More interestingly, Fantasia boldly defied crusty cultural strata, using the popular medium of Technicolor animation to give new and vivid life to the high art of classical music, which deftly illustrates the potential for shared culture, rather than the monolithic highbrow/lowbrow distinctions that characterized much of the 20th century. Disney was thus a pivotal cultural figure, a man who mixed with cultural elites, but nonetheless maintained a folksy connection to the “common man.” One of the constants in his work was the use of animation to instruct and enlighten, which at its best introduced new generations to art, music, ideas, and culture they might have otherwise not come into contact with. At the same time, though, this approach could be overly didactic and narrow-minded. In this regard, Fantasia, in myriad fascinating ways, embodies both the best and worst of Disney.

At its best, Fantasia is one of the most beautiful films you will ever see. Created out of thousands and thousands of hand-drawn, hand-painted animation cells overseen by the studio’s best directors over a two-year period, Fantasia is a constant visual marvel. Like Disney’s previous films, it helped advance the art of feature-length animation by incorporating new visual effects that added depth and detail to the imagery through which the camera could glide and swoop, creating a dynamic sense of presence that was far ahead of its time. The desire to capture with pen and ink the delicacy of light and the detailed nuances of movement offered Disney’s animators no end of challenges, and they came through wonderfully, producing seven segments in the film that embody different visual styles and tones, yet somehow come together into a coherent whole.

Disney’s concept from the beginning was to give new life to classical music by allowing his artists to interpret it visually, sometimes according to the narrative the music tells, and sometimes by simply finding a visual mode of conveying the music’s fundamental essence. Thus, for example, in Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor,” the animators provide abstract images that today look like nothing so much as a computer screensaver, but at the time presented a radical form of animation disassociated from cartoon characters and hectic activity. On the other hand, parts of the film tell definite stories, particularly “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” the most beloved sequence in which Mickey Mouse plays the eponymous character who finds that using magic and controlling magic are two very different things. The imagery can be lyrical, as in the mythical unicorns, centaurs, and cupids that populate Beethoven’s “Pastoral Symphony” (the overt sexuality of this sequence, despite the erasure of nipples and genitals, coupled with the now excised racist images of black centaurs tending happily to the white centaurs, make it a curious example of both Disney pushing against the perception that animation is just for children and the era’s unfortunate racial politics). The imagery can also be comical, as in the sequence that finds a parade of hippos, elephants, ostriches, and crocodiles bringing their own unique sense of balletic grace to Ponchielli’s “Dance of the Hours” from his opera La Gioconda. For me, the film’s standout sequence is “A Night on Bald Mountain,” which matches Russian composer’s Modest Mussorgsky’s formidable score with horrific, demonic imagery of such calculated power that it could only be balanced by ending the film with Schubert’s “Ava Maria.” Like the best of Disney’s films, Fantasia’s bold depictions of evil and violence and terror is ultimately counterbalanced by a sense of goodness and righteousness, albeit never quite enough to make us feel truly at ease.

Unfortunately, Fantasia’s various animated sequences are interspersed with live-action sequences of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra that are shot with a deliberate emphasis on primary colors, shadow, and contrast that often gives them the appearance of being animated. These sequences feature both the famed conductor Leopold Stokowski (always from behind and in shadow, giving him a kind of eternal presence) directing the orchestra and Deems Taylor, a well-known composer and music critic who acts as the film’s narrative voice. For each segment Taylor provides background information about the piece of music and the animators’ approach to envisioning it. While this helps to contextualize each piece, it also has a clumsy, didactic feel to it, with the tuxedoed Taylor speaking directly to us through the screen in a kind of lecture format, which takes away from the immersive flow of the animation. In some sense it was probably necessary, especially because Disney was trying to reach out to viewers who might not have much experience with or knowledge of classical music, but you can’t help but wish that the animated segments had simply flowed one into the next without interruption, thus speaking for themselves.

Copyright ©2010 James Kendrick

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