Review: Fantasia

The Sorcerer's Apprentice is just one of eight segments

Each month VIFF in Vancouver has its Pantheon series, featuring what they think are the greatest movies of all time. In addition to the showing is a film expert who gives some comments beforehand and there's some feedback afterwards from the audience.

Yesterday was the showing of Walt Disney's Fantasia. I watched it so long ago that I can't remember when, and thought it would be neat to watch it on the big screen. So did over 150 other people! The show was practically sold out on a rainy Sunday late morning.

Before the screening, Alla Gadassic, associate professor in Media History and Theory at Emily Carr gave a talk on the history of Fantasia, and explained how Disney poured a lot of money into the film and how it was such a risk for the studio, which lost money when it was first released in 1940.

The dancing Chinese mushrooms

She said nowadays we live in a very visual world, more than other senses, like sound. But in the 1910s and 20s people were thinking about how to represent sound visually. Gadassic showed a painting by the abstract Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, who is believed to have synesthesia, where people associate music with colours, or certain letters or numbers with colours. 

Around this time film was believed to be a way to represent sound visually and there were many experimental films at this time, showing sound waves, or shapes representing sounds. People like animator Oskar Fishinger believed that since music or sound didn't have historical or cultural context, neither should the visual representation of it, which is why simple shapes were believed to be a good way of doing this.

Disney probably saw Fishinger's work, and recruited him to work on Fantasia. However, they later had a falling out, as Fishinger felt his work was possibly too abstract for mass audiences and left the studio; he was never credited for his work on the first of eight segments of Fantasia, Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.

There are eight in total, each different from the others, which is why Gadassic suggests looking at Fantasia as an anthology. Disney himself chose the music, while different teams of animators worked on the segments and Gadassic says it was a group effort, where everyone collaborated. One theory is that Mickey Mouse was included because his popularity was flagging.

When a hippo and an alligator dance together

The eight segments are:

Toccata and Fugue in D Minor: Live action of the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski gradually fades into abstract patterns determined by the music.

The Nutcracker Suite: Various pieces were chosen, such as the Asian-looking mushrooms dancing in "Chinese Dance", beautiful fish frolicking in the sea in "Arabian Dance", and flowers and leaves blown by the wind in "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies".

The Sorcerer's Apprentice: Mickey Mouse is is an apprentice told by the sorcerer to gather water to put in the cauldron, and tries to use magic to make his life easier...

The Rite of Spring: How life began on earth from protozoa to eventually dinosaurs and how they became extinct.

Intermission/Meet the Soundtrack: The master of ceremonies announces there's a 15-minute intermission to which we snicker. The film cuts back to the orchestra members returning to their seats and have an impromptu jazz jam session.

A giant devil in Night on Bald Mountain

The Pastoral Symphony: A romantic scene of centaurs and "centaurettes" complete with cupids and fauns. Interestingly the female centaurs don't have their breasts defined which somehow escaped the censors, though they do wear revealing organic tops, covering their chests with leaves and flowers. Bacchus is super drunk, and they are all caught in a big thunderstorm created by Zeus above.

Dance of the Hours: A strange scenario of dancing ostriches, hippos and alligators.

Night on Bald Mountain/Ave Maria: A giant devil summons spirits and ghosts to dance for him (and there are brief shots of bared breasts) until dawn breaks and robed monks are carrying lights through the forest as Ave Maria is sung.

Gassadic also explained that a large number of women worked on Fantasia. They not only painted all the cells by hand, but a handful of them were the lead designers of some of the segments. She said Disney was a good manager, they didn't just work on Fantasia, but also Dumbo and Pinocchio, hence the dancing elephants and pastoral scenes, having already experimented with drawing and painting them in Fantasia.

Fascinating to get the context of the film before watching it to have a greater appreciation and understanding of the anthology. No wonder it felt so disparate before!