Fantasia ***** (no 44)

 

by Allan Fish

(USA 1940 123m) DVD1/2

Music for the Masses

p  Walt Disney  d  Ben Sharpsteen  md  Edward H.Plumb  m  Johann S.Bach, Peter I.Tchaikovsky, Paul Dukas, Igor Stravinsky, Amilcare Ponchielli, Ludwig Van Beethoven, Modest Moussorgsky, Franz Schubert, Claude Debussy

Deems Taylor (introducer), Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra,

Fantasia is a folly. The idea of bringing home classical music for the everyday man by setting it to animation is certainly ambitious, even daring; yet it is also extremely pretentious, one might even say patronising.  For all this, Fantasia would bid fair to be Disney’s greatest achievement.  Certainly 1940 was the peak year in Disney’s five golden years from 1937 to 1942, spanning Snow White and Bambi.  It was also the year of his greatest animated feature, Pinocchio, but though that wonderful adaptation of Collodi is amazing, Fantasia is something else.  It is a film to stir the imagination, intoxicate the senses and, occasionally, baffle in its inappropriateness.  In short, it is essential viewing.

            The film is split up into eight segments.  Actually, there were originally going to be nine, but Claude Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune’ was cut at the last minute (though it happily survives as an extra on the DVD).  Then the last two segments were actually combined as one, so that in actuality there are seven segments to the piece.  The first ‘Toccata and Fugue’ certainly has drawn mixed responses, but I actually found its abstract imagery one of the highlights of the programme, at times bordering on the surreal, often spectacularly beautiful, as in the erupting streams of light in the finale.  ‘The Nutcracker Suite’ bids fair to be the most pictorially breathtaking segment of the piece, but it’s also one of the most uneven.  Sequences range from the truly sublime (the figure-skating fairies, the dancing mushrooms, the Cossack dancing thistles) to the rather dull (the sleeping fishes).  The most famous segment is the third, with Mickey as Dukas’ eponymous ‘Sorcerer’s Apprentice’, but it’s also the least ambitious piece on the programme.  It certainly tells a definite story and it contains the brilliantly imaginative sequence with Mickey ruling the heavens, but all in all, it seems rather like a breather, a comedy aside.  Segment four was most controversial as Stravinsky detested his reworking of the ‘Rite of Spring’ set to images of early life on earth, through to the extinction of the dinosaurs.  Despite Stravinsky’s objections, it’s a brilliantly radical reworking with a marvellous opening sequence of mini-eruptions to the heartbeat of the music and some wonderful sequences with the dinosaurs, with what must for then have been a truly terrifying fight between a T-Rex and a potential victim in the rain.  (It may date after TV’s Walking With Dinosaurs, but this was drawn in 1938!)  Ponchielli’s comedy piece ‘The Dance of the Hours’, with hippos and elephants in tutus and comic ostriches and crocs is undoubtedly funny and very clever, yet it still seems like another filler.  We won’t say anything about the awful Beethoven travesty of ‘The Pastoral Symphony’ (with its bacchanalian leader modelled on the delicious debauchery of Laughton’s Nero in The Sign of the Cross and only memorable for Zeus’ thunderbolts) and move on to the finale.  ‘The Night on Bald Mountain’ has the terrifying Chernabog hovering like Emil Jannings’ Mephistopheles from Murnau’s Faust over a town, skeletons rising from the graves like the witches in Christensen’s Häxan, topless zombies moving too fast for the censors to notice and a truly shocking depiction of evil worthy of Montague Summers.  It’s the greatest segment in the entire programme and, if the immortal Schubert ‘Ave Maria’ that follows it is dull in comparison, there is a real sense of religious awe in its gothic tree branches and lantern carrying masses. (Could they have influenced Peter Jackson’s depiction of the elves heading off to the Grey Havens in The Lord of the Rings?) 

Fantasia is a film to spark debate, but healthy debate.  Parts of it may make you cringe, but more often than not it makes you soar.  The belated sequel Fantasia 2000 didn’t trust its short attention span audience and most of the pieces were snippets, mere excerpts, with only the Gershwin ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ piece worthy of the original.