Movies - Fantasia

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	Movies - Fantasia

Fantasia is a 1940 motion picture, the third in the Disney animated features canon, which was a Walt Disney experiment in animation and music. The soundtrack of the film consists of eight pieces of classical music, played by the Philadelphia Orchestra under the direction of Leopold Stokowski. Animated artwork of varying degrees of abstraction or literalism is used to illustrate or accompany the concert in various ways. The film also includes live-action segments featuring Stokowski, an orchestra, and American composer and music critic Deems Taylor, who serves as the host for the film. Besides its avant-garde qualities, Fantasia was notable for being the first major film released in stereophonic sound, using a process dubbed "Fantasound".

Originally released by Walt Disney Productions (without then-distributor RKO Radio Pictures) as a roadshow film with booked engagements, RKO eventually picked up Fantasia for release in 1941 and edited the film drastically the following year. Future re-releases restored various amounts of the deleted footage, with the most common version being the 1946 re-release edit. The original version of Fantasia was never released again after 1941, and although some of the original audio elements no longer exist, a 2000 DVD release version attempted to restore as much of the original version of the film as possible.

Music program

The musical pieces used in the film:

Johann Sebastian Bach — Toccata and Fugue in D Minor BWV 565 (Stokowski's own transcription for symphony orchestra) (abstract images)
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky — Nutcracker Suite Op. 71a (a variety of dances, just as in the original, but danced by animated fairies, mushrooms, fish, etc.)
Paul Dukas — L'apprenti sorcier (English title: The Sorcerer's Apprentice, with Mickey Mouse
in the role of the apprentice)
Igor Stravinsky — The Rite of Spring (early history of the planet Earth, dinosaurs and their extinction)
Ludwig van Beethoven — 6th symphony in F, Op.68 "Pastorale" (centaurs, fauns, and other creatures of classical mythology lounge about, cavort, fall in love, etc.)
Amilcare Ponchielli — La Gioconda: Dance of the Hours. Also a ballet in the original, performed in the film by elephants, ostriches, hippos, and alligators.
The last part of the film links:
*Modest Mussorgsky — Night on Bald Mountain (the demon Chernabog and other fiends have an orgy one night until driven back down by the light of day), to
*Franz Schubert — Ave Maria (monks march in the light of morning)

Most of the works played in the film are program music; that is, instrumental music that depicts stories in sound. However, the Disney program is generally not the same as the original. Beethoven meant to depict a joyous and inspiring visit to the Austrian countryside, not classical mythology. It may be noted that the animation accompanying Beethoven's symphony is of a kind that came to be increasingly associated with Disney studios, the rendering of otherwise serious and sometimes elevated subjects in a manner that makes them non-threatening and, occasionally, infantile, with a potential occlusion of their deeper significance. Schubert's music was composed as a song (1825) for single voice and piano ("Ellens dritter Gesang"; "Ellen's third song"), with German words translated by Adam Storck from Sir Walter Scott's The Lady of the Lake. In the song, the character Ellen prays to the Virgin Mary while in hiding. The song was subsequently reset to the Latin prayer Ave Maria.

Only the Dukas work is a straight setting of the composer's original intention. The story told musically by Dukas is taken from Goethe's poem "." which is in turn taken from the second century ACE writer Lucian. The Dukas is often considered the best sketch in the film, and was the only sequence carried over into Fantasia 2000 (see below).

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

In the late 1930s, Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse was losing his popularity with movie audiences. The Mickey Mouse cartoon shorts series had spawned the spin-off Donald Duck
series, which was proving to be more popular (and profitable) than the Mickey Mouse series. Mickey's fame had also been eclipsed by that of Popeye the Sailor, a competing character and series from Fleischer Studios. Walt's brother and business partner Roy Oliver Disney urged Walt to discontinue the Mickey Mouse series because of its lack of profitability, but Walt wasn't ready to give up on his favorite character just yet. He devised a special short that would be produced as a "comeback" film for Mickey Mouse: The Sorcerer's Apprentice, which would be completely silent save for the classical music piece by Paul Dukas (Walt feared that one of the reasons for Mickey's decline was the squeaky falsetto that Walt himself performed for Mickey).

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Movies - Fantasia

Music program

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

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