so intimidating. In her review “she” continued, “…beautiful– but bewildering… an overwhelmingly ambitious orgy of color, sound and imagination.” In the same critique “she” complained that “cavorting of gargoyles, dinosaurs, flying horses, plasms and the likes” distracted from appreciation of the great music. Me, myself? I love a good orgy, especially of color, music and imagination!
Fantasia was the culmination of an extraordinary era of discovery and exploration that had begun a dozen years earlier, in 1928, with Steamboat Willie, Mickey Mouse’s debut film.[5]
Those were revolutionary years for animation; more was conceived in those 12 years than in the 60 that followed.[6]
Known well into production by the conveniently descriptive moniker The Concert Feature it was finally acknowledged in November, 1938, that this new project needed some catchier title. An RKO Radio Pictures publicist suggested Filmharmonic Concert. No dice. So a contest was held at the studio…
… that produced almost 1,800 suggestions including Bach to Stravinsky and Bach and Highbrowski by Stokowski.[7]
Finally Disney conferred with his musical collaborator Leopold Stokowski (1882-1977) for suggestions. Stokowski recommended Fantasia.
…while artists at the other cartoon studios were planning further adventures for Popeye and Porky Pig, artists at the Disney Studio listened to Leopold Stokowski explain form in music…[8]
In musical parlance, a fantasia is a formless form, a composition that abjures those strictures of structure that define a sonata allegro symphonic movement or a scherzo or a theme-and-variations. Instead it conveys a sense of improvisation, of abandonment, of no-holds-barred freedom to proceed at its own pace in its own way on its own course to its own conclusion. Not a single musical composition showcased in Disney’s film is a bonafide fantasia. The term applies to the movie itself – as a whole – and it is an apt title for this wide-ranging composite of great musical classics representative of diverse periods, styles, nationalities, temperaments, moods, intentions and complexities. As New York Times critic Bosley Crowther put it Fantasia “dumps conventional formulas overboard and reveals the scope of films for imaginative excursion…”[9]
[1] As quoted in Culhane, John: op. cit., p.30.
[2] Mae Tineé as quoted in Prescott, David: “The Film That Saved Mickey”, Chicago Tribune, 2/8/85,Section 7, p. 2.
[3] Culhane, John: op. cit., p. 31.
[4] disney.fandom.com/wiki/Fantasia
[5] Solomon, Charles: “Donald Redux”, Minicourse Magazine, December 1990 – January 1991, p.46.
[6] Corliss, Richard: “Disney’s Fantastic Voyage”, Time Magazine, December 13, 1999, p.96.
[7] www.disney.fandom.com/wiki/Fantasia
[8] Culhane, John: op. cit., p.39.
[9] As quoted in Schickel, Richard: op. cit., p.208.
