Here I am, only three weeks into this silly thing, and already I've reached a film that I haven't seen before. It's hardly surprising, of course. Children rarely go out of their way to listen to classical music, and I suppose I was no exception. But, with age comes a more open mind, and perhaps it's for the best that I waited to experience Fantasia until I was ready for it (i.e. not a terrible child). Seeing the high esteem in which this odd highbrow experiment seems to be held, I found myself wondering whether this could truly hold up, or if it would just end up being a glorified Melody Time. (The question of whether or not my memories of Melody Time as being sort of terrible are still accurate will have to wait several weeks.)
Toccata and Fugue in D Minor
You really have to imagine that lot of Those Kids Today would be ready to give up on the film after the first seven minutes. Similarly, I can imagine people feeling some degree of relief when the animation finally kicks in. Is it weird that I'm not one of those people? Illuminating the orchestra with pretty coloured lights, with their gigantic imposing shadows towering in the backdrop, was infinitely more interesting than the abstract animation that eventually takes over here. Yes, it's all gorgeously smooth and fluid, and surely it's yet another impressive triumph of animation from Disney's ground-breaking early feature film days......but that doesn't necessarily mean it's interesting. With no real rhyme or reason to what's going on, and not a lot of detail (by design, but still), it's hard not to feel like you could achieve the same effect today by just playing the song in any old media player with a random visualization feature. Erm, no offense to the immensely talented animators behind this, of course! You didn't have Windows Media Player back then, and your world was better for it.Nutcracker Suite
Interesting to see this adapted in a non-Christmassy way, especially since the ballet was set around Christmas, thus giving every subsequent thing that used any part of The Nutcracker in its soundtrack a valid enough reason to cannibalize it for its own festively terrible purposes. Yes, of course the demon fairies are rocketing nature through all the seasons in record time with the express purpose of eventually reaching winter and freezing everything to death, but far more time is spent anthropomorphizing of random things as ballet dancers, which is interesting enough a couple of times. Perhaps not this many in a row, though. Those fish sure do look slutty for the 1940s, though, don't they?The Sorcerer's Apprentice
I do believe this is the segment that the general public would most readily associate with Fantasia, both because it's a segment featuring a famous Disney character, and because it's the first one where things actually happen. It's actually really well done, too, once you stop being distracted with the way Mickey Mouse's ear placement doesn't really play nice with his hat-wearermanship here. As in Pinocchio, gorgeously animated water is used to tremendous nightmarish effect - though it's more cartoony here, it's no less stunning. If early Disney features had a knack for anything, it's definitely capturing water. Also, is it weird that I was briefly unsettled by the sight of Mickey Mouse murdering (or at least attempting to murder) an anthropomorphic broom with his trusty axe?The Rite of Spring
It's always depressing to realise that science was easier to swallow for the general public over 70 years ago than it apparently is now. In fact, Deems Taylor boasts about how it's a "coldly accurate scientific reproduction"! (Personally, I doubt that the universe was actually formed in unison to any song at all.) This is, perhaps, where the paradigm of Deems describing each segment in detail before we actually see them really starts to seem silly. I mean, can you imagine if real documentaries about the formation of the earth, or any other important historical or scientific thing, did this? People wouldn't think they were terribly good documentaries at all, now would they? I probably would've liked this segment, with all its dinosaurs, when I was seven years old - today, I'm just left being sort of awed at how awkwardly animated they really are, not at all as fluid or well-animated as, well, everything in Disney features up to this very point, honestly. (Yet again, though, Disney makes sexy water.)Meet the Soundtrack
This is really the only part of the film where Jesse deems Deems to have a valid reason to be here. His muted "oh dear" at the realisation that his orchestra enjoys playing jazz during intermission is by far the cutest thing he does in the entire film, in a stuffy old-fashioned maybe-a-little-bit-racist sort of way, but his playful rapport with "The Soundtrack" also goes a long way towards humanising him. Doesn't change the fact that this is nothing more than a novel time-waster, though. A cute novel time-waster.The Pastoral Symphony
I have a confession to make. Centaurs kind of majorly creep me out. Simply because of that, I really didn't dig this as much as I could've, through no real fault of this segment itself, I suppose. So, I had to distract myself with other things, like the weirdness of cartoony fat comic relief Bacchus and the Zeussistant Vulcan looking like a pretty stereotypical dumb guy. For as "highbrow" as this film supposedly is, it doesn't feel quite fitting to render important Greek mythological figures in such a, dare I say, lowbrow way. Oh well!Dance of the Hours
Meanwhile, the silliness here feels just about right! Though The Sorcerer's Apprentice is probably the most iconic segment in Fantasia, this is easily the most charming to me, and probably my favourite overall. The animators clearly had fun creating the unusually shaped critters like ostriches, hippos, elephants, and alligators, and of course the secret to its success is that it actually manages to be a genuinely elegant piece, complimented rather than cannibalized by some cute visual gags. It's easy to imagine the visual of a cartoon hippo being a fat clumsy disaster as a ballet dancer; it's considerably harder to conceive of one moving about with true grace. And yet, here, the latter scenario is rendered seemingly so effortlessly that it just seems like the most natural thing in the world. Awesome. If any portion of this film can come together so well that it makes you feel uselessly untalented by comparison, this is it.Night on Bald Mountain/Ave Maria
As cartoon Satans go, Chernabog is probably above average. (And he clearly works out, to boot!) It seems that no Disney film can really be regarded as a classic without some proper nightmare fuel, and Night on Bald Mountain provides that in spades. Pretty much every shot featuring Actually, I suppose that's an apt way to describe Fantasia as a whole. As it seems was common with the very early Disney films, the pacing is rather odd in comparison to the more streamlined and refined plotting practices of decades to come, yet the animation is so beautiful (not just for its time, but beautiful, period) that you're willing to forgive it for that. Of course, despite that similarity, this is a very different film from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs or Pinocchio. Fantasia was pretty much a new concept when it first emerged from Disney's animation womb, one which people weren't as willing to accept. Even in 1940, people turned up their noses at such a highbrow cartoon, something I figure Those Kids Today would readily agree with. As such, though it eventually turned a profit in re-releases, this was the first Disney feature that could really be regarded as a financial failure at the time. And, well, I probably won't be rewatching it terribly often at all, but there's enough here that works, and works rather splendidly, that it's really the best kind of failure: a noble failure, executed with beauty and grace. You really should see this once in your lifetime.
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| Deems Taylor: Fantasia Narrator and Self-Loathing Musician |
TERRIBLE AND UNNECESSARY DIRECT-TO-VIDEO DISNEY SEQUEL CONCEPT: Well, um, there was already Fantasia 2000, which I haven't seen, but am told wasn't terrible, and was only sort of unnecessary. So, perhaps Disney deserves a second chance. Like Fantasiandré 3000! Which, naturally, would consist of animated skits set to the work of the non-Big-Boi half of OutKast. This would, of course, result in animated segments that play out at a far brisker pace - metaphorically driving themselves at nearly 110 miles per hour through the metaphorical 65 mph speed limit zone of the first two Fantasiae, if you will.
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