Disney Movie Reviews #3: Fantasia

How could I ever have doubted Fantasia?

There's no title card.  This is from the 15-minute intermission (!)

I'm afraid there may not be much to say.  It's wonderful; not flawless, but near enough.  It has strong themes (both musical and narrative), it tells exciting stories in new ways, and it extends the Disney magic of characterization to the most impossible heights.  But it's not just one story, so even if something were to become tiresome, it's gone before we ever reach that point.  We're just borne along unceasingly into the next grand culture-affecting spectacle.

I finally understand Troy McLure.

And you'd better believe it affected our culture.  I was surprised to hear Deems Taylor mention that the Nutcracker Suite was detested by Tchaikovsky, not much of a success, and isn't performed much nowadays.  A shocking notion indeed to our modern ears, which are all too aware of dozens of Nutcracker performances every Yuletide.  It's gotten so entrenched in our culture that dance critics have been moved to decry it as the chief source of stagnation in the world of ballet.  I can't say Fantasia was the chief cause of its enormous and lasting popularity, but it certainly led the charge.

Just so we're all on the same page, let me list the different musical numbers and their associated scenes:

1. Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (Bach) - The live-action orchestra illuminated by crazy colors transitions to abstract animated shapes reflecting the music in the clouds.
2. Nutcracker Suite (Tchaikovsky) - Scenes about the changing of the seasons featuring fairies, fish, flowers, mushrooms, and leaves.
3. The Sorcerer's Apprentice (Dukas) - Mickey gets up to some mischief with a bunch of brooms.
4. The Rite of Spring (Stravinsky) - Earth is born, life appears and evolves into dinosaurs, which eventually die out.
5. Intermission/Meet the Soundtrack:  The orchestra has a jazz jam session, then an animated "sound track" reacts to sounds.
6. The Pastoral Symphony (Beethoven) - Centaurs hook up, there's a Bacchanale, pegasi fly around, unicorns prance, and Zeus ruins everyone's day with some lightning.
7. Dance of the Hours (Ponchielli) - Ostriches, hippos, elephants, and alligators show off their moves.
8. Night on Bald Mountain (Mussorgsky) and Ave Maria (Schubert) - The devil plays with the dead until morning comes and monks go for a walk.

My impressions from each follow.

Toccata and Fugue in D Minor

This section is live-action, but it doesn't feel that way.  Through clever application of light and shadow, Disney gives the orchestra an otherworldy aspect.  It's intensely dramatic, and aptly amplifies the excitement of watching the orchestra perform.

Leopold Stokowski leads the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra through a performance that highlights every section brilliantly, but that doesn't always come across to the lay audience.  It's Disney that manages to pull out the specific sections, granting them prominence and emphasizing their thematic role in the work.

The trick here is that the "shadows" aren't true shadows.  They're recordings of the orchestra that have been washed out, stretched, and recolored, then positioned at some point in the background behind Stokowski.  The colors change, the sizes change, and the musicians themselves fade in and out, foreground to background, detailed to silhouetted, red to yellow to blue.   Is animation what is going on here?

I guess the answer is "yes and no".  The orchestra gradually transitions into larger and more complex abstractions, before giving way to a fully animated sky and landscape.  I don't think they're meant to really convey anything, though; I think the purpose is to get us used to the synesthetic experience to come.  To remind us, subtly, that music and visual can reinforce one another in miraculous ways, never more so than in animation.

I've written about this before, in the context of Fantasia; I don't need to repeat it all.  This first piece is the only one in this movie that doesn't attempt to tell a story.  It exists simply to be, to give a visual representation of the music.  It begins by doing so very literally, and it ends by doing so completely figuratively.

It returns to the literal, as most things do.  To ground us again, to prepare us once more to view things with context.  But for a moment there, a fabulous, indulgent, exulting moment, we were free.

Nutcracker Suite

This is probably the most  memorable part of Fantasia, although it doesn't really deserve it.  But it's the first time in the movie you get a WOW! moment, and that sticks with you.  The dancing flowers, of course, are really something special.

Click for a gif.

The Nutcracker isn't the best of this bunch -- the music connects somewhat tenuously to the animated goings-on at times, the fairies are cute but not that interesting, the fish are disturbingly sexy, and the whole thing is kind of weird.

Also, the mushrooms are pretty racist.

But still, there are things worth mentioning in terms of the the craft of animation.  Take the mushroom bit -- the spotlight slowly tightens in throughout the piece, forcing the mushrooms to move closer together at the same right as the music picks up in tempo.  The camera zooms in at the same time, giving the entire performance a sense of urgency and immediacy that's exactly in keeping with the score.  But there's absolutely no reason for these mushrooms to be dancing around!  Unlike the flowers floating down a river, or the fairies putting frost on everything, mushrooms don't move.  It's nonsense, but it has a huge amount of artistry going into it.  That's the right description for Fantasia at its worst, and it's still pretty high praise.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

I'm sure your memory of this will do it more justice than any words I write might manage.  That said...it isn't very good.

This piece is unique in Fantasia for a few reasons:  it's the only one to feature a recurring Disney character, it was created to be its own stand-alone work originally, and the story has a more direct relationship to the music than any other piece.  Disney had been doing musical animations for a while, releasing them as shorts known as Silly Symphonies, and The Sorcerer's Apprentice was originally intended to be just another one of those, not part of a feature-length film.  When it was being developed, Mickey Mouse's popularity as a character was at its lowest, and it became clear to Disney that it would never be able to recoup its development cost if it was released as a simple short.  Instead, they hatched the plan to include it in a feature as one of many animated accompaniments to music.  In other words, Fantasia only exists because Disney didn't think The Sorcerer's Apprentice was good enough to make any money on its own.

The music stands apart, too -- this is the only musical piece in Fantasia that was written explicitly to convey the narrative that Disney animates (you could argue that Night on Bald Mountain or The Rite of Spring meet this criterion, but the former doesn't really tell a story as much as it builds a scene, and if the latter has a narrative, it sure isn't the narrative Disney chose to tell).

It seems like these should be advantages, but I think the piece ultimately suffers from these factors.  First, developed as a stand-alone work originally, it probably didn't have as much budgetary freedom throughout the creative process as the rest of the pieces in Fantasia.  On top of that, it feels like the animators may have been boxed in by the dedication to a narrative.  There really isn't much of the whimsy present in the rest of the film.  It doesn't feel like anything can happen; it feels like one thing happens, and it doesn't even have any consequences.

That said, who's ever seen a broom with this much character?

It's only ten minutes long, so maybe you wouldn't expect it to be able to feature more than a few images.  The problem is that it repeats those images over and over.  Think hard about what happens in this piece.  What do you remember?  The wizard, Yen Sid.  Mickey firing magic into space.  Brooms carrying water.  Water sloshing about.  MORE water sloshing about.  That's it!  That's the whole thing!

Granted, the water looks amazing.  But as a child, I was always worried about the safety of that book.

Compared to any other work in Fantasia, Mickey trying to be a wizard is simply visually empty.  You have just three characters (including the broom), just one setting (castle, interior), and a whole lot of water.  It gets old pretty fast.

But if that's the case...why is it so well-loved?  Why was the first image that popped into your mind, on seeing that this review was for Fantasia, one of Mickey in his iconic wizard hat?  I can't really explain it.  My best guess is that its simplicity makes it easier for it to stick in a child's mind:  the visual repetition and direct marriage of music to narrative serve to glue it in the brain far better than the more complex pieces.  It's easily the most memorable part of Fantasia, and it's the worst.

Deal with it.

The Rite of Spring

RAZEM.

FRAZEM.

DINOSAURS.

The creative genius on display here is just staggering.  These fully imagined creatures move with a ponderous weight that perfectly communicates their size.  But, even more impressively, they aren't characterized with the 'Disney magic'.  They're drawn realistically, and they still carry the full impact of their emotional experience.  There is nothing human about the stegosaurus above, but its fear is palpable to us nonetheless.  Over and over, with dozens of species, the Disney animators succeed in bringing emotion to these totally alien lizards, transforming The Rite of Spring into a tale of cosmic birth and death.  With dinosaurs!

But it doesn't start with dinosaurs.

This is it.  This is as hard-nosed scientific as it got in 1940.  We're witness to billions of year of geographic upheaval, the appearance of life, and its gradual evolution into large, complex organisms (dinosaurs).  It's a cold representation of the facts as Science knew them at the time (and, in fact, it's almost completely consistent with our modern understanding of Earth's history), but it manages to thrill all the same.  That's right:  Fantasia makes learning fun.

For all we know, we could, in fact, be in Kansas anymore.

We get this really innovative galactic zoom-in to an embryonic Earth, passing nebulae, comets, asteroids, and a convincingly-rendered 3D starscape on the way.  Volcanoes, seismic shifts, and tidal waves cover the planet in chaotic upheaval, before settling down and letting us sink beneath the ocean to observe as unicellular life rears its multi-colored flagellae.

Just one cell, but so much character.

That solitary prokaryote goes on to evolve into all manner of undersea life.  From there, we get the textbook development of the fish who starts walking on land, and so on and so on, until...

Cue Jurassic Park theme music.

Those dinosaurs in the picture above bob their heads like birds as they walk.  Disney obviously had some serious paleontological chops supporting this piece, if only for the great care they take in animating dinosaurs as realistically as possible given what little we know (knew!) about them.  That level of care is everywhere in here, and it's wondrous.  What's really amazing, though, is the subtle cues in the overall story that decorate the early parts.

The first few images are of dinosaurs feasting happily, but it doesn't last.  Almost immediately after the giants appear on the screen, every scene involves some sort of conflict over food.  Herbivores of the same species are shown constantly fighting over plant life.  What's significant, though, is that the losers of these tussles never just go and get their own food.  It's sneaky, but the message is there:  the food is running out.

The palette gets murkier, less bright greens and more muted yellows and browns.  Soon, even the baby dinosaurs are fighting over food, the adults spend more time searching fruitlessly, and something begins to feel wrong.  Then, something is definitely wrong:

Walt always dreamed of designing heavy metal album covers.

The tyrannosaurus is suitably terrifying, but also tragic:  scroll up and take another look at the T-Rex fighting a stegosaurus above.  What's remarkable about that fight is that it's a contest.  The T-Rex doesn't have any size advantage there, and it's actually putting itself in danger.  But it doesn't have a choice.  It's so hungry that it has to go for the big target, risking its life in the hopes that it might be able to survive until its next meal, whenever that may be.  The T-Rex's fate is already sealed, whether it wins the fight or not.

Check out the plants in the foreground -- they're kind of shaped like swords stuck into the dirt.  This isn't a battlefield -- it's the remains of one.

The rain in this fight is the last fresh water the dinosaurs will see.  From here on, it's an arduous trek through a harsh desert; bereft of food to fight over, they take to clashing weakly with one another for water.

They march aimlessly, desperate to escape the heat and dehydration, dropping like flies as they go.  But this isn't The Land Before Time.  There's no mystical valley awaiting them.  One by one, they give in to the unlivable climate, collapsing to the ground, as the unforgiving sun continues to beat its rays down upon them.  No meteor here precipitates their fate; it is the result of a gradual climate shift that these specially adapted creatures cannot survive.

It is the end.  Their path, still reflected in their deep footprints, led them nowhere but the grave, and only their bones remain to speak to the majesty and power of these once-great beasts.  Then, another series of upheavals as earthquakes and tsunamis reshape the Earth, and even those remnants are buried deep beneath the surface, dirty secrets of a forgotten age, skeleton's in Gaia's closet.

At last, the moon shows the pity the sun would not, and a solar eclipse offers some little respite to the world's battered surface.  But it is too late for the dinosaurs.  Their kind will never come again.

As for my review of this segment, it's very good.  Exceptional, in fact; it's the most innovative story-music combo of any in Fantasia.  The geological scenes can feel a little slow, but they're well-suited to the music, and it's hard to blame them for not living up to the awesome majesty of the dinosaurs.

I've heard it said that technical ability is the mere foundation for great art, that true skill lies in the ability to craft the abstract in a way that hearkens to the real, without directly presenting it.  Disney's animators were living gods of their craft, capable of imbuing even the most mundane household item with life and character all its own.  But what a work of unfathomable artistic genius it was to go back to the purely technical side of their medium and apply it, scientifically, to creatures once alive, but never witnessed by human eyes!  This is how it must have been, you feel, when you watch these titans living and dying with grace, dignity, and tragedy.  Nobody knows, really, but Disney made it a fact nonetheless.  Such is the power of great art.

INTERMISSION/MEET THE SOUNDTRACK

Not much to say here.  After an actual 15-minute break, the orchestra has a jazzy jam sesh, kicked off by a playful clarinetist:

The guy to his right is thinking:  "This is an orchestra, man.  We play white people music!"

After that, this line comes out and changes shape in some way that, ideally, reflects the sound of an instrument:

This part is pretty boring.  The line, though fascinating in its DisneyMagic Anthropomorphism, doesn't really add anything.  It's a pleasant enough interlude, but ultimately, it just feels like filler.  I don't even consider it a real 'part' of Fantasia (or else I would rate it as worse than The Sorcerer's Apprentice).  I suppose it raises some interesting philosophical questions, though.  Why am I watching this?  Is this really the best use of my time?  Does an animated line, once endowed with personality, possess a soul?  I bet dinosaurs never had to watch lines change shape to the sound of a tuba.

I'm being really harsh, though.  The line segment lasts for all of three minutes.  It's just a thoughtless entertainment, inoffensive on its own, unfortunately located right on the tail of a deeply contemplative and sad epic story of the death of the dinosaurs.  That's a tough act to follow.

The Pastoral Symphony

Now for something completely different!

This is about as unscientific as it gets.

The various scenes of this piece track very closely to what Beethoven explicitly intended to convey.  Here are the movements and the scenes they describe:

1. Allegro ma non troppo.  'Awakening of cheerful feelings on arrival in the countryside'.
   Unicorns, pegasi, and satyrs scamper about an idyllic Greek countryside...cheerfully.  Check.
2. Andante molto mosso.  'Scene by the brook.'
   Scantily-clad centaurettes bathe and pretty themselves up in anticipation of some gentlecentaur callers.  Cherubs stand by as mythology's greatest wingmen/peeping-toms.  There is a brook.  Check, I guess?
3. Allegro.  'Merry gathering of country folk.'
   Bacchus shows up and throws a big ol' Bacchanale.  Wine flows freely.  Everybody gets drunk and has a blast.  Yep, check.
4. Allegro.  'Thunder.  Storm.'
   It rains.  Zeus throws lightning bolts around.  Check.
5. Allegretto.  'Shepherd's song.  Happy and thankful feelings after the storm.'
   The world is happy, safe, and peaceful once more.  Everybody goes to sleep.  Sure, check!

It's fun to watch!  But, perhaps strangely, this piece doesn't make much of an effort to synchronize the music with the action on screen.  With a few obvious exceptions (lightning strikes most prominently), the visuals are focused more on the overall feel of the music, and less on the actual beats and notes.

This baby pegasus, struggling to fly, lifts himself by his own tail.  That is so metal.

And that's fine.  I don't want to judge these works by how slavishly and obsessively the animators plotted every frame to the musical accompaniment.  It only stands out because the other sections are, comparatively, much more 'in tune' with their scores.  But I understand that Fantasia needs to be a lot more than a demonstration of technical perfection.  That said, I can't let this slide:

It's not clear from a static shot, but this water isn't that deep.  These pegasi are standing, not floating.  You can tell by the movement of their muscles -- the shift in weight is apparent as they walk.  But the baby pegasi exhibit the same muscle movement in the water.  This is impossible, though -- earlier shots established that the babies come up to their parents' knees when standing.  This is an enormous insult to our intelligence as viewers, and we should all write letters to Disney immediately to let them know that we aren't taken in for a second by this viciously lazy ruse.

I jest, of course.  Like everything Disney, it's technically meticulous -- in fact, technically speaking, I'd say this is the most impressive out of all the works of Fantasia.  The animators are really let loose with the mythological setting, and boy, do they make the most of it.  The backgrounds (sometimes multiple levels of them) zoom, pan, and even tilt at times, often when the foreground characters are doing the same thing, but in different directions.  Most of the shots have some element of reflection in them.  Every inch of the screen is full of life, color, and excitement.  It's amazing!

Cloud effects!

Watching as an adult, though, the scene with the centaurs has a creepy, voyeuristic vibe.  We're watching what's basically the lead-up to a series of booty calls.  And I don't even want to think about how many furries this scene created.

This speaks for itself.

There are lots of cute images with the cherubs flying around playing matchmaker, but it kind of feels forced at times.  For instance, I found it kind of strange that all of the centaurettes get matched up with a similarly-colored centaur:

Maybe it's my hypersensitized modern political correctness talking, but did it have to be this way?  We've got blues, greens, pinks, umbers, the works.  But there's this strange caste system in place, and the centaurs and centaurettes stick to it at all costs.  I wouldn't mention it, except there's this scene where just one centaur and just one centaurette haven't yet found a mate, and they're both so sad until the cherubs bring them together at last.  Which is all well and good, but they're the SAME COLOR.  How is there supposed to be any tension?  It's not exactly a Romeo & Juliet situation.  It's got a sense of inevitability, and that's not only boring, but has disturbing ramifications when considered in the broader scope of centaur courtship & reproduction.  Look, I'm not saying Disney & co. were a bunch of racialists or anything.  But these scenes with the centaurs speak to something along those lines, and we shouldn't ignore it.

OK, maybe we should just ignore it.

That said, Bacchus throws a mean party, and his donkeycorn is hilarious.

Lampwick rides again!

The scenes with Bacchus are short and sweet.  He's really funny visually (although his bottomless cup kind of freaks me out), and the frenetic energy on screen keeps you really engaged with every aspect of what's going on. Plus, the centaur dancing is really gorgeously animated -- clearly dressage is an essential element of the mythological Greek cotillion.

There's only one other thing that really bothers me about this scene, and it's the grape-crushing:

These guys are crushing grapes, right?  That's fine, it's an essential part of the ancient Greek winemaking process (I assume).  Except...

The liquid flows out of the press and forms a river that Bacchus happily drinks from.  His taste for it implies very strongly that it's wine, as does the whole feel of the scene.  This is simply shenanigans.  These grapes have had no time at all to ferment.  They're picked, crushed, and their juice is consumed within a matter of minutes.  It's patently absurd.  SHENANIGANS.

After the big party, Zeus shows up and tries to murder Bacchus for kicks.

Oh, Zeus, you crazy scamp.

It's scary, there's lightning.  There isn't much else worth mentioning here.  Oh, except the centaurette who whips herself to get over a hedge:

Self-flagellation is a valuable survival skill.

In the end, the sun comes out and everybody is happy and drinks rainbows.

The rainbows really are the most important part of this scene.  Some cherubs and pegasi fly between them, and their colors change dynamically as they pass from one end of the spectrum to the other.  Then everything gets dark and sleepy, and Morpheus shows up, and we all go to bed.

Goodnight.

The Pastoral Symphony is about as long as the Rite of Spring, and it's set in the past; in all other respects, these two pieces are as different as they could possibly be.  The Pastoral Symphony embraces a heavily mythologized, cartoony, optimistic and static vision of the way the world was, a world where science and facts are simply not a factor.  It's pure imagination, and while Disney certainly excels in that style, it carries so much of the Disney cachet as to feel like "more of the same."  Especially in contrast to the Rite of Spring, which was revolutionary, in context, thematically as well as technically, there's something comfortable and familiar to the Pastoral Symphony that can't help but feel a little disappointing.

It's still great!  It's wonderfully entertaining, beautifully animated, and very well integrated with the music.  For some people, that's all they want.  But I (and many others, I'm sure) hunger for something more.

Dance of the Hours

THIS IS IT.  This is the greatest part of Fantasia.  It's twelve minutes of totally amazing insanity, of perfectly animated and realized unreality, of masterfully integrated music that exists in a beautiful, mutually-reinforcing Möbius strip of wacky hijinx.  It's SO GOOD.

From the very first visual, this is completely different from every other piece in Fantasia:  it's a ballet, yes, but what matters is that it knows it's a ballet.  There are stage curtains (lots of curtains), the dancers wear ballet shoes and/or tutus, and they are all fully cognizant of being performers in a show.  But Disney doesn't call attention to it or anything so gaudy.  They don't break the fourth wall; there never was a fourth wall to begin with.  And most people never even realize it.  It adds a brilliant verisimilitude to this completely outlandish premise.  It's lovely.

Speaking of that premise, to wit:  Madame Upanova is an ostrich ballerina.

The picture of grace and beauty.  Also, note the clearly painted backdrop.

She finds some fruit and gives it out to her backup dancers, but she keeps the grapes for herself, and they all fight over it.

It's so wonderful that I don't even know what to say about it.  What's truly incredible about these ostriches is that, as ungainly, awkward, and grotesque as they are, Disney conveys handily that they completely believe in their own beauty and elegance.  Somehow, that ardent belief is enough to make the idea of their grace marginally less fake.

But only marginally.

As if it hadn't already proven itself as a cut above the rest of Fantasia, the Dance of the Hours starts to play with perspective in an entirely new way.

No 3-D glasses needed.

The camera zooms in and out to emphasize certain parts of the scene, and we get a number of unorthodox camera positions, allowing us to...erm, admire the ostriches from every angle.

Doesn't everybody eat bananas this way?

We have the ostriches for less than four minutes before they flee towards the horizon, to be replaced by something bubbling up from the depths.  Something huge and bulbous...something equally unaware of its own ridiculousness...we get Hyacinth Hippo the hippopotamus ballerina!

A figure we can only aspire to.

Look, I need to level with you.  I think this is marvelous.  I'm completely awestruck by the genius at work here.  See, here's the thing about Hyacinth Hippo and her hippo hoofers -- they're really good dancers.  The ostriches, you know, they thought they were all that, but you could tell they ain't.  The hippos are different.  As ridiculous as they look, they're also astoundingly graceful and lovely to watch.  It's true!!!

You've gotta believe me!

After Hyacinth Hippo completes her morning ablutions, she dances around a bit on her own, in the most anatomically detailed Disney moment of all time.

The fat on her lower half follows her upper half after a tiny delay.  This is revolutionary.

All that getting-ready-for-the-day has left Hyacinth Hippo plum tuckered out, so she collapses onto a chaise.  At which point she is assaulted by Elephanchine and her elephant troupe!

I have no idea which one is Elephanchine.  Elephants all look the same to me.

The elephants don't do that much dancing, but their visual quirk is just as inspired:  they blow bubbles in various sizes and quantities, and...do things with them.

I can't say exactly what's going on with these bubbles.  It's completely crazy, but it's so joyously done, and it has a weird, impossible logic to it.  Bubbles float, so why shouldn't they make other things float?

The elephants depart via the most inventive visual in all of Fantasia:  they blow away in the breeze.

Throughout their appearance, they've failed to exhibit any of the classical symptoms of being heavy, but they still seemed to have some appreciable mass as they pranced about.  At the end, here, they scatter like leaves on the wind, flung up into the sky against their volition.  What's really remarkable about it, though, is that each elephant has a clearly identifiable center of mass as they go hurtling off into the distance.  They spin around frantically, but it's all so strangely realistic; you can tell, in your heart and in your mind, that this is, indeed, what it would look like if an elephant weighed only a few grams and was caught in a strong gust of wind.

I forgive, and I let go.

From here, night falls, and we are introduced to a horde of ravenous alligators, hungry for Hyacinth.

There's a Hungry Hungry Hippos joke in here somewhere, I just know it!

But she is saved at the eleventh hour by our noble hero, Ben Ali Gator!

Let's take a moment to appreciate Ben Ali Gator's greatness.  He's a romantic, a gentleman, a phenomenal dancer, and he has a sweet feather in his cap that moves around to indicate his mood.  He's the complete package.

Ben Ali Gator scares away the villainous alligators and, finding himself smitten with Hyacinth Hippo (I mean, who wouldn't), proceeds to woo her with an intensity and fervor normally reserved for a different kind of hunt.

We've all been there -- you're about to eat dinner, then BAM, you fall in love with the entrée.

Hyacinth is appropriately bashful at first.

And very dainty!

She runs from Ben Ali Gator's advances, fleeing into the edge of the set.  But it's all a ruse!  For she immediately turns around and flings herself into the waiting arms of her beloved!

And such short, stubby arms they are.

But he finds it in himself to lift her, and they dance divinely together!

That spotlight.  That turn.  That stately expression.  That utter bliss and contentment.  Would that I were an alligator.

And, with a little eyebrow waggle from Hyacinth, Ben Ali knows he's sealed the deal.

Va-va-voom.

THEN EVERYTHING GOES COMPLETELY NUTS.

Ben Ali starts chasing Hyacinth.  Hippos are dancing all over the place.  Ostriches and elephants come out to watch, only to find themselves targeted by hungry alligators.  All is madness.  All is destruction.  Animals are getting carried off left and right, and everybody is dancing at once.  It's crazy in the best way.  Here, just listen:

BUM!

bum bum bum bum bum bum

BUM!

bum bum bum bum bum bum

bum!

bum bum bum!

bum bum bum bum bum ba bum bum bum bum

BUM!....and so on.

It's a masterpiece of kinetic animation.  It's got a visual excitement to it that only the very best Disney musical numbers have achieved (Aladdin's Friend Like Me springs foremost to mind).

It's deliriously funny, and anything can happen, and anything does happen, and everyone on screen and everyone who was behind the screen is just having such an amazing time, and you can tell, and they're all at the top of their game.  It's just wonderful.

They bring the house down (literally).

So, obviously, I love it.  I'm moved by how great it is.  Before we move on -- because I could gush about this for years -- I want to point out one very important visual element that indicates the absolute mastery that went into this production.

See, this is a ballet, right?  So everyone is supposed to be synchronized in their movements.  And generally, they are -- although there is usually one dancer who forgets a step in each dance, and it's very obvious when that happens (for instance, when an ostrich runs into a pole).

And that's hilarious!  But what's really excellent is when all the animals are dancing correctly together, you can almost always see some visual distinction between them anyway:

They all blink at different times!

It's these subtle little imperfections, deliberate mistakes, and missed timings that transform this from a work of animation to a work of genius.  So much care and attention was bent to making this feel like a live performance, rather than a static presentation!  So much...I just...I can't....

BUMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.

Night on Bald Mountain and Ave Maria

Even moreso than The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Night on Bald Mountain is visually wondrous and thematically empty.  But its visual splendor is so good that I can mostly forgive the fact that it has zero story, even if it thinks it has.

What genius decided to build a town right under the evil green mountain?

It's very exciting at the outset.  Chernabog, the god of the night in Slavic mythology, awakens on Walpurgisnacht and summons forth a bunch of demons to do a little dance.  Even now, at the end of Fantasia, Disney is showing that there's still more it can do in terms of animation technique.

Chernabog sends his shadow out over the town, distorting and warping everything it touches.  In fact, a great deal of the motion in this piece is composed of, rather than traditional animation redrawn cell-by-cell, static images being stretched and twisted.  This gives most of the motion a spooky, otherworldly quality, as everything moves and bends in pleasing parabolic arcs.

There's a palpable fluidity throughout.  Every shot has a gaseous, curling image going on, usually in the sky or the howling wind or the fog on the ground, but oftentimes in the evil monsters on screen themselves.

With all the rapid cuts, there isn't a lot of time to appreciate just how terrifying or unsettling these creatures are.  We spend a lot more time focusing on the dancing demons later, which are just grotesque animals, and somewhat cute.  These flying fiends, though -- they're a cavalcade of tortured souls, desperately charging into nightmare.  See the boar above; he isn't angry, or evil, or even hungry, he's just scared.  And that's the most frightening expression we could see on an awful monster's face.

Disney really nailed it with Chernabog's visual design.  He's supposed to be a representation of pure evil, and it's hard to argue with that.  Every inch of him speaks to his utter malevolence and general desire to inflict torment.  It's inspiring.  Except...

He doesn't really do much.  That's where this whole thing starts to come apart.  For all his monstrous visage, Chernabog's supposed evil extends no further than summoning some ghosts out of the ground and forcing them to dance.  It's spooky and unsettling, but far from menacing.  This is the sort of mischief he gets up to on Walpurgisnacht, the one night of the year when witches gather?  What's he make them do all the other nights, tap and jazz?

An illustration from 1668 of Walpurgisnacht.  Why didn't we get a demon using a chamber pot?

If anything, Chernabog spends most of his time destroying demons.  I'd say that makes him pretty nice.  We don't see any signs of harm inflicted on the town below, either.  Maybe some bad dreams?  There's so much raw craft and effort poured into making this visually incredible, but it's frustrating that there was little to no attention paid to building a strong narrative.  You can't even tell a story in your head from what's happening.  It's just a bunch of disconnected nightmare images.

From the silent film Faust (1926).  The first few minutes are clearly a direct inspiration for Night on Bald Mountain.

The sad truth is that I lost interest partway through watching demons dance.  As fascinating and well-made as it was, there was no context for me to hang my attention on, and my mind drifted.  I got bored.  So it came as some relief when a bell rang, a light shone, and the devils were banished back into sleep by the break of day.

This is the only image I can remember from Ave Maria.  A line of monks, each carrying a lantern, process across a quiet landscape, singing sonorously as they banish evil and celebrate a new day.  It's quiet, contemplative, peaceful, and pretty, and it carries an otherworldy feel much like Night on Bald Mountain, but from the other direction.  This is a meditation on beauty and grace.  It is elegant and steady, and its place at the end of Fantasia sends us forward into a new day.  The monks recede into a darkened forest, but their lights shine strong.

At last, the crystalline voice of a soprano carries us through the forbidding wood, and we lay eyes on a fresh, verdant forest.  At the end of this journey, there is joy, there is rest, there is gratitude, there is mercy.  We are content.

The sun rises.  Fantasia is over.

All is well.

Conclusion

Fantasia isn't just great.  It's exhaustingly, agonizingly, jaw-droppingly great.  It's not perfect, of course.  Some parts are boring, some make little sense, some are just filler.  And there's no unifying reason to have all these works in one place.  It's just a collection of what Disney can do, but it includes the very best of what Disney can do, and nothing is better than that.

It strikes every note on the harpsichord of human emotions, and may even draw forward a few you didn't know you had.  It's pure technical wizardry, raw artistic ability, and it's often hilarious.  Forget the parts you don't like, and keep the rest.  Everything stands in comparison to this.

FANTASIA

1940

RATING:  A

REASONING:  Some of the very best of what Disney will ever do alongside a few mediocre pieces, presented with just enough context to enhance the experience, while sustaining the mystery of it.  Perfect for everyone.