Fantasia (1940) Review

The Greatest Animated Film

Fantasia is the greatest animated film ever made, and it’s also the strangest one Disney ever released. There’s no single story, no princess and no villain, except for a few minutes near the end. Instead there are eight pieces of classical music, each turned into its own animated film, introduced by a music critic in a dinner jacket in front of a live orchestra.

It was Walt Disney’s most ambitious project, and in 1940 it failed. It lost money, confused audiences and was cut, re-released and cut again for decades. Then, at the end of the sixties, a new generation discovered it, and it has been a classic ever since. I give it a 10, and I don’t think anything in animation has matched its best sequences in the eighty years since.

Watch it with your full attention, on the best screen and sound system you can find. It rewards that attention more than almost anything else in cinema. Put your phone away, turn the lights down and let it wash over you, and it will show you things that no other film has managed before or since, in a style that could only have been made by hand, one painted frame at a time.

From a Short to a Concert

Fantasia began as a short: Mickey Mouse in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, intended to revive the character’s career at a time when Donald Duck and Goofy were stealing his thunder. Disney met the conductor Leopold Stokowski, who agreed to record the music, and the short went so far over budget that Disney decided to build a whole feature around it.

He called it the Concert Feature. The idea was that music and animation would be equal partners. Audiences who would never go to a symphony concert would discover Bach, Tchaikovsky and Beethoven through pictures. Disney believed it would change how people experienced classical music, and he planned to release new versions every few years with different pieces.

He was right about its influence, but it took thirty years to arrive. The planned new versions never came in his lifetime. Fantasia 2000 finally followed the idea sixty years later, under his nephew Roy E. Disney, and it’s a charming film in its own right. It never had the ambition of the original, and it couldn’t have, because the original was the work of a studio at the peak of its powers betting everything on one idea.

The Handshake

The most famous image in the film isn’t animated at all. After The Sorcerer’s Apprentice ends, Mickey climbs onto the conductor’s podium, tugs at Stokowski’s coat and congratulates him, and the two of them shake hands, the mouse and the maestro, seen in silhouette against a blazing background.

It’s a moment of pure showmanship, Hollywood’s most famous cartoon meeting one of the world’s most famous conductors, and it tells you exactly how proud Disney was of what he’d made. It’s also the film’s statement of intent: high culture and cartoons, shaking hands as equals.

Deems Taylor, the music critic who introduces each segment, has aged less well. His introductions are stiff and a little pompous, and modern viewers often skip them. They’re part of the film’s charm and its period, and they explain what Disney was trying to do in a way that’s easy to forget.

Toccata and Fugue

The film opens with Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. The orchestra is shown in silhouette in blue and gold light, and then the image dissolves into abstract shapes: bows becoming lines, notes becoming clouds, waves of color rising and falling with the music.

It was partly influenced by the experimental animator Oskar Fischinger, who worked on it briefly before leaving the studio, and it’s the purest expression of Disney’s idea: music turned directly into images, without a story. It’s the segment that most often loses young viewers, because nothing happens in the usual sense.

Watched as an adult, it’s mesmerising. It asks you to listen and look at the same time, and to let the two connect in your own head. It is what the whole film asks of you. It’s a small act of trust, from a filmmaker to his audience, that they can meet him halfway, and it’s rarer now than it was then.

The Nutcracker

Tchaikovsky’s ballet is reimagined as the seasons turning in a forest. Fairies paint dewdrops on flowers and frost on leaves. Fish dance in a slow, veiled underwater ballet. Thistles and orchids spin like dancers. A group of mushrooms performs the Chinese dance, one small mushroom always falling out of step.

The mushroom dance includes a caricature that has since been criticised. It’s worth acknowledging. The rest of the sequence is some of the most delicate and beautiful animation Disney ever produced, full of color, light and movement, and the autumn leaves and snowflake fairies in particular are breathtaking.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

The segment everyone remembers is the one that started it all. Mickey is an apprentice to a stern sorcerer, and when his master goes to bed, he borrows the magic hat and brings a broom to life to carry water for him. Then he falls asleep and dreams of commanding the stars and the sea, and wakes to find the room flooding.

He can’t stop the broom, so he chops it to pieces with an axe, and each splinter becomes a new broom, and the army marches on, carrying buckets through the rising water. It’s a perfect little fable about power without understanding, and Paul Dukas’ music tells the story completely on its own.

The sorcerer, when he finally returns and parts the flood with a gesture, is called Yen Sid in the studio’s notes, Disney spelled backwards. Mickey slinks away with an apologetic grin, and gets a swat from the broom. It’s the best thing Mickey Mouse ever did. The segment is short, about nine minutes, and it has the clarity of a fairy tale: a clear rule, a clear mistake and a clear lesson, told entirely through movement and music. It’s why this is the image most people picture when they hear the word Fantasia.

The Rite of Spring

Stravinsky’s music is used for the history of life on Earth, from volcanoes and single cells to the age of the dinosaurs. The sequence shows the planet forming, life emerging from the sea and the great reptiles rising, fighting and finally dying of thirst in a terrible drought, dragging themselves across a cracked desert.

It’s the most ambitious sequence in the film and the one that caused the most controversy. Stravinsky himself reportedly disliked what was done to his music. Stokowski rearranged and cut it. The images, though, have stayed with every child who has seen them. The fight between a Tyrannosaurus and a Stegosaurus in the rain is one of the most famous scenes in animation.

The sequence took its science seriously for 1940. The studio consulted scientists, and the film shows extinction not as a cartoon joke but as a slow, frightening death. It is remarkable for a family film of its time. Many adults who saw it as children remember this sequence more vividly than anything else in the film, and more than one has said it was their first encounter with the idea that whole kinds of life could disappear from the Earth.

The Pastoral Symphony

Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony is set on Mount Olympus, with centaurs, cupids, fauns, winged horses and the gods. Young centaurs court each other under the watchful eyes of cupids, Bacchus throws a drunken party, and Zeus, bored, starts hurling lightning bolts at the revellers until the storm passes and night falls.

It’s the weakest and most dated segment. The sweetness is cloying, the humour is broad, and the original version contained a racist caricature of a servant character that was removed from later releases. It’s the one part of the film that feels trapped in its era. It’s easy to understand why many viewers find it the hardest to sit through.

Dance of the Hours

Ponchielli’s ballet from La Gioconda is performed by ostriches, hippopotamuses, elephants and alligators. That’s a masterpiece of comic timing. The ostriches dance at dawn, the hippos in the afternoon, the elephants in the evening and the alligators at night, and every movement is timed precisely to the music.

Hyacinth Hippo dances in a pink tutu with delicate, dreamy grace, and the alligators ambush her in a romance that turns into a riot, bringing the whole palace down. The joke is always the gap between the heavy bodies and the light dance, and it never stops being funny. It’s the segment children love most, and the one that adults find funnier every time. The animators studied real ballet dancers to get the movements right, then exaggerated them for the animals, and the combination of skill and silliness is irresistible.

Night on Bald Mountain

The finale is the greatest sequence of animation ever made. The demon Chernabog unfolds his great black wings from a mountaintop at midnight and summons the dead from their graves: ghosts rising from a village churchyard, skeletons on horseback, spirits whirling in fire. They dance for him in the flames, and he gathers them in his hands and throws them into the pit.

Bill Tytla animated Chernabog, and every movement of his hands and wings has real weight and terrible power. He’s the most frightening figure in any Disney film, and he’s magnificent. It’s the music of Mussorgsky at its wildest, matched perfectly. Tytla reportedly studied the actor Bela Lugosi posing for reference, and the demon has something of the old horror star’s theatrical menace in his gestures.

Then church bells ring, dawn breaks, and the demon, wincing, folds himself back into the mountain as the spirits fade. A procession of pilgrims carrying candles walks through a misty forest to Schubert’s Ave Maria, and the film ends in silence and light. The contrast between darkness and dawn, fear and peace, is what the sequence is built on. It’s overwhelming.

Fantasound

Disney invented a new sound system for Fantasia, called Fantasound. It used multiple speakers placed around the theatre so that the music could move around the audience. It was the first commercial film released in stereo sound, and it anticipated modern surround sound by decades.

Fantasound was also far too expensive to catch on in 1940. Only a handful of theatres could install it, and the original roadshow version played in a few cities with the full system. Most audiences heard the film in ordinary mono. That undercut much of what Disney had been trying to achieve. It took restored releases decades later, on home video and in revival screenings, for most audiences to hear something close to what the studio originally intended, and the difference is enormous.

The Rediscovery

Fantasia lost money on release. The war cut off the European market, audiences didn’t know what to make of a feature without a story, and critics were divided about whether classical music should be illustrated at all. Disney reissued it several times over the following decades, shortened and edited.

In the late sixties it was rediscovered by a generation of students who found the abstract sequences, the color and the music a perfect match for the times, and it became a hit on the college circuit. Disney even marketed it with psychedelic posters. It has been a classic ever since. It’s now routinely listed among the greatest films of any kind.

Craft Note

The Verdict on Fantasia

Yes. It’s a 10. Watch it on the biggest screen and the best sound system you can, with your full attention, and don’t skip the abstract opening. Some of it is dated, and the best of it, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the dinosaurs and Night on Bald Mountain, is as startling now as it was in 1940.

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