PAUL DUKAS’ THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE — Part Three

The use of shadows in this segment is especially pronounced. As the sorcerer abandons his chamber ascending a curved staircase and diminishing into the distance Mickey’s shadow on the subterranean wall grows larger and larger visually “overshadowing” his master. Also shadows of the brooms proliferate all over the place, often given a purple tinge.

Watch for another of those animator in-jokes: as a desperate Mickey riding upon the sorcerer’s immense book of spells surfs the psychedelic watery vortex in the inundated cavern he rifles frantically through the pages pausing ever-so-quickly in the midst of this deluge to lick his thumb the better to “thumb” over to the next page.

The Sorcerer animated by Bill Tytla who also drew the demon in the Night on Bald Mountain segment goes by the name “Yensid”, which Richard Schickel condescendingly suggests is “sometimes amusing to spell backwards”. Just in the nick of time this magician returns, descending into his cavern to discover the cataclysm. Reminiscent of Moses parting the Red Sea, Yensid even sports a halo-like aura as he clears a path through the flood then dissolves away the waters. This sorcerer is quite appropriately a caricature by Tytla of Walt himself, including the master’s notorious facial “tell”, a disapproving peak of his left eyebrow. (Disney’s entire staff was always on the look-out for this unconscious indication that something in their work might have gone amiss – “that dirty Disney look” they called it.)

…Mickey in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is Walt Disney at the time of Fantasia, having risen in just a few years from conducting a few of his associates in The Band Concert to becoming the dreamer on a mountaintop, conducting the stars.[1]

So here we are presented with a caricature of Walt Disney, Yensid, confronting the alter-ego of Walt Disney, Mickey Mouse – the superego reasserting control over the ego? In the very last moment of this segment, after that eyebrow has shot up, a slight smile steals across one corner of Yensid’s lips and he uses the now safely inanimate broom to swat his apprentice on the butt and send him packing.

And where does the mouse go packing to? Why, right up onto the conductor’s podium back in the concert hall. There in silhouette Mickey proffers a congratulatory handshake to the maestro himself, also in silhouette. In the brief verbal exchange between these two we hear Walt Disney speaking as Mickey Mouse – “Congratulations, Mr. Stokowski!” – and Leopold Stokowski speaking as himself – “Congratulations to you, too, Mickey!”

In his book about Fantasia, John Culhane’s deciphering of this Sorcerer’s Apprentice segment is most insightful:

Fantasia was a peaceful experiment in fusing pictures and music whose immediate success was doomed by World War II… that war ended with the beginning of the nuclear age – the age in which man, like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, set in motion forces that can be as helpful or destructive as the animated brooms, and, like the brooms, may escape our control…The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, which most people know in the Disney version, is the truest folklore of the nuclear age.[2]

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[1] Culhane, John: op. cit., p. 100.

[2] Culhane, John: op. cit., loc. sit.