Fantasia (1940)
(On DVD, September 2019) It’s easy, while watching Fantasia, to imagine an alternative reality in which Disney Animation Studios would have gone in a very, very different direction. Disney historians will be happy to tell you how WW2 nearly put the studio out of business: not only was the Disney business affected by the United States’ entrance in the war (taking away employees, cutting attendance, focusing popular entertainment toward propaganda which included some Disney films), but their own office spaces were used as barracks for military personnel. It took years for the studio to come back from this near-death experience, and it quickly focused on children-focused entertainment as a way back. (There’s an eight-year gap between feature-length Bambi and Cinderella, and that gap was filled by compilations of short films.) We know the rest: Disney’s post-war production was clearly aimed at kids, but that’s not so obvious in pre-war Fantasia, which is a conscious attempt to vulgarize and make accessible the high art of classical music. Integrating live-action footage of orchestra conductors and musicians, Fantasia spells out how general audiences can enjoy orchestral music, starting with visual accompaniment that can be either playful or eerie depending on the music. Everyone knows “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” of course, but there’s a lot more to the film. Segments range from abstract art to quasi-narrative pieces, with varying but generally high levels of quality. “The Pastoral Symphony” is an interesting take on mythology, with a bit more nudity than expected. “Night on Bald Mountain / Ave Maria” ends the film on a high note, with nightmarish imagery as harsh as seen in a Disney film leading to a gloriously upbeat finale. Fantasia does remain—and I don’t say this about many films, let alone Disney films—a primarily sensorial experience, designed to wash over viewers rather than being scrutinized throughout. Ironically enough, it may have been designed to bring orchestras to movie theatres, but it’s now ideally suited in the streaming era to be played on a loop as background atmosphere. It remains a very different experience (even its semi-sequel Fantasia 2000 feels far more conventional and dated twenty years later) than other Disney movies, and any cinephile can’t help but wonder what would have happened to the studio had the Fantasia experiment had more traction in the years immediately following its release.