Fantasia (November 1940)

     

Hello!

    For anyone reading through these after publication date (welcome, thanks for being here!) you might not notice the nearly 2 month gap in posting dates. This is the second time that Fantasia has defeated my ability to write cogently about it, as it was the reason my first attempts didn’t get posted until 2024. With that being said, if this post is more or less personal, longer or shorter, or just not as good as the others I beg the readers forgiveness and forbearance (although if it’s better than the others let me know!).

Fantasia is a significantly different project than the previous two films, and strangely closer to the shorts in some ways. The presentation of a mixture of abstract and plotted stories to pre-existing music (in most cases) leads to an extremely personalised response, and one that is far more primal and emotional than previous entries. I say this because whilst I will attempt to explain why the Bach and Tchaikovsky entries landed better for me than the Ponchielli I will inevitably reach a point of gesturing vaguely to the images and music and merely saying “you know, that’s good, whereas that’s not!”

That being said, a summary is likely appropriate. Fantasia is made up of 8 sections, with further divisions existing within some of these, each section is a piece from an orchestral composer. Some of these have more plot, and some are more abstract. More than most of these films I would recommend having watched the film recently before diving into this review, as my summaries below will be pretty insufficient primer for whatever discussion I manage to tease out. 

The film is presented by Deems Taylor who gives a short introduction to each piece and also introduces the concept at the beginning.

Toccata and Fugue in D minor - Johann Sebastian Bach

Begins with stylised footage of the band, before fading into abstract animation that unlinks itself from specific music imagery as it goes on. Some highlights are lines reminiscent of violin strings or sheet music staves rippling across a sand dune, and violin bows moving through clouds.

Nutcracker Suite - Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky 

Little pixies dance through the air using their magic to add dewdrops to everything backed by the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy. Mushrooms dance together and flowers fall gracefully then dance like ballerinas, I believe both of these were to the Chinese Dance, but I may have missed when the change overs happened here. Fish with veil like fins dance underwater to the Arabian Dance. Sunflowers and/or dandelions dance energetically to the Russian Dance. This section is closed by flowers and leaves dancing as they fall then frost sprites racing around freezing things. Snowflakes fall then are revealed to be twirling dancers using the snow as tutus. The last bit happens to the Dance of the Flutes and Dance of the Flowers (again, not super sure if I picked the right names of the Dances here, or where the delineations were).

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice - Paul Dukas

This is the classic Fantasia scene everyone has seen. Mickey Mouse is an apprentice to a Sorcerer and rather than doing chores by hand uses magic to enchant a broom. When he can’t control it he destroys the broom but instead all the splinters turn into their own copies and flood the tower instead of just filling a reservoir.

Rite of Spring - Igor Stravinsky

Shows the progress of Earth from volcanic wasteland, to life evolving, then dinosaurs and their extinction. Interestingly, as the K2 meteor impact hadn’t even been theorised yet, the dinosaurs are shown to die seemingly of drought.

Intermission

Orchestra files out and then back in, some jazz is played and Taylor has them play with an animated “soundtrack” (sound wave visualiser).

The Pastoral Symphony - Ludwig van Beethoven

Set in the world of Greek mythology we see centaurs courting before entertaining a very Bacchus looking god, Zeus causes a massive storm before falling asleep. We get some good old fashioned racist designs.

Dance of the Hours - Amilcare Ponchielli

Ostriches do ballet, Hippos do ballet, Elephants do a bubble wand dance, Alligators perform a cult ritual (and dance). 

Night on Bald Mountain - Modest Mussorgsky AND Ave Maria - Franz Schubert

Chernabog hosts a demonic ritual of dancing ghosts and devils before they are banished by the sounds of church bells and we see a slow return to abstraction as Ave Maria plays. Priests seem to file through a forest towards a cathedral and then we return to the world of abstract light and colours.

As may be evident by my summaries I have a fairly mixed view of some of these sections. I will not go through them all individually with thoughts but will group them into categories based purely on my enjoyment, and we’ll start with

The Ones I Liked Least

To be clear - these aren’t without merit! I just didn’t find them as interesting or moving as the rest. The only two in this category are Dance of the Hours and The Pastoral Symphony. Both of these are pieces of music that I quite like, and probably feel more positively towards than I do towards their sections in this film. Dance of the Hours I simply found boring. The animation was exceptional but different animals dancing in more and more strange ways simply wasn’t able to capture me in the way that some of the previous absurdist imagery did. My notes have pointed out all the things I liked (for example the tutu’s around the creatures chests made me chuckle), but largely I didn’t take notes because I was struggling to see anything of note.The Pastoral Symphony I was enjoying until the Greek (or Roman?) gods appear. The beginning of the centaurs' courting was cute and enjoyable, but the antics that Bacchus (or Dionysus?) brings completely changes the tone from contemplative to what is supposed to be comic. For me this doesn’t work as it’s fairly bad physical comedy coupled with an extremely dramatic score, and the clash takes away from the whole, rather than making something new.

The Ones most in between

This category is mostly the sections I found interesting or moving in part, but not in the whole. Rite of Spring, the Intermission Section, and - probably the inclusion I will be defending for years to come - the Sorcerer's Apprentice. To save myself I’ll cover those in reverse order, and begin by pointing out that of the ones in this category tSA is probably the closest to being at the top. It is exceptionally animated and the physical comedy works a lot better here. The pacing is better than I had remembered as well. It is mostly in this category because the remaining three showed me something I didn’t know I wanted, which is a far more impressionist and absurdist interpretation of the music. tSA is, at its heart, quite a conventional story, elevated by being told through exceptional music and animation, but that only makes it good, not great. Rite of Spring is unfortunately paced quite slowly, and in my opinion could probably use about 5 minutes cut from it, or since it’s to music add around 5 minutes of extra stuff to cut down on the amount of times we see the same animation or general concept repeated. It is a fascinating look at what we thought dinosaurs behaved like, and how they went extinct, but I found it hard to engage with other than that. Lastly in this category, the intermission was fun while the musicians were just playing some jazz, and it dragged a bit when they were doing the bit with the “Soundtrack”. Probably another thing that would have been more impressive at the time, when audiences wouldn’t be used to seeing sound-wave and music visualisers everywhere.

The Ones I Loved

Night on Bald Mountain, Excerpts from the Nutcracker, and Toccata and Fugue in D minor. Bald Mountain was excellent, I loved the way they animated the ghosts as they were flying to Chernebog and fleeing back to their graves. The dancing demons had the pacing and interest that the dancing animals from Hours lacked. The slow fade to an abstract image of light before emerging from a tunnel at the end of Ave Maria was beautiful, and nearly brought a tear to my eye. I felt like the music was almost made for the animation, it fit so perfectly. I have a bit of a gripe with the second half of the Nutcracker Ballet. Clara and the Prince just sit and watch a string of dances that have next to no plot or progression, it’s literally a show within the world of the show. Adapting these into animation completely fixes this issue for me, and I thoroughly enjoyed the different plants and creatures moving through the world in dance. I was particularly moved by the snowflakes falling and becoming pirouetting sprites with snowflakes as tutus. Perhaps it’s because I grew up dancing, but I found the whole concept of finding balletic joy in the world extremely emotional, I felt freed and full of both joy and wonder. Given all this, it may surprise you that I liked the Toccatta and Fugue more. Perhaps it’s because this was the most abstract, both in not attempting to even have a continuity of idea between shots, or because it incorporated the music the most, but this first piece of the entire film captured me in a way none of the others did. I found myself entranced and I had to rewatch it to take notes because initially I was so engrossed that I didn’t take any beyond the start and end. The visualisations of the orchestra moving over desert dunes, or violin bows darting through the clouds captured the way I listen to music in a way I found very emotionally fulfilling. If the rest of Fantasia had stayed this abstract I would have been very happy.

Fantasia was a far more mixed experience than I had expected going into it. It was probably not helped that my personal two favourite sections were at the beginning, setting me up for some disappointment. Despite all this it started strong and ended strong, and I will not deny that it has more that is good or at least interesting than is boring, even in my opinion. The difficulty of writing has mostly come from how personal, and how unfocussed the work is, but that is part of what makes it great. I am certainly glad that I watched this the several times I needed to, and even that I have finally written about it (even if I don’t like the time it took me to write this). I hope to return to a consistent schedule and even maybe some higher quality writing next week, with 1941’s Dumbo. A film that I’m sure has no controversy surrounding it, at all.