Meeting the Minimum Qualifications for Fantastic

The combination of imaginative visuals and ingenious melodies can produce something wonderful. Disney's 1999 film Fantasia 2000 follows the format of its 1940 predecessor, combining classic musical compositions with sophisticated animation. 2000 isn't half as good as the original but it's still worth watching.

The original Fantasia was a bold experiment in the early days of feature film animation. It was a showcase for the medium that showed it could sit among the most highly regarded of artforms. So Walt Disney and his team created an unparalleled work of majesty and beauty, filled with marvellously executed ideas, both strange and awesome. 2000 feels more like an academic exercise with some truly interesting talent on display but leaning much more on a catalogue of influences. In addition, the kinds of storytelling on display fall much more under the harness of tradition and corporate policy, much moreso that the preceding decade's Renaissance.

The third segment exemplifies the strengths and weaknesses of the film as a whole. Using Dmitri Shostakovich's Piano Concerto No. 2, Allegro, Opus 102, it presents Hans Christian Anderson's "Steadfast Tin Soldier" just about completely drained of the original story's power. Disney's adaptation of The Little Mermaid had strengths of its own to somewhat compensate for what it lost from the Anderson original but it's unclear what Disney's take on "The Steadfast Tin Soldier" brings to the table to replace the delicate heartbreak of the original's simple construction--the sorrowful beauty created with the lightest touch as Anderson describes an unmoving, one legged tin soldier who sees a paper doll who also never moves.

Disney's version of the two has them both dancing around and playing little games and a fight between the good soldier and the dastardly jack-in-the-box. The segment uses cgi with an interesting pastel palette but nonetheless one wonders why one should watch this disposable, insipid thing instead of Toy Story which came out four years earlier.

George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue is paired with animation designed to resemble the work of cartoonist Al Hirschfeld. The familiar song with the Hirschfeld style, eternally connected to New York, produces a too obvious portrait of various New Yorkers. Amusing vignettes of physical comedy are presented of ice skating and high altitude construction antics but the story again falls into insipidity when a down-on-his-luck, unemployed man is given the job of the construction worker who runs off to pursue his dream of becoming a drummer.

The strongest segment is probably the final one, the combination of Igor Stravinsky's Firebird Suite with an allegory of spring as a flying woman awoken by a sombre elk. Visual and thematic influence were clearly drawn from Princess Mononoke but it is a lovely piece of animation in itself.

The most obvious call back to the original Fantasia is a segment featuring Donald Duck, a version of the story of Noah's Ark from the Book of Genesis paired with Edward Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance. Donald is Noah's assistant and the main drama revolves around Donald and Daisy, after the usual improbable slapstick, both believing the other didn't make it onto the Ark in time. It has some genuinely funny moments, rare for any Donald Duck cartoon since the '50s. The first gag is a little odd, though, featuring Noah finding Donald sleeping naked in a hammock. Maybe this was a reference to Genesis 9:20-27 and the episode where Noah's youngest son found him sleeping naked.

The Donald/Noah cartoon is preceded by "The Sorcerer's Apprentice", the segment from the original film. The nightmare scenario of Mickey's arrogance leading him to bizarre disaster is one of the weaker segments from the original Fantasia but still a thousand times stronger than anything in 2000. The visuals are also an interesting contrast, the effect of real paint somehow coming off richer in its gradations than the bright colours of the Donald Duck segment.

As the Mickey segment was originally followed by Mickey speaking with a live action Leopold Stokowski, the conductor for the film's score, so Fantasia 2000 has Mickey running over from speaking to Stokowski to speak with 2000's conductor, James Levine.

A renowned conductor associated for decades with the Metropolitan Opera, Levine passed away just three months ago on March 9, 2021. The two decades between his appearance in Fantasia 2000 and his death were filled with extraordinary misfortune. His career was interrupted several times due to health problems including sciatica and tremors as well as injury--he injured his shoulder after falling on stage. He had surgery to remove a kidney with a malignant cyst 2008 and then surgery for a herniated disk the following year. Then, in 2017, during the first wave of the MeToo movement, he lost his position and various honours when allegations of sexual molestation were brought against him. Considering criminal charges were never brought against him, and that one of the incidents involved a relationship between 25 year old Levine with a 20 year old man, I'm inclined to view the case with some skepticism, as I am inclined to do with many that came about in the first years of the MeToo movement. But I make no claim to certainty. Maybe he really did molest the 15 year old in the 80s. That would be horrible, though it would be also horrible to think the man who'd already endured so much physical agony might also have been subjected to a malicious demolition of his reputation. It's certainly no happy ending in any case. As far as I could tell, he was a good conductor.

Fantasia 2000 is available on Disney+.

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This is part of a series of posts I'm writing on the Disney animated canon.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Pinocchio
Fantasia
Dumbo
Bambi
Saludos Amigos
The Three Caballeros
Make Mine Music
Fun and Fancy Free
Melody Time
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad
Cinderella
Alice in Wonderland
Peter Pan
Lady and the Tramp
Sleeping Beauty
101 Dalmatians
The Sword in the Stone
The Jungle Book
The Aristocats
Robin Hood
The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
The Rescuers
The Fox and the Hound
The Black Cauldron
The Great Mouse Detective
Oliver & Company
The Little Mermaid
The Rescuers Down Under
Beauty and the Beast
Aladdin
The Lion King
Pocahontas
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hercules
Mulan
Tarzan

Dreams, Dark and Massive

Combining visual artistry with music is one of the distinguishing features of film. Still, it's amazing to think that just thirteen years after the first feature length sound film there was anything so audacious and imaginative as 1940's Fantasia. Not that it was entirely without precedent, being essentially a feature length version of Disney's own Silly Symphonies shorts. But those short films can't rival the scale and majesty on which Fantasia operates or the imagination behind some of its modes of expression.

The first segment is its most abstract, consequently the most difficult for children to sit still for. Using Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D minor", which was already beginning to be associated with horror films, the animation is freeform, starting with colour and shape before moving to more concrete imagery. This is actually explained by the film's somewhat superfluous host, critic and composer Deems Taylor. But it accomplishes just what he says, being a remarkable visual transcription of beautiful sound. The character of the more concrete images, clouds and musical notes, convey the majesty evoked by the composition.

Most of the musical choices and their animated accompaniments seem calculated to inspire awe. Even "The Sorcerer's Apprentice", originally intended as a Mickey Mouse short, is extraordinary in scale of terror when Mickey confronts the looming and crashing waves of his folly. The implacable, eerie broomsticks, marching continuously, are more nightmarish for the simplicity of Mickey himself as a character.

Most people prefer Donald or Goofy, their shorts lending themselves to better opportunities for comedy. They both have very straightforward flaws--Donald with his temper and Goofy with his stupidity. Mickey always felt sort of ill-defined. As the mute protagonist racing against embarrassment and death, his insubstantiality becomes another piece of the fearful patchwork in the turbulent sea, another source of instability.

Fantasia also features some of the sexiest women ever animated for a Disney film, beginning with the sensuous fairies populating the "Nutcracker" segment, followed later by the coquettish centaur women, or "centaurettes", according to Wikipedia.

This is from the segment set to Beethoven's "Pastoral Symphony", the first piece of a Disney animated film I've noticed to be censored on Disney+, though this censorship actually goes back to the film's 1968 rerelease. The original 1940 version featured stereotypical black child slaves tending to the white centaur women, giving the scene of ancient Greece an anachronistic flavour of the romanticised pre-Civil War American south and making the sexy centaur women into southern belles. In addition to the obvious racism, its a fascinating look at how women in the antebellum southern U.S. were dreamed of in the 1930s. Taken with Gone with the Wind, there seems to be a sexual piquancy in the folly of beautiful women in a lifestyle supported by slavery rather than a justification of the institution. The important thing for the artists here is that the women are beautiful, vulnerable, and spoiled. Like Clark Gable, a guy might fantasise about teaching these saucy creatures a thing or two.

The "Rite of Spring" presents another snapshot of the collective imagination of the time, in this case the contemporary impression of prehistoric Earth. The dark figures of the dinosaurs framed by sinister red glow are another inspiring nightmare. The doomed stegosaurus in his struggle with the tyrannosaurus is a concrete terror while the preceding chaos of volcanoes erupting and swirling slime is another example of strange, unstable majesty.

Perhaps the least effective segment is "Dance of the Hours", with the hippopotami and alligators. It's still pretty funny but sits oddly beside the other segments, the only one that seems to be more of a parody of classical music than a complement.

Of course, one of the best remembered images of the film is the mountain that transforms into, or reveals itself to have always been, a demon. In "Night on Bald Mountain", the impressively oppressive music is fitted perfectly with the satanic figure surrounded by the dead compelled to rise and swirl about him. With "Sorcerer's Apprentice", "Rite of Spring", "The Nutcracker", and the appearance of a thunderbolt lobbing Zeus in "Pastoral Symphony", the film returns repeatedly to a contemplation of fate and the level of control one has or hasn't over life. Whether it's the random molecules in the primordial soup or an army of marching broomsticks.

Fantasia is available on Disney+.