Fantasia may be the best animated cartoon ever made, and Fantasia 2000 is a worthy, if disappointingly brief, follow-up.
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Flush with success from his first full-length animated feature, "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" in 1937, Walt Disney became more ambitious. He decided to produce a two-hour sequence of imagery set to popular classical tunes. His ultimate aspiration was to create a "Fantasia" with about eight segments, a film that could be re-released every few years with new passages added and old ones deleted, thereby creating a new "Fantasia" upon each subsequent viewing. What's more, he decided to mount the whole production in what was then state-of-the-art color animation and the newfangled medium of stereophonic sound.
It's a good thing for the Disney studios that they also released "Pinocchio" in 1940 because "Fantasia" was a box-office flop. Its poor showing was partly accountable to the looming War years, partly to the high cost of equipping theaters for stereo sound, and partly to the highbrow concept of foisting classical music on an unsuspecting public. The film never did achieve its goal of introducing new segments with each re-release, but it did gain a following as the years went on, especially in the late sixties and early seventies when the hippie crowd took a liking to its psychedelic impressions and colors.
In 1999, the Disney studios finally realized their dream of producing another such film with "Fantasia 2000," the sixty intervening years probably a record for the time between an original and its sequel. Viewed back-to-back, as in this boxed set, "Fantasia" and "Fantasia 2000" give us a glimpse of the past and the present of film animation. Initial failure or no, "Fantasia" more than holds its own against its computer-assisted offspring and comes down to us today as a landmark film, still one of the most innovative pieces of moviemaking ever created. With a third disc of supplementary material, the "Fantasia Anthology" should provide hours of delight for anyone of any age, but if money is an object, the "Fantasia" and "Fantasia 2000" DVDs may be purchased separately.
"Fantasia":
"Fantasia" is presented in a Special 60th Anniversary edition that makes it available for the first time in its original, uncut form, which includes additional narrative introductions and an intermission not seen since its earliest theatrical release. The music for all eight segments is performed by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the segments themselves range from the purely abstract in character to the very literal in storytelling. Everyone will have personal-favorite episodes, of course, but for me the eight pieces increase in pleasure as they go along.
The first work on the program is Johann Sebastian Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D minor," a big, familiar, rhapsodic fanfare accompanied by nonrealistic pictorial representations of dancing notes, lines, and colors. Since Bach had no story line to evoke when he wrote the piece, "absolute music" it's termed, the animation is appropriate, if a bit static. However, the rest of the compositions in the movie were written with specific narratives in mind, "program music" or tone poems such stuff is called. Disney created visual plots for these pieces of music either coinciding with the composers' intentions or imaginatively suggesting other possibilities. The second work on the agenda is Pyotr Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker Suite," derived from his ballet "The Nutcracker." It is further divided into several sections, each one befittingly done up. Then comes Paul Dukas' "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," originally planned to stand as a cartoon by itself but fortunately becoming one of the movie's highlights. If you haven't seen Mickey Mouse trying desperately to undo the mischief he's made with his master's magical cap, you've probably just awakened from a seventy-year nap. Igor Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" is next, meant by the composer as a series of ritual dances but here interpreted as a panorama of Earth's beginning through the rise and fall of the dinosaurs. As a youngster in the early fifties, seeing the movie for the first time in a theater, this was one of the two parts of the film that scared me most, the other being the concluding "Night on Bald Mountain."
Next, though, comes my favorite part of the show, Beethoven's "Pastoral" Symphony, with all five movements represented in just slightly condensed form. Unlike Beethoven's concept of a day in the country, Disney produces a story line involving Greek mythology, centaurs, gods, and the like. To continue my reminiscences from childhood, it was this sequence with its nubile and very topless young ladies that I found most titillating. It still surprises me that Disney got away with as much as he did back then. Thereafter ensues Amilcare Ponchielli's "Dance of the Hours" from his opera "La Gioconda," with its wonderful dancing ostriches, crocodiles, elephants, and hippopotamuses. Then, the film concludes with Modest Moussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain," followed by Franz Shubert's "Ave Maria." Using the Schubert piece makes for a blatantly sentimental ending after the terrors of the Witches' Sabbath, yet despite going on too long it works reasonably well.
"Fantasia" Video:
The Disney folk have been good enough to offer up "Fantasia" in its original full-screen dimensions of 1.33:1 and in restored color and sound. At one point in its history, "Fantasia" was matted top and bottom to look like a widescreen production, so it's nice to be able to see everything the Disney animators intended. All the same, while the screen is big and the colors are vibrant, there is a good degree of grain remaining in the print and some color fluctuation that a viewer just has to live with. The grain is particularly apparent when one compares "Fantasia" to "Fantasia 2000" and the latter's crystal-clear backgrounds and hues. Oh, well, it's a small price to pay for what is otherwise cartoon heaven.
"Fantasia" Audio:
The sound, too, has been nearly wiped clean of hiss and pops, and its front channel stereo is quite amazingly wide even by today's standards. There is not a lot of rear-channel activity, and the sound retains the hard, bright, lean quality of its age, but, nonetheless, it holds up remarkably well. Both picture and sound have been THX certified, and the audio may be played back either through Dolby Digital 5.0 or DTS Digital decoding.
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