A journalist from a German news service asked me a couple of questions about the 75th anniversary of Fantasia. My answers never made it to the article, which had to be filed before my responses landed on the reporter's electronic desk, on November 10, 2015.
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Given the climate of the time, what drove Disney
and Stokowski to make something as experimental as Fantasia - no narrative arc, unrelated segments, classical music?
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If the world wasn't ready for Fantasia when it was released, what
changed to bring the film into the modern canon?
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| Disney acts out a scene for Stokowski (right) |
The collaboration of Walt Disney and Leopold Stokowski, both
master showmen of high profile, and passionate about sound technology, led to
what was initially conceived as a ‘concert feature’, around Mickey Mouse, the
protagonist of a fairy tale set to the music of French composer Paul Dukas, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1897). Disney saw the project first as an experiment
in animated technique going boldly beyond the Silly Symphonies and Snow
White, a phenomenal popular and critical success in 1937, and then as a
means to popularize classical music.
Fantasia was also
conceived as a prestige picture, a way of realizing the artistic possibilities
of the medium. For that purpose, the German avant-garde painter Oskar
Fischinger was brought in to design the opening sequence. The film was conceived as a musical fantasia
- a free development of a given theme – linking a series of eight unrelated
segments set to classic pieces by Beethoven, Stravinsky, Bach and Mussorgsky,
Dukas, Ponchielli and Tchaikovsky, restructured and reinstrumentalized.
The film premiered on November 13, 1940, in the Broadway
Theatre in New York, with a running time of 130 minutes.
Fantasia elicited violently
mixed reviews, and did poorly at the box-office. Audiences expected a Disney film to be more
like Snow White and Pinocchio, and many critics decried the
‘defilement’ of classical music. For others, it provided a new standard for
what was termed the ‘harmony of sight and sound’.
By marrying mass entertainment to experimental visual
techniques and classical music, including the 20th century
avant-garde, Fantasia was ahead of
its time in bridging the gap between popular culture and highbrow art. This distinction
has now collapsed: the Ride of the
Valkyries sets the tempo for helicopters carpet bombing the Vietnam jungle
in Apocalypse Now, and Beethoven is
used by Kubrick to foreground the violence of A Clockwork Orange.
75 years after it premiered, Fantasia has secured a place as an undisputed work of art. It is a
fitting example of André Malraux’s observation that film is an industry that
sometimes disguises itself as art.
Fantasia is a delight to watch, at any age, any time - yesterday, today and tomorrow. The dainty pirouettes of ostriches and hippopotamus, poking fun at high art at the expense of Ponchielli's Dance of the Hours, never fail to delight the students learning to appreciate the marriage of sound and visuals. And the film is still a great way to show how sentimentality and modernism can be beautifully rendered on the screen.
