Fantasia (Walt Disney Productions, RKO, 1940)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night my husband Charles and I brought out a 2011 Disney DVD of the original 1940 Fantasia and the 2000 sequel, FAntasia 2000, and we ran the original movie last night. Fantasia was one of the most unusual projects to come out under the Walt Disney imprimatur because, instead of an animated retelling of a fairy tale the way Disney’s previous features, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio, had been, it was a plotless excursion into the world of classical music held together by the celebrity status of its two on-screen hosts, conductor Leopold Stokowski and music critic Deems Taylor. It actually began as a 10-minute short that was one of Disney’s periodic attempts to restore the luster of his first star character, Mickey Mouse. He had the idea of teaming Mickey with Stokowski for a film based on French composer Paul Dukas’s tone poem “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” based on a German folk tale about the titular sorcerer’s apprentice who, charged with filling a cauldron with water, brings a broom to life and gets it to be his water-bearer. Only he can’t get it to stop, and when in sheer desperation he takes an ax to the broom and cuts it into splinters, each splinter grows into a whole new broom and buries the room, and poor Mickey the sorcerer’s apprentice, into ribbons. In one of the film’s most frightening moments, Mickey tries to use the sorcerer’s book of spells as a combination resource and life raft, but he’s unable to find the counter-spell and it’s left to the sorcerer himself (drawn, according to the film’s imdb.com page, as a caricature of Walt Disney) to reverse the spell.

Then Disney got the idea of doing an entire feature out of those vignettes based on classical music, and while “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” had been recorded in Los Angeles with studio musicians, for the rest of the movie Stokowski was able to use the Philadelphia Orchestra (by that time he had relinquished the job of music director to Eugene Ormandy, but he was still its principal guest conductor and he used them for various film assignments, including the Deanna Duirbin vehicle One Hundred Men and a Girl) and record it in a nine-channel stereo system called “Fantasound.” (Alas, almost nobody got to see the film in Fantasound because it was too expensive to wire the theatres to show it.) Disney also got pioneering German filmmaker Oskar Fischinger to direct the opening sequence, an abstract depiction of Stokowski’s orchestration of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, but Fischinger quit the project because he wanted the sequence to be totally abstract whereas Disney wanted realistic images of musicians on the opening slowly dissolving into abstractions. He said he wanted the sequence to look like what you would see if you were nodding off at a concert.

I’m pretty sure I’d seen Fantasia only once before, at a theatrical reissue screening in the late 1960’s or early 1970’s; Disney left this one in the vaults after its 1940 first release was a commercial disappointment and didn’t take it out again until 1966, the year of his death. A number of hippies sneaked marijuana into the theatres showing Fantasia and watched the movie “high.” Walt Disney was shocked and wanted to pull the film from release, but his more pragmatic brother Roy, the chief financial officer, told him that as much as Walt might disapprove of what the hippies were doing in the theatres, they had paid the Disney company good money to be there. Viewed today. Fantasia is one of the landmarks of the Disney company and particularly of the incredible team of animators and technicians he had assembled for short films and which created the first five Disney features (Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi and Dumbo) before the bitter animators’ strike of 1941-42 abruptly ended the halcyon days. Disney’s studio survived by making training films for the U.S. war effort – ironic since after the war he adopted the visceral hatred of government typical of the American radical Right – but he would not make another all-animated feature again until Cinderella in 1950. (He did make a few short features combining live action with animation, including one called Make Mine Music in 1946 whose most spectacular sequence, featuring a Benny Goodman small band playing “After You’ve Gone,” suggests what a jazz version of Fantasia could have looked like.)

Fantasia works best in its more abstract sequences – the opening Bach piece (however already mangled by Stokowski’s infamous orchestral transcription even before Disney’s animators got to it), the Dukas, the magisterial evocation of primitive life on earth set to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (Stravinsky got to see the film and resented the way his score had been retouched; he complained bitterly but he was unable to block its use because when he composed this in 1913 he was still a citizen of Tsarist Russia, and when Lenin and the Bolsheviks took over in 1917 they abrogated all intellectual-property laws, including Stravinsky’s copyrights), and the finale, an odd mashup of Missorgsky’s “A Night on Bald Mountain” and Schubert’s “Ave Maria” which was supposed to represent the triumph of good over evil and spirituality over Satanism. Elsewhere the creators of Fantasia really went for the cutes: the bizarre dance of the mushrooms set to the “Chinese Dance” from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite (Deems Taylor’s intro says the complete ballet is “rarely performed today” –didn’t he realize what a cash cow it is for the ballet industry, with just about every ballet company in the world putting it on during Christmas season and making at least half their yearly “take” from it?) and the Sugar Plum Fairies (plural) at the opening of the sequence; the bizarre bastardization of Greek mythology to Beethoven’s “Pastorale” Symphony and the horribly cutesy-poo cavorting of dragons and elephants to the “Dance of the Hours” from Ponchielli’s opera La Gioconda. (Deems Taylor says in his intro that the ballet is supposed to be a divertissement at the home of Prince Alvise. He fails to mention that Alvise is actually the opera’s villain.)

“Black” Disney biographer Richard Schickel blames the commercial failure of Fantasia for Disney’s visceral contempt for high culture that seeped into his work and his public statements from then on because he had mistaken what Stokowski and Taylor had offered him for “culture.” And yet what doesn’t work about Fantasia pales by comparison to what does work about it: the stunning visual quality, the integration with music and the overall artistic ambition of the piece. I hadn’t realized before how much Fantasia owed to Busby Berkeley, whose numbers were created with living bodies instead of animation abstractions but had a similarly monumental sense of ambition and scope, and a determination to upend the audience’s expectations of just what a movie could be and how it could either express reality or play with an audience’s expectations of how far a movie could go and what one could look (and sound) like.