From Misfire to Magic…and Back Again?: ‘Fantasia/Fantasia 2000’ (Blu-ray)

It’s hard to believe it was only his third full length feature film. Additionally, it’s stunning to learn that, after the overwhelming successes of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio, it would fail to connect with an audience. At the time, Walt Disney wanted to do something different with the animated medium. Having already proven its long form potential, he wanted to push its boundaries even further. Looking to combine his love of classical music with the amazing talent at his disposal, Mickey’s maker conceived of a sprawling, ever-changing production, a collection of creative shorts that would illustrate the perfect meshing of the visual with the aural. Borrowing a bit from his successful Silly Symphonies, he came up with Fantasia. Unfortunately – at least at first – the rest was not quite history.

Because of its exclusive nature, because of Walt’s desire to design an entire package and presentation around the film (including the creation of the first multichannel recording technology, which he dubbed “Fantasound”), Fantasia could only initially run in what was known as a “roadshow exhibition”. This meant the movie would take us residence in a specific location, plays for a set number of dates, and then move on to another part of the country. Unlike today’s world wide release strategies which see the latest House of Mouse fare open on thousands of theaters around the globe, Fantasia‘s creative complexities mandated such a restrictive approach. At first, Disney loved the idea. It made the movie more like an event, a “live” concert with clever studio animation as an additional draw. But costs soon became a concern, and the original version of the film only played in 12 theaters.

Since then, Fantasia has been sliced, diced, reconstructed, and reconfigured. It’s been a shallow victory in a highly shortened form and a surprise hit of the drug-fueled haze of the psychedelic ’60s. It’s stirred more than enough controversy among purists and racial pundits (more on this in a moment) and never quite lived up to its creator’s aesthetic mandates. Indeed, Disney had hoped that Fantasia would be a regular “new” release, old segments cast aside and new ones delivered so that audiences wouldn’t have the same experience each time out. In fact, it took 60 years and several generations of corporate controllers to finally get the boss’s original idea off the ground. While flawed, Fantasia 2000 would prove there was more than mythos to what Walt had originally planned.

Of course, any update would pale in comparison to the original. While it may not have been popular in its day, Fantasia has endured, transporting generations of pen and ink patrons into an unheard of realm of imagination and invention. From the abstractions of Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” to the ostrich/hippo/alligator ballet dancers of Ponchielli’s “Dance of the Hours”, Disney’s flare for illustrative finery mixed with conductor Leopold Stokowski’s sumptuous soundscapes is a true masterpiece. Sure, numerous replays and repeats have rendered some aspects of the original as fey or cutesy, and it seems that all anyone really remembers of the film is a famous cartoon mouse and his battle with some slightly sinister brooms. But there is much more to Fantasia than mere nostalgia or ‘animated music videos’. It’s a work that actually stretches beyond the limits of description to become something unique and timeless.

At first, it’s not hard to understand why subsequent rereleases meddled with the overall movie. At nearly two hours plus, it’s luxuriantly long. Sequences can last up to 25 minutes, almost four times longer than the typical animated short. Even with today’s greater appreciate of all musical forms, classical remains something elusive and – some might argue – elitist and the live action segments featuring composer and critic Deems Taylor are arc and rather dry. Yet the minute the images start flashing across the screen, abstractions meant to reproduce the various illustrations playing through your own mind, Disney has us hooked. The rest is a daring masterwork of undeniable movie magic, perhaps the most pure ‘film as form’ title that the House of Mouse ever made.

It’s just one amazing vignette after another. Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker Suite” is a thrilling example of detailed drawing, while Dukas’ “Apprentice” is surprisingly dark – even for an early Disney film. Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring”, with its evolution through dinosaurs narrative, remains one of the movie’s most memorable and influential (the Italian take on the concept – Allegro Non Troppo – even parodied it to the tune of Ravel’s “Bolero”) while the intermission bit involving “the soundtrack” is well known to most Wonderful World of Disney/theme park fans. With one exception, everything about Fantasia is faultless, from the hilarious animal slapstick dancing to the horrific/holy images used to depict Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain” and Schubert’s “Ave Maria”. Yet even the passage of time can’t lessen the lingering issues involving one key sequence.

Set to the gorgeous “Pastoral Symphony” by Beethoven, this particular piece of House of Mouse history would, perhaps, rather be forgotten all together. While the brief nudity and sexual undercurrents of the piece are not the biggest problem, the inclusion of a racially insensitive character within an otherwise serene Greek Mythology setting has haunted the studio ever since such cartoon intolerance was condemned in the ’60s. The main culprit is a tiny centaur named “Sunflower”, a shocking stereotype that looks like a rejected mascot for DW Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. As a silly, smiling servant to the rest of the pale skinned creatures, her braids and big lips brazenness is an absolute affront. Of course, by now you are asking yourself “Sunflower who?” Indeed, Disney has excised this bit from all current release prints of Fantasia, making completists angry for its lack of inclusion and scholars suspicious of why she was ever in the film in the first place.

While some continue to excuse a Song of the South level of cultural context, the whole “Sunflower” subject underlies the complexities of something like Fantasia. It is more than just a commercial entity, a piece of a company’s burgeoning business model. It meant so much to Disney himself that to see the removed sequences today (they can be found all over YouTube) brings a whole new series of questions and inferences. Answers are literally nowhere to be found – not within the standard studio speak, not within the hushed conspiracies of modern corporate boardrooms. What’s clear is that, no matter the format, the House of Mouse wants to shun its unconscionably wrong past. Of course, on the other hand, you are not getting the true version of Fantasia as seen by audiences in 1940. In fact, if you are to believe film folklore, no one since then ever has.

And then, of course, there are the tantalizing “lost” sequences, pieces of a puzzle its drafter never got a chance to play with. The most spellbinding has always been Destino, a proposed collaboration with surrealist master Salvador Dali. The painter loved Disney’s work, and believed a partnership could produce something magic. In the end, all it produced was a set of compelling sketches and concept art. Locked in the studio’s vault for decades, it was uncovered around the time that another Fantasia was conceived. Deciding that there was a window of opportunity to make even more magic, Roy Disney commissioned a Destino “reconstruction”. The results, found on recent home video releases, is a revelation. Beautiful, oblique, and visually challenging, it is everything the new Fantasia should have been.

It’s just too bad then that Walt’s nephew didn’t take the same approach with the amiable if average 2000 take. Aside from the horrid host segments that manage to make Steve Martin even more unbearable and Penn and Teller equally intolerable, the whole film feels like a “why not” afterthought. Salvaging “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” (because Mickey means money), the rest of the 79 minute marketing tool is fun, if almost wholly forgettable. Those wondering about Sunflower can look to the Al Hirschfield inspired urban fairytale of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” to see a kind of apology/analogy. With a hardworking, jazz loving, Depression era African American as one of its focuses, you can almost read the mea culpas in every single shot.

But instead of the overwhelming invention of the original, the update overreaches. The “flying whales” of Respighi’s “Pines of Rome” never ever make sense, and the opening sequence set to Beethoven’s 5th is more of a rip-off than a homage to “Toccata”‘s abstractions. Only the brilliant Donald Duck dementia of Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance” (everyone’s favorite fowl plays ark assistant to Noah), the CG “Steadfast Tin Soldier” set to Shostakovich’s “Piano Concerto No. 2 in F Major-I Allegro” and the pro-environment finale fashioned to Stravinsky’s “Firebird Suite – 1919 Version” come close to the levels of before. Yet even with its attempted mimicry of the past, Fantasia 2000 can’t help but feel unnecessary. Since it can’t better the original (or even match it, most of the time), it’s lack of impact leaves one wondering.

Maybe it’s just a matter of time. Perhaps decades have to go by and new audiences found before something like Fantasia 2000 can live up to its parent’s preeminent status. It took Disney a while before he saw Fantasia fully embraced, and even then, the love was tenuous at best. While we can forgive the whole “Sunflower” debacle (the new Blu-ray does a good job of hiding her lack of inclusion) and the initial high brow approach, we can’t argue with the power and panache of the overall vision. Walt may have hoped that his newest idea would remove animation from the “kiddie” conceit once and for all. Instead, Fantasia remains a beloved if still baffling entry in Disney’s creative canon. Fantasia 2000, on the other hand, just can’t compare.