Cartoon Corner- Fantasia

Originally posted at the DL April 2016

Oh god what have I done.



Naaaah this should be okay.  I mean talking about one of the most influential movies ever made can't be that hard.

The thing about Fantasia is that it damn near ruined Disney.  They went all in here, and it shows.  The core concept is something that's been done later, and was parodied by Warner Bros. in their heyday, but even then Fantasia has a... seriousness isn't quite the right word.  Solemnity.  It's not just a strange concept, it's a silly one, and they even play with that in some of the introduction segments... but it never carries through.  We're doing something groundbreaking, serious, elevating our artform to a level nobody could possibly have believed.  And nobody DID in 1940, but here we are.

Actually let's get on to the individual shorts.

Toccata and Fugue in D Minor- “Well, we want the audience to know what they’re in for.  We better start with MAXIMUM DRUGS.”  Well, not actually, they actually linger on the orchestra’s shadows for quite a lot longer than you’d think, but the main bit is MAXIMUM DRUGS.  Although at one point early on once it switches to animation they have basically flying bridges.  Cute.
Actually though, the introduction to the piece notes that it’s “music for its own sake”, and in that context it’s pretty successful overall.  The flying shapes are a bit off, but after a few minutes it settles into a sort of motion theme that’s actually really cool.  You kinda meander in time to the music, then suddenly start falling.  Then it moves into impressionistic styles that then suddenly punctuate with harsh colors and lights that make sense: you’re also getting jarred by sudden deep notes in the music.  It feels more like a proof of concept than anything else, but within that it’s quite effective.

The Nutcracker Suite- I get the impression a lot of the movement here is taken fairly straight from the ballet, so a lot of it is kinda dull comparatively?  Doesn’t help that the musically slow bits accompany the cast segments with the least personality (the dew fairies and angel fish).

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice- Y’know, Yen Sid seems to have a less defined model than Mickey.  Feels a bit amorphous.  Although that kinda makes sense, I think they’d previously been rotoscoping (or some similar technique) human figures for these things and probably figured what Yen Sid was doing was a bit complex for that considering it’s a ~10 minute short.
Of course this is a light piece to lead in to the one where everything dies, and Mickey’s suffering is in fact pretty funny.  I’m not entirely sure how you’re supposed to get that particular story out of the music as written, but I don’t think it works at all without Mickey’s desperation to punctuate the march of the brooms.

The Rite of Spring- This was also originally composed for a ballet apparently, but unlike Nutcracker suite this just makes sense as what Disney made it, a dramatic retelling of ancient Earth.  The whole first movement is downright violent, but with a lot of gravitas, it just makes sense as the background for lava flows and the formation of landmasses.  Once dinosaurs show up, there’s a definite sense of just letting the creatures operate in their habitat and the music waiting for them to act rather than some larger story trying to force its way in.
That Disney would go on to produce large numbers of actual nature documentaries is utterly unsurprising.  Huge amounts of attention are given to how the dinosaurs move, particularly mouth movements as they eat.
In general though this short has the most technical skill on display.  They blend a lot of layers of cells here to get some of these effects, and while a couple of the seams are really obvious for the most part it’s a gorgeous (if often bleak) piece.

The Pastoral Symphony- Hello drugs.
This feels the most Disney-esque of the shorts in Fantasia.  To an extent it’s just because it’s a very colorful and the characters are fairly consistently done in a very Disney style.  And each movement of the music has its own shorter story in it, which all match well to a certain sort of classic Disney short where it’s about… how to put it.  Daily struggles with just a little cartoon edge to them I guess.  The youngest Pegasus can’t quite work out how to fly and has to haul his ass up by his own tail to get it done?  Something about that is quintessentially Disney to me.  Drawing on the Greek pantheon is also in character for them at this time
But in some ways that makes it stand out.  It’s this sustained marathon of a short, where the others in Fantasia have long stretches where there’s no characters on screen, so they animators could just have stuff happen in time to the music rather than having to write stories for each bit of the song.

Dance of the Hours- So Nutcracker Suite I’m not terribly fond of since it feels like they just arbitrarily had a bunch of plants do the original ballet.  Dance of the Hours is overtly drawing from the ballet (they’re in fucking tutus here) but… they’ve added an entirely different character and plot atop of it.  Or Dance of the Hours is awesomely fucked up.  But even if it is, it still doesn’t have dancing hippos.
Since I said I’d be on the lookout- they definitely emphasize the fatness of them hippo asses sometimes, but this short never uses cinematic camera angles as we understand them… although at the time this was released, I’m not sure cinema used cinematic camera angles as we understand them, at least not in as ubiquitously (Although APPARENTLY Gloria was the hippo from Madagascar.  This hippo is apparently Hyacinth.)  Of course Dance of the Hours doesn’t particularly anthropomorphize the cast.  They just walk on two legs with no other particular anatomical changes.  Strange shit.
(Obviously DRUGS is a major theme of this short as well.  I mean you can find them in all the shorts, everything moves rhythmically all the time, but.

Night on Bald Mountain/Ave Maria- Holy shit did they actually draw those skeletons in chalk?  That grainy translucence is fuckin’ weird man.  The pettiness of Chernabog in tormenting his servants is kinda neat actually, emphasizes that this is really just a celebration of his own evil for him.
Probably the most interesting thing here is actually the transition between the two songs, where they use a lot of lighting and color changes on a bunch of different characters which you just don’t see too much of at this time.  In fact I’m not sure it’s a thing normally.
Then again Ave Maria is pretty worthless soooo I dunno.

Even though I pick on Nutcracker Suite, it has to be emphasized that every bit of Fantasia is ambitious as all get out and brings in something new and revolutionary.  Even for all the DRUGS bits, you can feel how badly Disney were trying to push themselves and make this entire crazy operation work.  And even where I can’t trace any of the precise lineages, I do feel like animation would have taken years to make the strides it did in the late 40s and 50s without Fantasia and the techniques and sheer ambition it took to create it.

From deep within his icy bunker beneath Cinderella’s Castle, old Uncle Walt smiles at the legacy this film carved through the medium.  And for all there’s not always characters or plot in any traditional sense, it’s hard not to get swept up in that at times.
Rating- 8/10