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Fantasia (film)
Encyclopedia
Fantasia is a 1940 American animated film produced by Walt Disney
and released by Walt Disney Productions. The third feature in the Walt Disney Animated Classics series, the film consists of eight animated segments set to pieces of classical music conducted by Leopold Stokowski
, seven of which are performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra
. Music critic and composer Deems Taylor
introduces each segment in live-action interstitial scenes.
Disney settled on the film's concept as work neared completion on The Sorcerer's Apprentice, an elaborate Silly Symphonies
short designed as a comeback role for Mickey Mouse
who had declined in popularity. As production costs grew higher than what it could earn, he decided to include the short in a feature-length film with other segments set to classical pieces. The soundtrack was recorded using multiple audio channels and reproduced with Fantasound
, a pioneering sound reproduction system that made Fantasia the first commercial film shown in stereophonic sound
.
Fantasia was first released in theatrical roadshow engagements
held in thirteen U.S. cities from November 13, 1940. It received mixed critical reaction, and was unable to make a profit due to World War II
cutting off the profitable Europe
an market and the high roadshow overhead costs from leasing theatres and installing the Fantasound equipment. The film was subsequently reissued multiple times with its original footage and audio being deleted, modified, or restored in each version. Fantasia has grossed $76.4 million in domestic revenue and is the 22nd highest-grossing film of all time in the U.S. when adjusted for inflation
. Walt's nephew Roy E. Disney
co-produced a sequel released in 1999 titled Fantasia 2000
.
's cartoon character Mickey Mouse
entered a period of decline in the 1930s. His popularity fell behind Donald Duck
, Goofy
and in some opinion polls, behind Popeye
of Fleischer Studios
. In early 1937, Disney decided to feature Mickey in a comeback Silly Symphony cartoon based on Goethe
's ballad Der Zauberlehrling set to the music of L'apprenti sorcier
, a symphonic poem
by Paul Dukas
based on the same story. He obtained the rights to use the music by the end of July, and considered using a well-known conductor to score the piece. The first choice was Arturo Toscanini
, but the decision was changed when Leopold Stokowski
agreed to take on the job. Disney met Stokowski in late 1937 at Chasen's
, a noted Hollywood restaurant. The conductor offered his services at no charge. He also suggested the idea of a film that illustrated various selections of classical music, to which Disney passed on. Stokowski was nonetheless "thrilled at the idea" of recording for Disney, and a synopsis of the story was given to each of the 700 studio staff, who were encouraged to give their suggestions. Disney expressed his wish to use "the finest men in the plant, from color men down to animators" on the short. Ideas surfaced to have Dopey from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
in the starring role, but Disney insisted upon using Mickey.
On the night of January 9, 1938, over 100 musicians gathered at Culver Studios
, California
to record The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Animation for the short began on January 21, and in keeping with the project's ambitious efforts, animator Fred Moore redesigned Mickey by adding pupils to his eyes for greater expression. It became clearer to Disney when costs surpassed $125,000 that as a cartoon short, he could not make the same amount back from revenue. He reconsidered Stokowski's idea to expand the cartoon into a feature-length film, and work began on what was first titled The Concert Feature in February 1938. The idea was to incorporate The Sorcerer's Apprentice as well as "a group of separate numbers, regardless of their running time, put together in a single presentation". Disney hoped the concept would attract a wider audience into classical music. "This film is going to open this kind of music to a lot of people like myself who've walked out on this kind of stuff", he said in a story meeting. Its eventual title was declared by Stokowski, who described what was in the making a "Fantasia", pronounced "fan-ta-zee-ah". Composer, music critic and radio personality Deems Taylor
agreed to serve as a technical advisor and to provide narrative introductions for each segment.
The musical pieces in Fantasia were selected during a three-week conference held in September 1938 among Disney, Stokowski, Taylor, and writers Joe Grant
and Dick Huemer
. Ideas on possible storylines were discussed with stenographers recording each conversation verbatim, after which each participant would receive a copy for review before the next day's meeting. As music selections were being considered for the film, a recording of the piece was brought in for playing amongst the group. Taylor's suggestion to include The Rite of Spring was agreed upon after Disney enquired about a piece to "build something of a prehistoric theme...with prehistoric animals". By the end of the engagements, it was decided to include the pieces seen in the final film plus Cydalise et le Chèvre-pied by Gabriel Pierné
and Clair de Lune
by Claude Debussy
. When Taylor returned to the studios to review the film's progress in May 1939, Clair de Lune had been removed from the program and Cydalise was replaced with Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony due to problems with fitting a story to the music, a change that Taylor had welcomed.
From November 1938 to October 1939, artist Oskar Fischinger
worked on the Toccata and Fugue. He was a pioneer in producing abstract animation set to music, but Disney felt his designs were too abstract for a mass audience. Fischinger left the studio in apparent disgust and despair, as he was not used to working in a group and with little control. Disney had plans to make the segment the first commercial 3-D film
, with viewers being given glasses
with their programs, but this idea was later abandoned.
In The Nutcracker Suite, animator Art Babbitt
is said to have credited Curly Howard
from The Three Stooges as a guide for animating the dancing mushrooms in the Chinese Dance routine. An Arabian dancer was brought into the studios to study the movements for the goldfish in Arab Dance.
An early concept for The Rite of Spring was to extend the story from the first life forms on Earth up to the age of man, but it was curtailed by Disney to avoid religious controversy. To gain a better understanding of the history of the planet the studio received guidance from Roy Chapman Andrews
, the director of the American Museum of Natural History
, English biologist Julian Huxley
, paleontologist Barnum Brown
, and astronomer Edwin Hubble
. Animators studied comets and nebulae at the Mount Wilson Observatory
and observed a herd of iguanas and a baby alligator that were brought into the studios. Stravinsky was the only surviving composer featured in Fantasia during its development. He visited the studios in December 1939 to see The Sorcerer's Apprentice, hear Stokowski's arrangement of The Rite of Spring and view the sketches, storyboards, and models for the segment.
For inspiration on the routines in Dance of the Hours, animators studied real life ballet performers including Marge Champion
and Irina Baronova
. Béla Lugosi
, best known for his role in Dracula
, was brought in to provide reference poses for Chernabog. As animator Bill Tytla
disliked the results, he used colleague Wilfred Jackson
to pose shirtless which gave him the images he needed.
The Ave Maria segment was to provide "an emotional relief to audiences tense from the shock of Mussorgsky's malignant music and its grim visualization." Its sequence was designed for the studios' multiplane camera
, which provides the illusion of depth to the 2-D drawings. Fantasia used more multiplane footage than Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio
combined. Ed Gershman, who worked on the segment, described how the animation of the procession figures was so closely drawn, "a difference in the width of a pencil line was more than enough to cause jitters, not only to the animation, but to everyone connected with the sequence." Disney ordered many time-consuming and expensive reshots. A horizontal camera crane was built that could accommodate pictures four feet wide on panes of glass that were mounted on moveable stands, so they could be placed out of the way as the camera progressed through the film. Workers shot for six days and six nights, only to find the camera had the wrong lens on. They shot again for three days and nights before a small earthquake had rocked the wooden stands holding the glass panes. They restarted once more, and completed filming with one day to spare until the premiere. On the day of release, the last piece of film arrived in New York with four hours to spare.
Over 1,000 artists and technicians were used in the making of Fantasia, which features more than 500 characters.
Stokowski signed an eighteen-month contract with Disney to conduct the remaining pieces for Fantasia in January 1939. Disney wished to develop the concept of presenting sound further, and along with Stokowski, adopted a new approach to sound recording and reproduction
techniques. "We know...that music emerging from one speaker
behind the screen sounds thin, tinkly and strainy. We wanted to reproduce such beautiful masterpieces...so that audiences would feel as though they were standing at the podium with Stokowski". Recording began in April 1939 and lasted for seven weeks with the Philadelphia Orchestra, which Stokowski had directed from 1912 to 1938. The orchestra's home at the Academy of Music
concert hall in Philadelphia was the chosen venue because of its good acoustics
. Disney paid all the expenses of the rehearsals and recordings including the wages of the musicians, stage hands, a music librarian, and the orchestra's manager at a cost close to $18,000.
In the recording sessions, 33 microphones were placed around the orchestra to capture the music which was transferred onto nine optical track
machines located in the hall's basement. Six of the sound channels focused on a different section of the orchestra that provided an audio "close-up" of instruments – cellos and basses, violins, violas, brass, woodwinds and tympani – while the seventh recorded a mixture of the first six, and the eighth captured the overall sound at a distance. The ninth channel was used to provide a click-track
function for animators to time their drawings to the music. In the 42 days of recording, exactly 483,000 feet of film was used, which was shipped to the Disney studios in Burbank, California
for tone adjustments.
Led by William E. Garity, engineers at Disney and RCA
devised a pioneering audio reproduction system named Fantasound
that made Fantasia the first commercial film to be shown in stereophonic sound
. The nine tracks recorded at the Academy were mixed
onto four master tracks – three for the music, voices and special effects and the fourth for volume control of the first three. To create the illusion of moving sound, a device named the "pan pot
" was built to allow sound to progressively travel across a left, centre, and right speaker configuration using constant output fades. Additional speakers were installed around the venue to achieve a surround sound
effect. The movement of the sound channels was initially under manual control until a more sophisticated set-up performed the task automatically, which used a mechanical relay system operated by means of notches cut into the edge of the film. Disney was an early customer for the newly-established Hewlett-Packard
company when it ordered eight of its oscillators to test its sound systems. Fantasound marked a number of innovations in its development including the click track, overdubbing and simultaneous multi-track recording. Almost a fifth of the film's budget was spent on musical recording techniques.
presented by the Walt Disney Company
itself. A roadshow presentation consisted of a limited run, usually at a playhouse
rather than a movie theater
, with reserved seats, advance sale tickets, and only two shows a day (matinee and evening). The premiere was held at the Broadway Theatre
in New York City
on November 13, 1940. The two-hour, twenty-minute film included a fifteen-minute intermission, and a program booklet
illustrated by Gyo Fujikawa
was given to audience members. Proceeds made on the opening night went to the British War Relief Society
for the efforts in the Battle of Britain
. Fantasia ran at the Broadway Theatre for forty-nine consecutive weeks, the longest record for any sound film at the time. Its run ended on February 28, 1942 for a total of fifty-seven weeks and over a thousand screenings.
Twelve additional roadshows were held across the United States in 1941 which included a thirty-nine week run at the Carthay Circle Theatre
in Los Angeles
between January and October, where Fantasia broke the long-run record at the venue in its twenty-eighth week; a record previously held by Gone with the Wind
. The eight-week run at the Fulton Theatre
in Pittsburgh attracted over 50,000 people, with reservations being made from cities located 100 miles from the venue. The remaining engagements were held at the Majestic Theatre
in Boston
, the Geary Theatre
in San Francisco, the Hanna Theatre
in Cleveland (nine weeks), and in Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago
, Buffalo
, Minneapolis, Washington, D.C.
and Baltimore
.
As many as eighty-eight roadshows were outlined across five years, but the number of Fantasound systems that could be built were limited due to demands for radio equipment from the Department of Defense
. The first eleven engagements had earned $1.3 million by April 1941, though the $85,000 needed for the production and installation of a single Fantasound setup, along with Disney having to lease theaters, was too costly. The onset of the Second World War had cut off the profitable European market, which formed 45% of the studio's income, contributed to the commercial failure of Fantasia in its opening release. The studio's combined average receipts from each roadshow was reported to be around $315,000.
, and Fantasia made its wide release
in 1942 as a double feature
with Valley of the Sun
in a mono soundtrack and its duration cut to 81 minutes. This shortened version of Fantasia omits most of the live-action interstitials as well as the entire Toccata and Fugue segment.
Disney at this point started to see Fantasia as a mistake. "We all make mistakes. Fantasia was one but it was an honest mistake. I shall now rededicate myself to my old ideals." The roadshow version continued to screen in select theatres at more popular prices for a limited time. In 1944, Taylor's narration was translated for a projected release in Germany
.
In 1946 the film was reissued in what would be its standard form for the next few decades. All of the musical segments were restored, but the original narration and live-action elements were condensed. The soundtrack was in standard mono.
, a three-track copy was made onto magnetic film across telephone wires to an RCA
facility in Hollywood.
Fantasia was first released in Superscope
, a derivative of the anamorphic
widescreen CinemaScope
format with stereo sound, in 1956 at the Trans-Lux Normandie Theatre in New York City. The film was released by Buena Vista
, Disney's own distribution company. An automatic motor-driven control mechanism designed by Disney engineers was coupled to a variable anamorphic lens, which allowed the picture to switch between its standard aspect ratio
of 1.33:1 to the wide ratio of 2.35:1 in 20 seconds, without a break in the film. This was achieved by placing the cues that controlled the mechanism on the fourth track, while the first three contained the film's soundtracks. Only selected parts of the animated segments were stretched, with all live-action scenes unchanged. The Superscope issue received some criticism from audience members, who complained about the cropping of the picture. Fantasia was re-released in 1963.
. Disney promoted the film using a psychedelic-styled advertising campaign. The Miami News
advertised the film as "The old Disney favorite re-released for the new audience. The ultimate trip". Fantasia was reissued once more with simulated stereo sound, in 1977.
directed a 125-piece orchestra for the recording. This marked the first time a motion picture's score was digitally recorded in its entirety. The live-action narrative sequences were cut and shorter voice-over introductions were recorded by Hugh Douglas. In Los Angeles, Fantasia took in $38,000 at a single theatre in three days. The 1982 version was re-released to around 400 theatres nationwide in 1985, this time with actor Tim Matheson
providing the narration.
print from 1951 used for guidance on color and tone. This marked the first time since 1946 that a release of Fantasia came from the original negative, and not from a duplicate. Disney placed various technical requirements on theatres, including to present the film in its original 1.33:1 aspect ratio, masked by black borders on the side of the cinema screen. Theatres were also required to have a specific stereo sound system installed. Taylor's introductions were also restored as was the Stokowski soundtrack that was remastered from the four-track magnetic copy made in 1956. An estimated 3,000 pops and hisses were removed in the restoration process. The 1990 reissue earned $25 million in gross revenue. This was the film's last general theatrical release to date.
released a three-LP
set of the Stokowski score in 1957 under the catalog number WDX-101. The soundtrack was remastered and issued as a two-disc CD in 1991 which attracted sales of 100,000 units and was re-released in 2006. In 1982, Buena Vista Records released a two-disc edition of the Kostal recording.
and laser disc on November 1, 1991 as part of the "Walt Disney Classics
" line. The 50-day release prompted 9.25 million advance orders for cassettes and a record 200,000 for discs, doubling the figure of the previous record. The "Deluxe Edition" package included the film, a "making of" feature, a commemorative lithograph, a 16-page booklet, a two-disc soundtrack of the Stokowski score and a certificate of authenticity signed by Roy E. Disney
, the nephew of Walt. Fantasia became the biggest-selling sell-through
cassette of all time with 14.2 million copies being purchased. The record was surpassed by Beauty and the Beast
in December 1992. This version was also released as a DVD in 2000, outside of the U.S. in the United Kingdom and other countries, again under the "Walt Disney Classics" banner.
In November 2000, Fantasia was released on video for the second time, this time along with Fantasia 2000, on DVD
with 5.1 surround sound
. The films were issued both separately and in a three-disc set called The Fantasia Anthology. A variety of bonus features were included in the bonus disc, The Fantasia Legacy. Fantasia included restored live action scenes from the original roadshow version not seen since 1941. The 2000 UK release, however, was in the 1991 video version.
Both films were reissued again by Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment in November 2010 as a two-disc DVD set (two-disc Blu-ray in the UK) and a combined DVD and Blu-ray four-disc set that boasted 1080p
high-definition video
and 7.1 surround sound. This latest edition included additional restored live-action footage, making it the most nearly complete recreation of the original roadshow version yet attempted. In the 2000 and 2010 releases Deems Taylor's voice has been overdubbed throughout by Corey Burton
because most of the audio tracks to Taylor's restored scenes have been lost. Fantasia was withdrawn from release and returned to the "Disney Vault
" moratorium
on April 30, 2011.
of The New York Times
, who noted that "motion history was made last night...Fantasia dumps conventional formulas overboard and reveals the scope of films for imaginative excursion...Fantasia...is simply terrific." Peyton Boswell, an editor at Art Digest, called it "an aesthetic experience never to be forgotten." Time
magazine thought the premiere was "stranger and more wonderful than any of Hollywood's", and described the experience of Fantasound "as if the hearer were in the midst of the music. As the music sweeps to a climax, it froths over the proscenium arch, boils into the rear of the theatre, all but prances up and down the aisles." Dance Magazine
devoted its lead story to the film, saying that "the most extraordinary thing about Fantasia is, to a dancer or balletomane, not the miraculous musical recording, the range of color, or the fountainous integrity of the Disney collaborators, but quite simply the perfection of its dancing." Variety
also hailed Fantasia, calling it "a successful experiment to life the relationship from the plane of popular, mass entertainment to the higher strata of appeal to lovers of classical music."
Those who adopted a more negative view at the time of the film's release were mostly music critics who resisted the idea of presenting classical music with visual images. Composer and music critic Virgil Thomson
praised Fantasound which he thought offered "good transmission of music", but disliked the "musical taste" of Stokowski, with exception to The Sorcerer's Apprentice and The Rite of Spring. Olin Downes
of The New York Times too hailed the quality of sound that Fantasound presented, but felt that "much of Fantasia distracted from or directly injured the scores." Film critic Pauline Kael
dismissed parts of Fantasia as "grotesquely kitsch
y".
Fantasia holds a "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes
, a website which aggregates film reviews
. Its consensus — "A landmark in animation and a huge influence on the medium of music video
, Disney's Fantasia is a relentlessly inventive blend of the classics with phantasmagorical images". 98% of critics gave the film a positive review based on a sample of 48 reviews, with an average score of 8.6 out of 10. Among the website's "top critics" it holds a positive rating of 86% from seven reviews. Roger Ebert
of the Chicago Sun-Times
rated the film four stars out of four, and noted that throughout Fantasia, "Disney pushes the edges of the envelope".
Remarks have also been made about Fantasia not being a children's film. Reporting on the popular culture site Inside Pulse
and in The Eagle
newspaper, Robert Saucedo remembered to be "not the only one...having to sit through the movie as a kid fidgeting in your seat as the film delivers abstract image after abstract image", concluding that Fantasia is "for adults and very nerdy kids," while news and gossip website PopSugar
included Fantasia in its "10 Movies That Scared Buzz Readers as Kids" list. Paul Trandahl of the non-profit advocacy group Common Sense Media
, referred to both of the aforementioned criticism, saying "While there are enchanting dancing flowers, hippos, unicorns,...there are at least as many very threatening images intensified by the shadowy dark music" and that "some additional selections...are very long, slow and may not fully engage today’s kids", with the site giving the film an 'Ages 6 and Up' rating.
in the Top Ten Films
category. Disney and Stokowski won a Special Award for the film at the 1940 New York Film Critics Circle Awards. Fantasia was the subject of two Academy Honorary Award
s on February 26, 1942 — one for Disney, William Garity, John N. A. Hawkins and the RCA Manufacturing Company
for their "outstanding contribution to the advancement of the use of sound in motion pictures through the production of Fantasia", and the other to Stokowski "and his associates for their unique achievement in the creation of a new form of visualized music in Walt Disney's production Fantasia, thereby widening the scope of the motion picture as entertainment and as an art form".
In 1990, Fantasia for preservation in the United States National Film Registry
by the Library of Congress
as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". On the 100th anniversary of cinema in 1995, the Vatican
included Fantasia in its list of 45 "great films"
made under the art category; the others being religion and values.
Fantasia is featured in three lists that rank the greatest American films as determined by the American Film Institute
. Fantasia ranked #58 in 100 Years... 100 Movies
in 1998 before it was dropped from its 10th Anniversary revision in 2007, though it was nominated for inclusion. The 10 Top 10
list formed in 2008 placed Fantasia fifth under Animation.
, the editor responsible for the change in the 1991 video release, said "It's sort of appalling to me that these stereotypes were ever put in". Film critic Roger Ebert commented on the edit – "While the original film should, of course, be preserved for historical purposes, there is no need for the general release version to perpetrate racist stereotypes in a film designed primarily for children." The edits have been in place in all subsequent theatrical and home video reissues.
In May 1992, the Philadelphia Orchestra filed a lawsuit against The Walt Disney Company and Buena Vista Home Video. The orchestra maintained that as a co-creator of Fantasia, the group was entitled to half of the estimated $120 million in profits from video and laser disc sales. The orchestra dropped its case in 1994 when the two parties reached an undisclosed settlement out of court. British music publisher Boosey & Hawkes
filed a further lawsuit in 1993, contending that Disney did not have the rights to distribute The Rite of Spring in the 1991 VHS home video release because the permission granted to Disney by Stravinsky in 1940 was only in the context of a film to be shown in theaters. The United States district court backed Boosey & Hawkes's case in 1996, but the Second Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the ruling in 1998, stating that Disney's original "license for motion picture rights extends to video format distribution."
by Richard Wagner
, The Swan of Tuonela by Jean Sibelius
, Invitation to the Dance
by Carl Maria von Weber
, Flight of the Bumblebee
by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
, which was later adapted into the Bumble Boogie segment in Melody Time
(1948), and there was even consideration for a segment inspired by the Polka and Fugue from Schwanda the Bagpiper by Jaromír Weinberger
. The film's disappointing initial box office performance and the advent of World War II brought an end to these plans. Taylor had prepared introductions for The Firebird
by Stravinsky, La Mer
by Claude Debussy
, Adventures in a Perambulator by John Alden Carpenter
, Don Quixote
by Richard Strauss
, and Pictures at an Exhibition
by Mussorgsky "to have them for the future in case we decided to make any one of them".
Clair de Lune was another segment that was part of the film's original program. After being completely animated, it was cut out of the final film to shorten its already long running time. The segment featured two egrets flying through the Everglades
on a moonlit night. The sequence was later edited and re-scored for the Blue Bayou segment in Make Mine Music
(1946). A workprint
of the original was discovered and Clair de Lune was restored in 1992, complete with the original soundtrack of Stokowski with the Philadelphia Orchestra. It was included as a bonus feature in The Fantasia Anthology DVD in 2000.
reported that animators Woolie Reitherman and Mel Shaw had begun work on Musicana, "an ambitious concept mixing jazz, classical music, myths, modern art and more, following the old Fantasia format." Animation historian Charles Solomon wrote that development took place between 1982 and 1983, which combined "ethnic tales from around the world with the music of the various countries". Proposed segments for the film included a battle between an ice god and a sun goddess set to Finlandia
by Sibelius, one set in the Andes
to the songs of Yma Sumac
, and another featuring caricatures of Louis Armstrong
and Ella Fitzgerald
. The project was shelved in favor of Mickey's Christmas Carol
.
Roy E. Disney
, the nephew of Walt, co-produced Fantasia 2000
which entered production in 1990 and features seven new segments performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra
with conductor James Levine
. The Sorcerer's Apprentice is the only segment retained from the original film. Fantasia 2000 premiered at Carnegie Hall
on December 17, 1999 as part of a five-city live concert tour, followed by a four-month engagement in IMAX
cinemas and a wide release in regular theatres, in 2000.
, a Warner Bros.
cartoon from 1943 of the Merrie Melodies
series. The short features Elmer Fudd
in the role of Taylor, wearing his styled eyeglasses, who introduces two segments set to pieces by Johann Strauss
. In 1976, Italian animator Bruno Bozzetto
produced Allegro Non Troppo
, a feature-length parody of Fantasia. Walt Disney Pictures
used the story of The Sorcerer's Apprentice as a basis for its eponymous fantasy-adventure film
in 2010.
The Sorcerer's Hat
is the icon of Disney's Hollywood Studios
, one of the four theme parks located at Walt Disney World Resort
. The structure is of the magic hat from The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Also located at the resort is Fantasia Gardens
, a miniature golf course that integrates characters and objects from the film in each hole. The fireworks and water show Fantasmic!
features scenes from The Sorcerer's Apprentice and other Fantasia segments on water projection screens, and involves the plot of Mickey as the apprentice doing battle with the Disney Villains.
developed by Infogrames
was released for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis
system. The player controls Mickey Mouse, who must find missing musical notes scattered across four elemental worlds based upon the film's segments.
The Disney/Square Enix
crossover game series Kingdom Hearts features Chernabog as a boss in the first installment. The Night on Bald Mountain piece is played during the fight. In Kingdom Hearts II
, Yen Sid is given a speaking role and is voiced in English by Corey Burton. Yen Sid also appears in Epic Mickey
, a game released in 2010 for the Wii
console, and Chernabog makes a cameo appearance in the form of a painting.
and performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra
, except as noted.
Walt Disney
Walter Elias "Walt" Disney was an American film producer, director, screenwriter, voice actor, animator, entrepreneur, entertainer, international icon, and philanthropist, well-known for his influence in the field of entertainment during the 20th century. Along with his brother Roy O...
and released by Walt Disney Productions. The third feature in the Walt Disney Animated Classics series, the film consists of eight animated segments set to pieces of classical music conducted by Leopold Stokowski
Leopold Stokowski
Leopold Anthony Stokowski was a British-born, naturalised American orchestral conductor, well known for his free-hand performing style that spurned the traditional baton and for obtaining a characteristically sumptuous sound from many of the great orchestras he conducted.In America, Stokowski...
, seven of which are performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra
Philadelphia Orchestra
The Philadelphia Orchestra is a symphony orchestra based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the United States. One of the "Big Five" American orchestras, it was founded in 1900...
. Music critic and composer Deems Taylor
Deems Taylor
Joseph Deems Taylor was a U.S. composer, music critic, and promoter of classical music.-Career:Taylor initially planned to become an architect; however, despite minimal musical training he soon took to music composition. The result was a series of works for orchestra and/or voices...
introduces each segment in live-action interstitial scenes.
Disney settled on the film's concept as work neared completion on The Sorcerer's Apprentice, an elaborate Silly Symphonies
Silly Symphonies
Silly Symphonies is a series of animated short subjects, 75 in total, produced by Walt Disney Productions from 1929 to 1939, while the studio was still located at Hyperion Avenue in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles...
short designed as a comeback role for Mickey Mouse
Mickey Mouse
Mickey Mouse is a cartoon character created in 1928 by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks at The Walt Disney Studio. Mickey is an anthropomorphic black mouse and typically wears red shorts, large yellow shoes, and white gloves...
who had declined in popularity. As production costs grew higher than what it could earn, he decided to include the short in a feature-length film with other segments set to classical pieces. The soundtrack was recorded using multiple audio channels and reproduced with Fantasound
Fantasound
Fantasound was a stereophonic sound reproduction system developed by the engineers of Walt Disney studios for its 1940 animated film Fantasia, the first commercial film to be released in stereo. Fantasound led to the development of what is known today as surround sound.-Origins:Walt Disney's...
, a pioneering sound reproduction system that made Fantasia the first commercial film shown in stereophonic sound
Stereophonic sound
The term Stereophonic, commonly called stereo, sound refers to any method of sound reproduction in which an attempt is made to create an illusion of directionality and audible perspective...
.
Fantasia was first released in theatrical roadshow engagements
Roadshow theatrical release
A roadshow theatrical release was a term in the American motion picture industry for a practice in which a film opened in a limited number of theaters in large cities like Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, Dallas, and San Francisco for a specific period of time before the...
held in thirteen U.S. cities from November 13, 1940. It received mixed critical reaction, and was unable to make a profit due to World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
cutting off the profitable Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
an market and the high roadshow overhead costs from leasing theatres and installing the Fantasound equipment. The film was subsequently reissued multiple times with its original footage and audio being deleted, modified, or restored in each version. Fantasia has grossed $76.4 million in domestic revenue and is the 22nd highest-grossing film of all time in the U.S. when adjusted for inflation
Inflation adjustment
Inflation adjustment is the process of adjusting economic indicators and the prices of goods and services from different time periods to the same price level. To adjust for inflation, an indicator is divided by the inflation index...
. Walt's nephew Roy E. Disney
Roy E. Disney
Roy Edward Disney, KCSG was a longtime senior executive for The Walt Disney Company, which his father Roy Oliver Disney and his uncle Walt Disney founded. At the time of his death he was a shareholder , and served as a consultant for the company and Director Emeritus for the Board of Directors...
co-produced a sequel released in 1999 titled Fantasia 2000
Fantasia 2000
Fantasia 2000 is a 1999 American animated film produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation and released by Walt Disney Pictures. It was the 38th feature in the Walt Disney Animated Classics series and a sequel to 1940's Fantasia...
.
Program
The program as presented in the 1940 roadshow version.- Introduction: Live-action photography of members of the orchestra gathering and tuning their instruments. Deems TaylorDeems TaylorJoseph Deems Taylor was a U.S. composer, music critic, and promoter of classical music.-Career:Taylor initially planned to become an architect; however, despite minimal musical training he soon took to music composition. The result was a series of works for orchestra and/or voices...
joins the orchestra to introduce the film's program. - Toccata and Fugue in D MinorToccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565The Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565, is a piece of organ music attributed to Johann Sebastian Bach. It is one of the most famous works in the organ repertoire, and has been used in a variety of popular media ranging from film, video games, to rock music, and ringtones...
: Live-action shots of the orchestra illuminated in blue and gold, backed by superimposedSuperimposedSuperimposed is an Indie Metal band based in Manchester, England. The exact membership of the band is subject to speculation, as the number of members appearing at gigs varies, and their identity is heavily masked...
shadows. The number segues into abstractAbstract artAbstract art uses a visual language of form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an...
animated patterns, lines, shapes and cloud formations. - Nutcracker SuiteThe NutcrackerThe Nutcracker is a two-act ballet, originally choreographed by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov with a score by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The libretto is adapted from E.T.A. Hoffmann's story "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King". It was given its première at the Mariinsky Theatre in St...
: A selection of pieces from the ballet depicts the changing of the seasons from summer to autumn to winter. A variety of dances are presented with fairies, fish, flowers, mushrooms, and leaves, including "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy", "Chinese Dance", "Dance of the Flutes", "Arabian Dance", "Russian Dance" and "Waltz of the Flowers". - The Sorcerer's ApprenticeThe Sorcerer's Apprentice (Dukas)For the 2010 film produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, see The Sorcerer's Apprentice .The Sorcerer's Apprentice is a symphonic poem by the French composer Paul Dukas, written in 1896-97. Subtitled "Scherzo after a ballad by Goethe," the piece was inspired by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 1797 poem of the...
: Based on GoetheJohann Wolfgang von GoetheJohann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German writer, pictorial artist, biologist, theoretical physicist, and polymath. He is considered the supreme genius of modern German literature. His works span the fields of poetry, drama, prose, philosophy, and science. His Faust has been called the greatest long...
's 1797 poem Der Zauberlehrling. Mickey MouseMickey MouseMickey Mouse is a cartoon character created in 1928 by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks at The Walt Disney Studio. Mickey is an anthropomorphic black mouse and typically wears red shorts, large yellow shoes, and white gloves...
, an apprentice of sorcerer Yen Sid, attempts some of his master's magic tricks before knowing how to control them. - The Rite of SpringThe Rite of SpringThe Rite of Spring, original French title Le sacre du printemps , is a ballet with music by Igor Stravinsky; choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky; and concept, set design and costumes by Nicholas Roerich...
: A visual history of the Earth's beginnings is depicted to selected sections of the ballet, from the planet's formation to the first living creatures, followed by the reign and extinction of the dinosaurs. - Intermission/Meet the Soundtrack: The musicians depart and the Fantasia title card is revealed. After the intermission there is a brief jam sessionJam sessionJam sessions are often used by musicians to develop new material, find suitable arrangements, or simply as a social gathering and communal practice session. Jam sessions may be based upon existing songs or forms, may be loosely based on an agreed chord progression or chart suggested by one...
of jazz music led by the clarinettist as the orchestra members return. Then a humorously stylized demonstration of how sound is rendered on film is shown, where the sound track "character", initially a straight white line, changes into different shapes and colors based on the sounds played. - The Pastoral SymphonySymphony No. 6 (Beethoven)Symphony No. 6 in F major, Op. 68, also known as the Pastoral Symphony , is a symphony composed by Ludwig van Beethoven, and was completed in 1808...
: A mythical ancient GreekAncient GreeceAncient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...
world of centaurs, cupids, fauns and other figures from classical mythologyClassical mythologyClassical mythology or Greco-Roman mythology is the cultural reception of myths from the ancient Greeks and Romans. Along with philosophy and political thought, mythology represents one of the major survivals of classical antiquity throughout later Western culture.Classical mythology has provided...
. A gathering for a festival to honor BacchusDionysusDionysus was the god of the grape harvest, winemaking and wine, of ritual madness and ecstasy in Greek mythology. His name in Linear B tablets shows he was worshipped from c. 1500—1100 BC by Mycenean Greeks: other traces of Dionysian-type cult have been found in ancient Minoan Crete...
, the god of wine, is interrupted by ZeusZeusIn the ancient Greek religion, Zeus was the "Father of Gods and men" who ruled the Olympians of Mount Olympus as a father ruled the family. He was the god of sky and thunder in Greek mythology. His Roman counterpart is Jupiter and his Etruscan counterpart is Tinia.Zeus was the child of Cronus...
who creates a storm and throws lightning bolts at the attendees. - Dance of the HoursDance of the HoursDance of the Hours is a short ballet from Act 3, Scene 2 of the opera La Gioconda composed by Amilcare Ponchielli. It depicts the hours of the day through solo and ensemble dances. The opera was first performed in 1876 and was revised in 1880...
: A comic ballet featuring Madame Upanova and her ostriches (Morning); Hyacinth Hippo and her servants (Afternoon); Elephanchine and her bubble-blowing elephant troupe (Evening); and Ben Ali Gator and his troop of alligators (Night). The finale sees all the characters dancing together until the palace collapses. - Night on Bald MountainNight on Bald MountainNight on Bald Mountain is a composition by Modest Mussorgsky that exists in, at least, two versions—a seldom performed 1867 version or a later and very popular "fantasy for orchestra" arranged by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, A Night on the Bare Mountain , based on the vocal score of the "Dream Vision...
and Ave MariaEllens dritter GesangEllens dritter Gesang , in English: "Ellen's Third Song", was composed by Franz Schubert in 1825 as part of his Opus 52, a setting of seven songs from Walter Scott's popular epic poem The Lady of the Lake, loosely translated into German.It has become one of Schubert's most popular works under the...
: At midnight the devil Chernabog summons evil spirits and restless souls from their graves. The spirits dance and fly through the air until driven back by the sound of an Angelus bell as night fades into dawn. A chorus is heard singing Ave Maria as a line of robed monks is depicted walking with lighted torches through a forest and into the ruins of a cathedral.
Development
Walt DisneyWalt Disney
Walter Elias "Walt" Disney was an American film producer, director, screenwriter, voice actor, animator, entrepreneur, entertainer, international icon, and philanthropist, well-known for his influence in the field of entertainment during the 20th century. Along with his brother Roy O...
's cartoon character Mickey Mouse
Mickey Mouse
Mickey Mouse is a cartoon character created in 1928 by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks at The Walt Disney Studio. Mickey is an anthropomorphic black mouse and typically wears red shorts, large yellow shoes, and white gloves...
entered a period of decline in the 1930s. His popularity fell behind Donald Duck
Donald Duck
Donald Fauntleroy Duck is a cartoon character created in 1934 at Walt Disney Productions and licensed by The Walt Disney Company. Donald is an anthropomorphic white duck with a yellow-orange bill, legs, and feet. He typically wears a sailor suit with a cap and a black or red bow tie. Donald is most...
, Goofy
Goofy
Goofy is a cartoon character created in 1932 at Walt Disney Productions. Goofy is a tall, anthropomorphic dog, and typically wears a turtle neck and vest, with pants, shoes, white gloves, and a tall hat originally designed as a rumpled fedora. Goofy is a close friend of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck...
and in some opinion polls, behind Popeye
Popeye
Popeye the Sailor is a cartoon fictional character created by Elzie Crisler Segar, who has appeared in comic strips and animated cartoons in the cinema as well as on television. He first appeared in the daily King Features comic strip Thimble Theatre on January 17, 1929...
of Fleischer Studios
Fleischer Studios
Fleischer Studios, Inc., was an American corporation which originated as an Animation studio located at 1600 Broadway, New York City, New York...
. In early 1937, Disney decided to feature Mickey in a comeback Silly Symphony cartoon based on Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German writer, pictorial artist, biologist, theoretical physicist, and polymath. He is considered the supreme genius of modern German literature. His works span the fields of poetry, drama, prose, philosophy, and science. His Faust has been called the greatest long...
's ballad Der Zauberlehrling set to the music of L'apprenti sorcier
The Sorcerer's Apprentice (Dukas)
For the 2010 film produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, see The Sorcerer's Apprentice .The Sorcerer's Apprentice is a symphonic poem by the French composer Paul Dukas, written in 1896-97. Subtitled "Scherzo after a ballad by Goethe," the piece was inspired by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 1797 poem of the...
, a symphonic poem
Symphonic poem
A symphonic poem or tone poem is a piece of orchestral music in a single continuous section in which the content of a poem, a story or novel, a painting, a landscape or another source is illustrated or evoked. The term was first applied by Hungarian composer Franz Liszt to his 13 works in this vein...
by Paul Dukas
Paul Dukas
Paul Abraham Dukas was a French composer, critic, scholar and teacher. A studious man, of retiring personality, he was intensely self-critical, and he abandoned and destroyed many of his compositions...
based on the same story. He obtained the rights to use the music by the end of July, and considered using a well-known conductor to score the piece. The first choice was Arturo Toscanini
Arturo Toscanini
Arturo Toscanini was an Italian conductor. One of the most acclaimed musicians of the late 19th and 20th century, he was renowned for his intensity, his perfectionism, his ear for orchestral detail and sonority, and his photographic memory...
, but the decision was changed when Leopold Stokowski
Leopold Stokowski
Leopold Anthony Stokowski was a British-born, naturalised American orchestral conductor, well known for his free-hand performing style that spurned the traditional baton and for obtaining a characteristically sumptuous sound from many of the great orchestras he conducted.In America, Stokowski...
agreed to take on the job. Disney met Stokowski in late 1937 at Chasen's
Chasen's
Chasen's was a restaurant in West Hollywood, California that was a hangout for entertainment luminaries. Located at 9039 Beverly Boulevard near Beverly Hills, it was the site of the Academy Awards party for many years and was also known for its chili. In 1962 Liz Taylor had several orders of...
, a noted Hollywood restaurant. The conductor offered his services at no charge. He also suggested the idea of a film that illustrated various selections of classical music, to which Disney passed on. Stokowski was nonetheless "thrilled at the idea" of recording for Disney, and a synopsis of the story was given to each of the 700 studio staff, who were encouraged to give their suggestions. Disney expressed his wish to use "the finest men in the plant, from color men down to animators" on the short. Ideas surfaced to have Dopey from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937 film)
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is a 1937 American animated film based on Snow White, a German fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm. It was the first full-length cel-animated feature in motion picture history, as well as the first animated feature film produced in America, the first produced in full...
in the starring role, but Disney insisted upon using Mickey.
On the night of January 9, 1938, over 100 musicians gathered at Culver Studios
Culver Studios
The Culver Studios is a historic Colonial-styled movie studio located at 9336 W. Washington Blvd., in Culver City, California. It was the site of filming for Gone with the Wind, Citizen Kane and other classics from Hollywood’s Golden Age...
, California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
to record The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Animation for the short began on January 21, and in keeping with the project's ambitious efforts, animator Fred Moore redesigned Mickey by adding pupils to his eyes for greater expression. It became clearer to Disney when costs surpassed $125,000 that as a cartoon short, he could not make the same amount back from revenue. He reconsidered Stokowski's idea to expand the cartoon into a feature-length film, and work began on what was first titled The Concert Feature in February 1938. The idea was to incorporate The Sorcerer's Apprentice as well as "a group of separate numbers, regardless of their running time, put together in a single presentation". Disney hoped the concept would attract a wider audience into classical music. "This film is going to open this kind of music to a lot of people like myself who've walked out on this kind of stuff", he said in a story meeting. Its eventual title was declared by Stokowski, who described what was in the making a "Fantasia", pronounced "fan-ta-zee-ah". Composer, music critic and radio personality Deems Taylor
Deems Taylor
Joseph Deems Taylor was a U.S. composer, music critic, and promoter of classical music.-Career:Taylor initially planned to become an architect; however, despite minimal musical training he soon took to music composition. The result was a series of works for orchestra and/or voices...
agreed to serve as a technical advisor and to provide narrative introductions for each segment.
The musical pieces in Fantasia were selected during a three-week conference held in September 1938 among Disney, Stokowski, Taylor, and writers Joe Grant
Joe Grant
Joe Grant was a Disney artist and writer.Born in New York City, New York, he worked for The Walt Disney Company as a character designer and story artist beginning in 1933 on the Mickey Mouse short, "Mickey's Gala Premiere". He was a Disney legend. He created the Queen in Snow White and the Seven...
and Dick Huemer
Dick Huemer
Dick Huemer was an animator in the Golden Age of Animation.- Career :...
. Ideas on possible storylines were discussed with stenographers recording each conversation verbatim, after which each participant would receive a copy for review before the next day's meeting. As music selections were being considered for the film, a recording of the piece was brought in for playing amongst the group. Taylor's suggestion to include The Rite of Spring was agreed upon after Disney enquired about a piece to "build something of a prehistoric theme...with prehistoric animals". By the end of the engagements, it was decided to include the pieces seen in the final film plus Cydalise et le Chèvre-pied by Gabriel Pierné
Gabriel Pierné
Henri Constant Gabriel Pierné was a French composer, conductor, and organist.-Biography:Gabriel Pierné was born in Metz in 1863. His family moved to Paris to escape the Franco-Prussian War. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire, gaining first prizes for solfège, piano, organ, counterpoint and fugue...
and Clair de Lune
Suite bergamasque
The Suite bergamasque is one of the most famous piano suites by Claude Debussy. Debussy commenced the suite in 1890 at age 28, but he did not finish or publish it until 1905.-History:...
by Claude Debussy
Claude Debussy
Claude-Achille Debussy was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he was one of the most prominent figures working within the field of impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions...
. When Taylor returned to the studios to review the film's progress in May 1939, Clair de Lune had been removed from the program and Cydalise was replaced with Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony due to problems with fitting a story to the music, a change that Taylor had welcomed.
Design and animation
During the production of Fantasia, segments would be color-keyed scene by scene so the colors in a single shot would harmonize between proceeding and following ones. Prior to the completion of the narrative pattern of a segment, an overall color scheme was designed to the general mood of the music, and patterned to correspond with the development of the subject matter.From November 1938 to October 1939, artist Oskar Fischinger
Oskar Fischinger
Oskar Fischinger was a German-American abstract animator, filmmaker, and painter. He made over 50 short animated films, and painted c. 800 canvases, many of which are in museums, galleries and collections worldwide. Among his film works is Motion Painting No. 1 , which is now listed on the...
worked on the Toccata and Fugue. He was a pioneer in producing abstract animation set to music, but Disney felt his designs were too abstract for a mass audience. Fischinger left the studio in apparent disgust and despair, as he was not used to working in a group and with little control. Disney had plans to make the segment the first commercial 3-D film
3-D film
A 3-D film or S3D film is a motion picture that enhances the illusion of depth perception...
, with viewers being given glasses
Stereoscopy
Stereoscopy refers to a technique for creating or enhancing the illusion of depth in an image by presenting two offset images separately to the left and right eye of the viewer. Both of these 2-D offset images are then combined in the brain to give the perception of 3-D depth...
with their programs, but this idea was later abandoned.
In The Nutcracker Suite, animator Art Babbitt
Art Babbitt
Arthur Harold Babitsky , better known as Art Babbitt, was an American animator, best known for his work at The Walt Disney Company. He received over 80 awards as animation director and animator, but is most famous for creating Goofy...
is said to have credited Curly Howard
Curly Howard
Jerome Lester "Jerry" Horwitz , better known by his stage name Curly Howard, was an American comedian and vaudevillian. He is best known as a member of the American slapstick comedy team the Three Stooges, along with his older brothers Moe Howard and Shemp Howard, and actor Larry Fine...
from The Three Stooges as a guide for animating the dancing mushrooms in the Chinese Dance routine. An Arabian dancer was brought into the studios to study the movements for the goldfish in Arab Dance.
An early concept for The Rite of Spring was to extend the story from the first life forms on Earth up to the age of man, but it was curtailed by Disney to avoid religious controversy. To gain a better understanding of the history of the planet the studio received guidance from Roy Chapman Andrews
Roy Chapman Andrews
Roy Chapman Andrews was an American explorer, adventurer and naturalist who became the director of the American Museum of Natural History. He is primarily known for leading a series of expeditions through the fragmented China of the early 20th century into the Gobi Desert and Mongolia...
, the director of the American Museum of Natural History
American Museum of Natural History
The American Museum of Natural History , located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States, is one of the largest and most celebrated museums in the world...
, English biologist Julian Huxley
Julian Huxley
Sir Julian Sorell Huxley FRS was an English evolutionary biologist, humanist and internationalist. He was a proponent of natural selection, and a leading figure in the mid-twentieth century evolutionary synthesis...
, paleontologist Barnum Brown
Barnum Brown
Barnum Brown , a paleontologist born in Carbondale, Kansas, and named after the circus showman P.T. Barnum, discovered the second fossil of Tyrannosaurus rex during a career that made him one of the most famous fossil hunters working from the late Victorian era into the early 20th century.Sponsored...
, and astronomer Edwin Hubble
Edwin Hubble
Edwin Powell Hubble was an American astronomer who profoundly changed the understanding of the universe by confirming the existence of galaxies other than the Milky Way - our own galaxy...
. Animators studied comets and nebulae at the Mount Wilson Observatory
Mount Wilson Observatory
The Mount Wilson Observatory is an astronomical observatory in Los Angeles County, California, United States. The MWO is located on Mount Wilson, a 5,715 foot peak in the San Gabriel Mountains near Pasadena, northeast of Los Angeles...
and observed a herd of iguanas and a baby alligator that were brought into the studios. Stravinsky was the only surviving composer featured in Fantasia during its development. He visited the studios in December 1939 to see The Sorcerer's Apprentice, hear Stokowski's arrangement of The Rite of Spring and view the sketches, storyboards, and models for the segment.
For inspiration on the routines in Dance of the Hours, animators studied real life ballet performers including Marge Champion
Marge Champion
Marge Champion is an American dancer, choreographer, and pedagogue. In addition, she also worked in film and appeared in a number of television variety shows.-Early years:...
and Irina Baronova
Irina Baronova
Irina Mikhailovna Baronova , FRAD was a Russian ballerina who was one of the Baby Ballerinas of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, discovered by George Balanchine in Paris in the 1930s...
. Béla Lugosi
Béla Lugosi
Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó , commonly known as Bela Lugosi, was a Hungarian actor of stage and screen. He was best known for having played Count Dracula in the Broadway play and subsequent film version, as well as having starred in several of Ed Wood's low budget films in the last years of his...
, best known for his role in Dracula
Dracula (1931 film)
Dracula is a 1931 vampire-horror film directed by Tod Browning and starring Bela Lugosi as the title character. The film was produced by Universal and is based on the stage play of the same name by Hamilton Deane and John L...
, was brought in to provide reference poses for Chernabog. As animator Bill Tytla
Bill Tytla
Vladimir Peter "Bill" Tytla was one of the original Disney animators and is considered by many to be the best character animator to work during The Golden Age of Hollywood animation...
disliked the results, he used colleague Wilfred Jackson
Wilfred Jackson
Wilfred Jackson was an American animator, arranger, composer and director best known for his work on the Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphonies series of cartoons and the two segments Night on Bald Mountain and Ave Maria of Fantasia from The Walt Disney Company.Wilfred Jackson was born in Chicago,...
to pose shirtless which gave him the images he needed.
The Ave Maria segment was to provide "an emotional relief to audiences tense from the shock of Mussorgsky's malignant music and its grim visualization." Its sequence was designed for the studios' multiplane camera
Multiplane camera
The multiplane camera is a special motion picture camera used in the traditional animation process that moves a number of pieces of artwork past the camera at various speeds and at various distances from one another...
, which provides the illusion of depth to the 2-D drawings. Fantasia used more multiplane footage than Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio
Pinocchio (1940 film)
Pinocchio is a 1940 American animated film produced by Walt Disney and based on the story The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi. It is the second film in the Walt Disney Animated Classics, and it was made after the success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and was released to theaters by...
combined. Ed Gershman, who worked on the segment, described how the animation of the procession figures was so closely drawn, "a difference in the width of a pencil line was more than enough to cause jitters, not only to the animation, but to everyone connected with the sequence." Disney ordered many time-consuming and expensive reshots. A horizontal camera crane was built that could accommodate pictures four feet wide on panes of glass that were mounted on moveable stands, so they could be placed out of the way as the camera progressed through the film. Workers shot for six days and six nights, only to find the camera had the wrong lens on. They shot again for three days and nights before a small earthquake had rocked the wooden stands holding the glass panes. They restarted once more, and completed filming with one day to spare until the premiere. On the day of release, the last piece of film arrived in New York with four hours to spare.
Over 1,000 artists and technicians were used in the making of Fantasia, which features more than 500 characters.
Soundtrack recording and reproduction
Sound recording and reproduction
Sound recording and reproduction is an electrical or mechanical inscription and re-creation of sound waves, such as spoken voice, singing, instrumental music, or sound effects. The two main classes of sound recording technology are analog recording and digital recording...
techniques. "We know...that music emerging from one speaker
Monaural
Monaural or monophonic sound reproduction is single-channel. Typically there is only one microphone, one loudspeaker, or channels are fed from a common signal path...
behind the screen sounds thin, tinkly and strainy. We wanted to reproduce such beautiful masterpieces...so that audiences would feel as though they were standing at the podium with Stokowski". Recording began in April 1939 and lasted for seven weeks with the Philadelphia Orchestra, which Stokowski had directed from 1912 to 1938. The orchestra's home at the Academy of Music
Academy of Music (Philadelphia)
The Academy of Music, also known as American Academy of Music, is a concert hall and opera house located at Broad and Locust Streets in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was built in 1857 and is the oldest opera house in the United States that is still used for its original purpose...
concert hall in Philadelphia was the chosen venue because of its good acoustics
Acoustics
Acoustics is the interdisciplinary science that deals with the study of all mechanical waves in gases, liquids, and solids including vibration, sound, ultrasound and infrasound. A scientist who works in the field of acoustics is an acoustician while someone working in the field of acoustics...
. Disney paid all the expenses of the rehearsals and recordings including the wages of the musicians, stage hands, a music librarian, and the orchestra's manager at a cost close to $18,000.
In the recording sessions, 33 microphones were placed around the orchestra to capture the music which was transferred onto nine optical track
Sound-on-film
Sound-on-film refers to a class of sound film processes where the sound accompanying picture is physically recorded onto photographic film, usually, but not always, the same strip of film carrying the picture. Sound-on-film processes can either record an analog sound track or digital sound track,...
machines located in the hall's basement. Six of the sound channels focused on a different section of the orchestra that provided an audio "close-up" of instruments – cellos and basses, violins, violas, brass, woodwinds and tympani – while the seventh recorded a mixture of the first six, and the eighth captured the overall sound at a distance. The ninth channel was used to provide a click-track
Click track
A click track is a series of audio cues used to synchronize sound recordings, sometimes for synchronization to a moving image. The click track originated in early sound movies, where marks were made on the film itself to indicate exact timings for musicians to accompany the film...
function for animators to time their drawings to the music. In the 42 days of recording, exactly 483,000 feet of film was used, which was shipped to the Disney studios in Burbank, California
Burbank, California
Burbank is a city in Los Angeles County in Southern California, United States, north of downtown Los Angeles. The estimated population in 2010 was 103,340....
for tone adjustments.
Led by William E. Garity, engineers at Disney and RCA
RCA
RCA Corporation, founded as the Radio Corporation of America, was an American electronics company in existence from 1919 to 1986. The RCA trademark is currently owned by the French conglomerate Technicolor SA through RCA Trademark Management S.A., a company owned by Technicolor...
devised a pioneering audio reproduction system named Fantasound
Fantasound
Fantasound was a stereophonic sound reproduction system developed by the engineers of Walt Disney studios for its 1940 animated film Fantasia, the first commercial film to be released in stereo. Fantasound led to the development of what is known today as surround sound.-Origins:Walt Disney's...
that made Fantasia the first commercial film to be shown in stereophonic sound
Stereophonic sound
The term Stereophonic, commonly called stereo, sound refers to any method of sound reproduction in which an attempt is made to create an illusion of directionality and audible perspective...
. The nine tracks recorded at the Academy were mixed
Audio mixing (film and television)
Audio mixing for film and television is a process during the post-production stage of a moving image program by which a multitude of recorded sounds are combined into one or more channels...
onto four master tracks – three for the music, voices and special effects and the fourth for volume control of the first three. To create the illusion of moving sound, a device named the "pan pot
Panning (audio)
Panning is the spread of a sound signal into a new stereo or multi-channel sound field. A typical physical recording console pan control is a knob with a pointer which can be placed from the 8 o'clock dial position fully left to the 4 o'clock position fully right...
" was built to allow sound to progressively travel across a left, centre, and right speaker configuration using constant output fades. Additional speakers were installed around the venue to achieve a surround sound
Surround sound
Surround sound encompasses a range of techniques such as for enriching the sound reproduction quality of an audio source with audio channels reproduced via additional, discrete speakers. Surround sound is characterized by a listener location or sweet spot where the audio effects work best, and...
effect. The movement of the sound channels was initially under manual control until a more sophisticated set-up performed the task automatically, which used a mechanical relay system operated by means of notches cut into the edge of the film. Disney was an early customer for the newly-established Hewlett-Packard
Hewlett-Packard
Hewlett-Packard Company or HP is an American multinational information technology corporation headquartered in Palo Alto, California, USA that provides products, technologies, softwares, solutions and services to consumers, small- and medium-sized businesses and large enterprises, including...
company when it ordered eight of its oscillators to test its sound systems. Fantasound marked a number of innovations in its development including the click track, overdubbing and simultaneous multi-track recording. Almost a fifth of the film's budget was spent on musical recording techniques.
Roadshow with Fantasound (1940–1941)
Fantasia debuted as a roadshow theatrical releaseRoadshow theatrical release
A roadshow theatrical release was a term in the American motion picture industry for a practice in which a film opened in a limited number of theaters in large cities like Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, Dallas, and San Francisco for a specific period of time before the...
presented by the Walt Disney Company
The Walt Disney Company
The Walt Disney Company is the largest media conglomerate in the world in terms of revenue. Founded on October 16, 1923, by Walt and Roy Disney as the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio, Walt Disney Productions established itself as a leader in the American animation industry before diversifying into...
itself. A roadshow presentation consisted of a limited run, usually at a playhouse
Playhouse
Playhouse is a common Elizabethan term for a theatre, especially those built in London such as The Globe and The Rose.It is also used as the name for theatres today:- Australia :* Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre...
rather than a movie theater
Movie theater
A movie theater, cinema, movie house, picture theater, film theater is a venue, usually a building, for viewing motion pictures ....
, with reserved seats, advance sale tickets, and only two shows a day (matinee and evening). The premiere was held at the Broadway Theatre
The Broadway Theatre
The Broadway Theatre is a Broadway theatre located at 1681 Broadway in midtown-Manhattan....
in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
on November 13, 1940. The two-hour, twenty-minute film included a fifteen-minute intermission, and a program booklet
Programme (booklet)
A programme or program is a booklet available for patrons attending a live event such as theatre performances, fêtes, sports events, etc. It is a printed leaflet outlining the parts of the event scheduled to take place, principal performers and background information. In the case of theatrical...
illustrated by Gyo Fujikawa
Gyo Fujikawa
Gyo Fujikawa was an American illustrator and children's book author. A prolific creator of more than 50 books for children, her work is regularly in reprint and has been translated into 17 languages and published in 22 countries. Her most popular books, Babies and Baby Animals, have sold over 1.7...
was given to audience members. Proceeds made on the opening night went to the British War Relief Society
British War Relief Society
The British War Relief Society was a US-based humanitarian umbrella organisation dealing with the supply of non-military aid such as food, clothes, medical supplies and financial aid to people in Great Britain during the early years of the Second World War...
for the efforts in the Battle of Britain
Battle of Britain
The Battle of Britain is the name given to the World War II air campaign waged by the German Air Force against the United Kingdom during the summer and autumn of 1940...
. Fantasia ran at the Broadway Theatre for forty-nine consecutive weeks, the longest record for any sound film at the time. Its run ended on February 28, 1942 for a total of fifty-seven weeks and over a thousand screenings.
Twelve additional roadshows were held across the United States in 1941 which included a thirty-nine week run at the Carthay Circle Theatre
Carthay Circle Theatre
The Carthay Circle Theatre was one of the most famous movie palaces of Hollywood's Golden Age. It opened at 6316 San Vicente Boulevard in 1926 and was considered developer J...
in Los Angeles
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
between January and October, where Fantasia broke the long-run record at the venue in its twenty-eighth week; a record previously held by Gone with the Wind
Gone with the Wind (film)
Gone with the Wind is a 1939 American historical epic film adapted from Margaret Mitchell's Pulitzer-winning 1936 novel of the same name. It was produced by David O. Selznick and directed by Victor Fleming from a screenplay by Sidney Howard...
. The eight-week run at the Fulton Theatre
Byham Theater
The Byham Theater is a landmark building at 101 Sixth Street in the Cultural District of Downtown Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. Originally built in 1903 as The Gayety Theater, the former vaudeville house was renovated and reopened as The Byham Theater in 1990.Built in 1903 and opened...
in Pittsburgh attracted over 50,000 people, with reservations being made from cities located 100 miles from the venue. The remaining engagements were held at the Majestic Theatre
Cutler Majestic Theatre
The Cutler Majestic Theatre at Emerson College, in Boston, Massachusetts, is a 1903 "Beaux Arts" style theater, designed by the architect John Galen Howard. Originally built for theatre, one of three theaters commissioned in Boston by Eben Dyer Jordan, son of the founder of Jordan Marsh, a...
in Boston
Boston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...
, the Geary Theatre
American Conservatory Theater
American Conservatory Theater is a large non-profit theater company in San Francisco, California, that offers both classical and contemporary theater productions. A.C.T. was founded in 1965 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in conjunction with the Pittsburgh Playhouse and Carnegie Tech by theatre and...
in San Francisco, the Hanna Theatre
Hanna Theatre
The Hanna Theatre is a theater on Playhouse Square in downtown Cleveland, Ohio, United States. It is one of the original five venues built in the district, opening on March 28, 1921...
in Cleveland (nine weeks), and in Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
, Buffalo
Buffalo, New York
Buffalo is the second most populous city in the state of New York, after New York City. Located in Western New York on the eastern shores of Lake Erie and at the head of the Niagara River across from Fort Erie, Ontario, Buffalo is the seat of Erie County and the principal city of the...
, Minneapolis, Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
and Baltimore
Baltimore
Baltimore is the largest independent city in the United States and the largest city and cultural center of the US state of Maryland. The city is located in central Maryland along the tidal portion of the Patapsco River, an arm of the Chesapeake Bay. Baltimore is sometimes referred to as Baltimore...
.
As many as eighty-eight roadshows were outlined across five years, but the number of Fantasound systems that could be built were limited due to demands for radio equipment from the Department of Defense
United States Department of Defense
The United States Department of Defense is the U.S...
. The first eleven engagements had earned $1.3 million by April 1941, though the $85,000 needed for the production and installation of a single Fantasound setup, along with Disney having to lease theaters, was too costly. The onset of the Second World War had cut off the profitable European market, which formed 45% of the studio's income, contributed to the commercial failure of Fantasia in its opening release. The studio's combined average receipts from each roadshow was reported to be around $315,000.
RKO mono edition (1942, 1946)
In April 1941, Disney's usual distributor, RKO Radio Pictures acquired the distribution rights of Fantasia. All but one of the Fantasound systems were dismantled and contributed to the war effortWar effort
In politics and military planning, a war effort refers to a coordinated mobilization of society's resources—both industrial and human—towards the support of a military force...
, and Fantasia made its wide release
Wide release
Wide release is a term in the American motion picture industry for a motion picture that is playing nationally . Specifically, a movie is considered to be in wide release when it is on 600 screens or more in the United States and Canada.In the US, films holding an NC-17 rating almost never have a...
in 1942 as a double feature
Double feature
The double feature, also known as a double bill, was a motion picture industry phenomenon in which theatre managers would exhibit two films for the price of one, supplanting an earlier format in which one feature film and various short subject reels would be shown.The double feature, also known as...
with Valley of the Sun
Valley of the Sun (film)
Valley of the Sun is a 1942 film directed by George Marshall. It stars Lucille Ball and James Craig.-Cast:*Lucille Ball as Christine Larson*James Craig as Jonathan Ware*Cedric Hardwicke as Lord Warrick*Dean Jagger as Jim Sawyer...
in a mono soundtrack and its duration cut to 81 minutes. This shortened version of Fantasia omits most of the live-action interstitials as well as the entire Toccata and Fugue segment.
Disney at this point started to see Fantasia as a mistake. "We all make mistakes. Fantasia was one but it was an honest mistake. I shall now rededicate myself to my old ideals." The roadshow version continued to screen in select theatres at more popular prices for a limited time. In 1944, Taylor's narration was translated for a projected release in Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
.
In 1946 the film was reissued in what would be its standard form for the next few decades. All of the musical segments were restored, but the original narration and live-action elements were condensed. The soundtrack was in standard mono.
Stereo widescreen edition (1956, 1963)
By 1955, the original audio negatives stored on nitrate film had deteriorated, but a four-track nitrate print had survived in good condition. Using the remaining Fantasound system at the Disney studios in Burbank, CaliforniaBurbank, California
Burbank is a city in Los Angeles County in Southern California, United States, north of downtown Los Angeles. The estimated population in 2010 was 103,340....
, a three-track copy was made onto magnetic film across telephone wires to an RCA
RCA
RCA Corporation, founded as the Radio Corporation of America, was an American electronics company in existence from 1919 to 1986. The RCA trademark is currently owned by the French conglomerate Technicolor SA through RCA Trademark Management S.A., a company owned by Technicolor...
facility in Hollywood.
Fantasia was first released in Superscope
Superscope
Superscope may refer to:* Superscope, an anamorphic widescreen and full screen process Also, the name of the company that developed Superscope 235: Superscope Inc., founded in 1954 by the Tushinsky Brothers....
, a derivative of the anamorphic
Anamorphosis
Anamorphosis or anamorphism may refer to any of the following:*Anamorphosis, in art, the representation of an object as seen, for instance, altered by reflection in a mirror...
widescreen CinemaScope
CinemaScope
CinemaScope was an anamorphic lens series used for shooting wide screen movies from 1953 to 1967. Its creation in 1953, by the president of 20th Century-Fox, marked the beginning of the modern anamorphic format in both principal photography and movie projection.The anamorphic lenses theoretically...
format with stereo sound, in 1956 at the Trans-Lux Normandie Theatre in New York City. The film was released by Buena Vista
Buena Vista (Walt Disney Company)
Buena Vista is a brand name frequently used for divisions of The Walt Disney Company, whose primary studios and offices are located on Buena Vista Street in Burbank, California. It was originally created by Walt Disney in 1953 after the release of Peter Pan to distribute his film and television...
, Disney's own distribution company. An automatic motor-driven control mechanism designed by Disney engineers was coupled to a variable anamorphic lens, which allowed the picture to switch between its standard aspect ratio
Aspect ratio (image)
The aspect ratio of an image is the ratio of the width of the image to its height, expressed as two numbers separated by a colon. That is, for an x:y aspect ratio, no matter how big or small the image is, if the width is divided into x units of equal length and the height is measured using this...
of 1.33:1 to the wide ratio of 2.35:1 in 20 seconds, without a break in the film. This was achieved by placing the cues that controlled the mechanism on the fourth track, while the first three contained the film's soundtracks. Only selected parts of the animated segments were stretched, with all live-action scenes unchanged. The Superscope issue received some criticism from audience members, who complained about the cropping of the picture. Fantasia was re-released in 1963.
"The ultimate trip" (1969, 1977)
Fantasia started to make a profit from its $2.28 million budget after its 1969 reissue. The film was popular among teenagers and college students, some of whom were reported to have taken drugs while viewing the film for a psychedelic experiencePsychedelic experience
The term "psychedelic experience" is vague – characterized by polyvalence or ambiguity due to its nature – however in modern psychopharmacological science as well as philosophical, psychological, neurological, spiritual-religious and most other ideological discourses it is understood as an altered...
. Disney promoted the film using a psychedelic-styled advertising campaign. The Miami News
The Miami News
The Miami News was the dominant evening newspaper in Miami, Florida for most of the 20th century, its chief concurrent competitor being the morning-edition of The Miami Herald. The paper started publishing in May 1896 as a weekly called The Miami Metropolis. The Metropolis had become a daily paper...
advertised the film as "The old Disney favorite re-released for the new audience. The ultimate trip". Fantasia was reissued once more with simulated stereo sound, in 1977.
Digital soundtrack (1982, 1985)
For the 1982 re-release, the 1956 sound master was deemed both unusable and unsalvageable. Disney spent $1 million in March 1982 to re-record Fantasias score for a new soundtrack using Dolby digital stereo technology. Conductor Irwin KostalIrwin Kostal
Irwin Kostal was an American musical arranger of films and an orchestrator of Broadway musicals.Born in Chicago, Illinois, Kostal opted not to attend college, instead teaching himself musical arranging by studying the symphonic scores available at his local library...
directed a 125-piece orchestra for the recording. This marked the first time a motion picture's score was digitally recorded in its entirety. The live-action narrative sequences were cut and shorter voice-over introductions were recorded by Hugh Douglas. In Los Angeles, Fantasia took in $38,000 at a single theatre in three days. The 1982 version was re-released to around 400 theatres nationwide in 1985, this time with actor Tim Matheson
Tim Matheson
Tim Matheson is an American actor, director and producer. He is perhaps best known for his portrayal of the smooth-talking Eric 'Otter' Stratton in the 1978 comedy National Lampoon's Animal House and has had a variety of other well-known roles, including providing the voice of the lead character...
providing the narration.
Film restoration (1990)
Fantasia returned to 550 theatres nationwide for its 50th anniversary on October 5, 1990. The film underwent a two-year restoration process, where Disney and YCM Laboratories spent six months piecing together the original 1940 negative that had been kept in storage since 1946. A further six months were used to clean each of the film's 535,680 frames, with an untouched TechnicolorTechnicolor
Technicolor is a color motion picture process invented in 1916 and improved over several decades.It was the second major process, after Britain's Kinemacolor, and the most widely used color process in Hollywood from 1922 to 1952...
print from 1951 used for guidance on color and tone. This marked the first time since 1946 that a release of Fantasia came from the original negative, and not from a duplicate. Disney placed various technical requirements on theatres, including to present the film in its original 1.33:1 aspect ratio, masked by black borders on the side of the cinema screen. Theatres were also required to have a specific stereo sound system installed. Taylor's introductions were also restored as was the Stokowski soundtrack that was remastered from the four-track magnetic copy made in 1956. An estimated 3,000 pops and hisses were removed in the restoration process. The 1990 reissue earned $25 million in gross revenue. This was the film's last general theatrical release to date.
Audio
Disneyland RecordsDisneyland Records
Disneyland Records is the original name of the Walt Disney Company's record company.After long associations with primarily RCA Victor Records, with a few select titles on Capitol, Disneyland Records was established by the Disney studio in 1956 with its first release entitled A Child's Garden of...
released a three-LP
LP record
The LP, or long-playing microgroove record, is a format for phonograph records, an analog sound storage medium. Introduced by Columbia Records in 1948, it was soon adopted as a new standard by the entire record industry...
set of the Stokowski score in 1957 under the catalog number WDX-101. The soundtrack was remastered and issued as a two-disc CD in 1991 which attracted sales of 100,000 units and was re-released in 2006. In 1982, Buena Vista Records released a two-disc edition of the Kostal recording.
Video
Fantasia has received three home video releases. The first, featuring the 1990 restored theatrical version, was released on VHSVHS
The Video Home System is a consumer-level analog recording videocassette standard developed by Victor Company of Japan ....
and laser disc on November 1, 1991 as part of the "Walt Disney Classics
Walt Disney Classics
Walt Disney Classics was a brand name used by Walt Disney Home Video on their American, Japanese, European and Australian home video releases of Disney animated features. The first title arrived in stores on December 6, 1984...
" line. The 50-day release prompted 9.25 million advance orders for cassettes and a record 200,000 for discs, doubling the figure of the previous record. The "Deluxe Edition" package included the film, a "making of" feature, a commemorative lithograph, a 16-page booklet, a two-disc soundtrack of the Stokowski score and a certificate of authenticity signed by Roy E. Disney
Roy E. Disney
Roy Edward Disney, KCSG was a longtime senior executive for The Walt Disney Company, which his father Roy Oliver Disney and his uncle Walt Disney founded. At the time of his death he was a shareholder , and served as a consultant for the company and Director Emeritus for the Board of Directors...
, the nephew of Walt. Fantasia became the biggest-selling sell-through
Sell-through
In publishing, sell-through refers to a percentage of units shipped which are actually sold. In the case of books, the rest is returned to the publisher. Other items, such as software, are usually discounted....
cassette of all time with 14.2 million copies being purchased. The record was surpassed by Beauty and the Beast
Beauty and the Beast (1991 film)
Beauty and the Beast is a 1991 American animated fantasy film produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios and distributed by Walt Disney Pictures. The thirtieth film in the Walt Disney Animated Classics series and the third film of the Disney Renaissance period...
in December 1992. This version was also released as a DVD in 2000, outside of the U.S. in the United Kingdom and other countries, again under the "Walt Disney Classics" banner.
In November 2000, Fantasia was released on video for the second time, this time along with Fantasia 2000, on DVD
DVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
with 5.1 surround sound
5.1 surround sound
5.1 is the common name for six channel surround sound multichannel audio systems. 5.1 is now the most commonly used layout in both commercial cinemas and home theaters. It uses five full bandwidth channels and one low frequency enhancement channel . Dolby Digital, Dolby Pro Logic II, DTS, and...
. The films were issued both separately and in a three-disc set called The Fantasia Anthology. A variety of bonus features were included in the bonus disc, The Fantasia Legacy. Fantasia included restored live action scenes from the original roadshow version not seen since 1941. The 2000 UK release, however, was in the 1991 video version.
Both films were reissued again by Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment in November 2010 as a two-disc DVD set (two-disc Blu-ray in the UK) and a combined DVD and Blu-ray four-disc set that boasted 1080p
1080p
1080p is the shorthand identification for a set of HDTV high-definition video modes that are characterized by 1080 horizontal lines of resolution and progressive scan, meaning the image is not interlaced as is the case with the 1080i display standard....
high-definition video
High-definition video
High-definition video or HD video refers to any video system of higher resolution than standard-definition video, and most commonly involves display resolutions of 1,280×720 pixels or 1,920×1,080 pixels...
and 7.1 surround sound. This latest edition included additional restored live-action footage, making it the most nearly complete recreation of the original roadshow version yet attempted. In the 2000 and 2010 releases Deems Taylor's voice has been overdubbed throughout by Corey Burton
Corey Burton
Corey Burton is an American voice actor, perhaps best known as Count Dooku, Ziro the Hutt and Cad Bane in Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Brainiac in the DC animated universe and Spike Witwicky and Shockwave in the Transformers universe...
because most of the audio tracks to Taylor's restored scenes have been lost. Fantasia was withdrawn from release and returned to the "Disney Vault
Disney Vault
The "Disney Vault" is the term used by Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment for its policy of putting home video releases of Walt Disney Animation Studios's animated features on moratorium...
" moratorium
Moratorium (entertainment)
A moratorium in the home entertainment business refers to the practice of suspending the sales of DVD movies or DVD boxed sets after a certain period of time...
on April 30, 2011.
Critical response
Among those at the film's premiere was film critic Bosley CrowtherBosley Crowther
Bosley Crowther was a journalist and author who was film critic for The New York Times for 27 years. His reviews and articles helped shape the careers of actors, directors and screenwriters, though his reviews, at times, were unnecessarily mean...
of The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, who noted that "motion history was made last night...Fantasia dumps conventional formulas overboard and reveals the scope of films for imaginative excursion...Fantasia...is simply terrific." Peyton Boswell, an editor at Art Digest, called it "an aesthetic experience never to be forgotten." Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
magazine thought the premiere was "stranger and more wonderful than any of Hollywood's", and described the experience of Fantasound "as if the hearer were in the midst of the music. As the music sweeps to a climax, it froths over the proscenium arch, boils into the rear of the theatre, all but prances up and down the aisles." Dance Magazine
Dance Magazine
Dance Magazine is an "influential" American trade publication for dance, currently published by the Macfadden Communications Group. It was first published in June 1927 as The American Dancer. William Como was its editor-in-chief from 1970 to his death in 1989. Wendy Perron became its editor-in...
devoted its lead story to the film, saying that "the most extraordinary thing about Fantasia is, to a dancer or balletomane, not the miraculous musical recording, the range of color, or the fountainous integrity of the Disney collaborators, but quite simply the perfection of its dancing." Variety
Variety (magazine)
Variety is an American weekly entertainment-trade magazine founded in New York City, New York, in 1905 by Sime Silverman. With the rise of the importance of the motion-picture industry, Daily Variety, a daily edition based in Los Angeles, California, was founded by Silverman in 1933. In 1998, the...
also hailed Fantasia, calling it "a successful experiment to life the relationship from the plane of popular, mass entertainment to the higher strata of appeal to lovers of classical music."
Those who adopted a more negative view at the time of the film's release were mostly music critics who resisted the idea of presenting classical music with visual images. Composer and music critic Virgil Thomson
Virgil Thomson
Virgil Thomson was an American composer and critic. He was instrumental in the development of the "American Sound" in classical music...
praised Fantasound which he thought offered "good transmission of music", but disliked the "musical taste" of Stokowski, with exception to The Sorcerer's Apprentice and The Rite of Spring. Olin Downes
Olin Downes
Olin Downes was an American music critic.He studied piano, music theory, and music criticism in New York and Boston, and it was in those two cities that he made his career as a music critic—first with the Boston Post and then with the New York Times...
of The New York Times too hailed the quality of sound that Fantasound presented, but felt that "much of Fantasia distracted from or directly injured the scores." Film critic Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael was an American film critic who wrote for The New Yorker magazine from 1968 to 1991. Earlier in her career, her work appeared in City Lights, McCall's and The New Republic....
dismissed parts of Fantasia as "grotesquely kitsch
Kitsch
Kitsch is a form of art that is considered an inferior, tasteless copy of an extant style of art or a worthless imitation of art of recognized value. The concept is associated with the deliberate use of elements that may be thought of as cultural icons while making cheap mass-produced objects that...
y".
Fantasia holds a "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is a website devoted to reviews, information, and news of films—widely known as a film review aggregator. Its name derives from the cliché of audiences throwing tomatoes and other vegetables at a poor stage performance...
, a website which aggregates film reviews
Review aggregator
A review aggregator is a system that collects reviews of products and services . This system stores the reviews and then uses them for purposes such as: creating a website for users to view the reviews, selling information to third parties about consumer tendencies and creating databases for...
. Its consensus — "A landmark in animation and a huge influence on the medium of music video
Music video
A music video or song video is a short film integrating a song and imagery, produced for promotional or artistic purposes. Modern music videos are primarily made and used as a marketing device intended to promote the sale of music recordings...
, Disney's Fantasia is a relentlessly inventive blend of the classics with phantasmagorical images". 98% of critics gave the film a positive review based on a sample of 48 reviews, with an average score of 8.6 out of 10. Among the website's "top critics" it holds a positive rating of 86% from seven reviews. Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert is an American film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.Ebert is known for his film review column and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The...
of the Chicago Sun-Times
Chicago Sun-Times
The Chicago Sun-Times is an American daily newspaper published in Chicago, Illinois. It is the flagship paper of the Sun-Times Media Group.-History:The Chicago Sun-Times is the oldest continuously published daily newspaper in the city...
rated the film four stars out of four, and noted that throughout Fantasia, "Disney pushes the edges of the envelope".
Remarks have also been made about Fantasia not being a children's film. Reporting on the popular culture site Inside Pulse
Murtz Jaffer
Murtz Jaffer is a Canadian celebrity journalist. He hosted the television show Reality Obsessed which aired on TVTropolis and the Global Reality Channel in Canada. He is the television editor of InsidePulse.com. Jaffer currently resides in Toronto, Canada.- Career :Jaffer began his career at the...
and in The Eagle
The Eagle (newspaper)
The Eagle is a daily newspaper based out of Bryan, Texas. Centered in Brazos County, Texas, the paper is typified as serving the coverage needs of a community that includes Texas A&M University, the George Bush Presidential Library and eight counties...
newspaper, Robert Saucedo remembered to be "not the only one...having to sit through the movie as a kid fidgeting in your seat as the film delivers abstract image after abstract image", concluding that Fantasia is "for adults and very nerdy kids," while news and gossip website PopSugar
Popsugar
PopSugar.com is Sugar Publishing's celebrity news and gossip site. Founded in March 2005, the site is based in San Francisco, California.PopSugar is the flagship site for the Sugar Network, which now includes nine additional sites.-Editors:...
included Fantasia in its "10 Movies That Scared Buzz Readers as Kids" list. Paul Trandahl of the non-profit advocacy group Common Sense Media
Common Sense Media
Common Sense Media , commonly known as CSM, is a San Francisco-based non-profit organization which serves as a guide for parents that has reviews for most media types, including books, movies, video games, music, and websites, and rates them in terms of violence, sex, and profanity. The website...
, referred to both of the aforementioned criticism, saying "While there are enchanting dancing flowers, hippos, unicorns,...there are at least as many very threatening images intensified by the shadowy dark music" and that "some additional selections...are very long, slow and may not fully engage today’s kids", with the site giving the film an 'Ages 6 and Up' rating.
Awards and honors
Fantasia ranked fifth at the 1940 National Board of Review AwardsNational Board of Review Awards 1940
-Best American Films:#The Grapes of Wrath#The Great Dictator#Of Mice and Men#Our Town#Fantasia#The Long Voyage Home#Foreign Correspondent#The Biscuit Eater#Gone with the Wind#Rebecca-Winners:*Best American Film: The Grapes of Wrath...
in the Top Ten Films
National Board of Review: Top Ten Films
The following is a list of the Top-10 films chosen annually by the National Board of Review, beginning in 1929. From 1968 till 2005, 29 times the NBR chose the film that would eventually win the Academy Award for Best Picture as Best Film...
category. Disney and Stokowski won a Special Award for the film at the 1940 New York Film Critics Circle Awards. Fantasia was the subject of two Academy Honorary Award
Academy Honorary Award
The Academy Honorary Award, instituted in 1948 for the 21st Academy Awards , is given by the discretion of the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to celebrate motion picture achievements that are not covered by existing Academy Awards, although prior winners of...
s on February 26, 1942 — one for Disney, William Garity, John N. A. Hawkins and the RCA Manufacturing Company
RCA
RCA Corporation, founded as the Radio Corporation of America, was an American electronics company in existence from 1919 to 1986. The RCA trademark is currently owned by the French conglomerate Technicolor SA through RCA Trademark Management S.A., a company owned by Technicolor...
for their "outstanding contribution to the advancement of the use of sound in motion pictures through the production of Fantasia", and the other to Stokowski "and his associates for their unique achievement in the creation of a new form of visualized music in Walt Disney's production Fantasia, thereby widening the scope of the motion picture as entertainment and as an art form".
In 1990, Fantasia for preservation in the United States National Film Registry
National Film Registry
The National Film Registry is the United States National Film Preservation Board's selection of films for preservation in the Library of Congress. The Board, established by the National Film Preservation Act of 1988, was reauthorized by acts of Congress in 1992, 1996, 2005, and again in October 2008...
by the Library of Congress
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...
as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". On the 100th anniversary of cinema in 1995, the Vatican
Holy See
The Holy See is the episcopal jurisdiction of the Catholic Church in Rome, in which its Bishop is commonly known as the Pope. It is the preeminent episcopal see of the Catholic Church, forming the central government of the Church. As such, diplomatically, and in other spheres the Holy See acts and...
included Fantasia in its list of 45 "great films"
Vatican's list 45 films
In 1995, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of cinema, the Vatican compiled list 45 "greatest films" of all time. The 45 movies are divided into three categories: "Religion", "Values" and "Art".-Category "Religion":* Andrei Rublev...
made under the art category; the others being religion and values.
Fantasia is featured in three lists that rank the greatest American films as determined by the American Film Institute
American Film Institute
The American Film Institute is an independent non-profit organization created by the National Endowment for the Arts, which was established in 1967 when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act...
. Fantasia ranked #58 in 100 Years... 100 Movies
AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies
The first of the AFI 100 Years… series of cinematic milestones, AFI's 100 Years…100 Movies is a list of the 100 best American movies, as determined by the American Film Institute from a poll of more than 1,500 artists and leaders in the film industry who chose from a list of 400 nominated movies...
in 1998 before it was dropped from its 10th Anniversary revision in 2007, though it was nominated for inclusion. The 10 Top 10
AFI's 10 Top 10
AFI's 10 Top 10 honors the ten greatest American films in ten classic film genres. Presented by the American Film Institute , the lists were unveiled on a television special broadcast by CBS on June 17, 2008....
list formed in 2008 placed Fantasia fifth under Animation.
Controversies
In the late 1960s, four short scenes from The Pastoral Symphony were removed that depicted two characters in a racially stereotyped manner. A black female centaur called Sunflower was depicted polishing the hooves of a white centaur, and a second named Otika appeared briefly during the procession scenes with Bacchus and his followers. According to Disney archivist David Smith, the sequence was aired uncut on television in 1966 before the edits were made for the film's 1969 theatrical reissue. John CarnochanJohn Carnochan
John Carnochan is a film editor. He is noted particularly for editing animated films, including the Disney Company's The Little Mermaid , Beauty and the Beast , and the The Lion King ....
, the editor responsible for the change in the 1991 video release, said "It's sort of appalling to me that these stereotypes were ever put in". Film critic Roger Ebert commented on the edit – "While the original film should, of course, be preserved for historical purposes, there is no need for the general release version to perpetrate racist stereotypes in a film designed primarily for children." The edits have been in place in all subsequent theatrical and home video reissues.
In May 1992, the Philadelphia Orchestra filed a lawsuit against The Walt Disney Company and Buena Vista Home Video. The orchestra maintained that as a co-creator of Fantasia, the group was entitled to half of the estimated $120 million in profits from video and laser disc sales. The orchestra dropped its case in 1994 when the two parties reached an undisclosed settlement out of court. British music publisher Boosey & Hawkes
Boosey & Hawkes
Boosey & Hawkes is a British music publisher purported to be the largest specialist classical music publisher in the world. Until 2003, it was also a major manufacturer of brass, string and wind musical instruments....
filed a further lawsuit in 1993, contending that Disney did not have the rights to distribute The Rite of Spring in the 1991 VHS home video release because the permission granted to Disney by Stravinsky in 1940 was only in the context of a film to be shown in theaters. The United States district court backed Boosey & Hawkes's case in 1996, but the Second Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the ruling in 1998, stating that Disney's original "license for motion picture rights extends to video format distribution."
Additional material
Disney had wanted Fantasia to be an ongoing project, with a new edition being released every few years. His plan was to substitute one of the original segments with a new one as it was complete, so the viewer would always see a new version of the film. From January to August 1941, story material was developed based on additional pieces, including Ride of the ValkyriesRide of the Valkyries
The Ride of the Valkyries is the popular term for the beginning of Act III of Die Walküre, the second of the four operas by Richard Wagner that comprise Der Ring des Nibelungen. The main theme of the Ride, the leitmotif labelled Walkürenritt, was first written down by the composer on 23 July 1851...
by Richard Wagner
Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor, theatre director, philosopher, music theorist, poet, essayist and writer primarily known for his operas...
, The Swan of Tuonela by Jean Sibelius
Jean Sibelius
Jean Sibelius was a Finnish composer of the later Romantic period whose music played an important role in the formation of the Finnish national identity. His mastery of the orchestra has been described as "prodigious."...
, Invitation to the Dance
Invitation to the Dance (Weber)
Invitation to the Dance , Op. 65, J. 260, is a piano piece in rondo form written by Carl Maria von Weber in 1819. It is also well known in the 1841 orchestration by Hector Berlioz...
by Carl Maria von Weber
Carl Maria von Weber
Carl Maria Friedrich Ernst von Weber was a German composer, conductor, pianist, guitarist and critic, one of the first significant composers of the Romantic school....
, Flight of the Bumblebee
Flight of the Bumblebee
"Flight of the Bumblebee" is an orchestral interlude written by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov for his opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan, composed in 1899–1900. The piece closes Act III, Tableau 1, during which the magic Swan-Bird changes Prince Gvidon Saltanovich into an insect so that he can fly away to...
by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov was a Russian composer, and a member of the group of composers known as The Five.The Five, also known as The Mighty Handful or The Mighty Coterie, refers to a circle of composers who met in Saint Petersburg, Russia, in the years 1856–1870: Mily Balakirev , César...
, which was later adapted into the Bumble Boogie segment in Melody Time
Melody Time
Melody Time is a 1948 animated feature produced by Walt Disney and released to theatres by RKO Radio Pictures on May 27, 1948. Made up of several sequences set to popular music and folk music, the film is, like Make Mine Music before it, the popular music version of Fantasia Melody Time is a 1948...
(1948), and there was even consideration for a segment inspired by the Polka and Fugue from Schwanda the Bagpiper by Jaromír Weinberger
Jaromír Weinberger
- Biography :Weinberger was born in Prague, from a family of Jewish origin. He heard Czech folksongs from time spent at his grandparents' farm as a youth. He started to play the piano at age 5, and was composing and conducting by age 10. He began musical studies with Jaroslav Křička. Later teachers...
. The film's disappointing initial box office performance and the advent of World War II brought an end to these plans. Taylor had prepared introductions for The Firebird
The Firebird
The Firebird is a 1910 ballet created by the composer Igor Stravinsky and choreographer Michel Fokine. The ballet is based on Russian folk tales of the magical glowing bird of the same name that is both a blessing and a curse to its captor....
by Stravinsky, La Mer
La Mer (Debussy)
La mer, trois esquisses symphoniques pour orchestre , or simply La mer , is an orchestral composition by the French composer Claude Debussy. It was started in 1903 in France and completed in 1905 on the English Channel coast in Eastbourne...
by Claude Debussy
Claude Debussy
Claude-Achille Debussy was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he was one of the most prominent figures working within the field of impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions...
, Adventures in a Perambulator by John Alden Carpenter
John Alden Carpenter
John Alden Carpenter was an American composer.-Biography:Born in Park Ridge, Illinois, Carpenter was raised in a musical household. He was educated at Harvard University, where he studied under John Knowles Paine, and was president of the Glee Club and wrote music for the Hasty-Pudding Club...
, Don Quixote
Don Quixote (Strauss)
Don Quixote, Op. 35, is a composition by Richard Strauss for cello, viola and large orchestra. Subtitled Phantastische Variationen über ein Thema ritterlichen Charakters , the work is based on the novel Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes. Strauss composed this work in Munich in 1897...
by Richard Strauss
Richard Strauss
Richard Georg Strauss was a leading German composer of the late Romantic and early modern eras. He is known for his operas, which include Der Rosenkavalier and Salome; his Lieder, especially his Four Last Songs; and his tone poems and orchestral works, such as Death and Transfiguration, Till...
, and Pictures at an Exhibition
Pictures at an Exhibition
Pictures at an Exhibition is a suite in ten movements composed for piano by Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky in 1874.The suite is Mussorgsky's most famous piano composition, and has become a showpiece for virtuoso pianists...
by Mussorgsky "to have them for the future in case we decided to make any one of them".
Clair de Lune was another segment that was part of the film's original program. After being completely animated, it was cut out of the final film to shorten its already long running time. The segment featured two egrets flying through the Everglades
Everglades
The Everglades are subtropical wetlands in the southern portion of the U.S. state of Florida, comprising the southern half of a large watershed. The system begins near Orlando with the Kissimmee River, which discharges into the vast but shallow Lake Okeechobee...
on a moonlit night. The sequence was later edited and re-scored for the Blue Bayou segment in Make Mine Music
Make Mine Music
Make Mine Music is an animated feature produced by Walt Disney and released to theatres by RKO Radio Pictures on August 15, 1946. It is the eighth animated feature in the Walt Disney Animated Classics series....
(1946). A workprint
Workprint
A workprint is a rough version of a motion picture, used by the film editor during the editing process. Such copies generally contain original recorded sound that will later be re-dubbed, stock footage as placeholders for missing shots or special effects, and animation tests for in-production...
of the original was discovered and Clair de Lune was restored in 1992, complete with the original soundtrack of Stokowski with the Philadelphia Orchestra. It was included as a bonus feature in The Fantasia Anthology DVD in 2000.
Sequel
In 1980, the Los Angeles TimesLos Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
reported that animators Woolie Reitherman and Mel Shaw had begun work on Musicana, "an ambitious concept mixing jazz, classical music, myths, modern art and more, following the old Fantasia format." Animation historian Charles Solomon wrote that development took place between 1982 and 1983, which combined "ethnic tales from around the world with the music of the various countries". Proposed segments for the film included a battle between an ice god and a sun goddess set to Finlandia
Finlandia
Finlandia is a symphonic poem by Jean Sibelius.Finlandia may also refer to:* Finlandia Hymn, a section of the Sibelius symphonic poem Finlandia* Finlandia University, a private university located in Hancock, Michigan, USA...
by Sibelius, one set in the Andes
Andes
The Andes is the world's longest continental mountain range. It is a continual range of highlands along the western coast of South America. This range is about long, about to wide , and of an average height of about .Along its length, the Andes is split into several ranges, which are separated...
to the songs of Yma Sumac
Yma Súmac
Yma Sumac was a noted Peruvian soprano. In the 1950s, she was one of the most famous proponents of exotica music. She became an international success based on her extreme vocal range, which was said to be "well over four octaves" and was sometimes claimed to span even five octaves at her peak.Yma...
, and another featuring caricatures of Louis Armstrong
Louis Armstrong
Louis Armstrong , nicknamed Satchmo or Pops, was an American jazz trumpeter and singer from New Orleans, Louisiana....
and Ella Fitzgerald
Ella Fitzgerald
Ella Jane Fitzgerald , also known as the "First Lady of Song" and "Lady Ella," was an American jazz and song vocalist...
. The project was shelved in favor of Mickey's Christmas Carol
Mickey's Christmas Carol
Mickey's Christmas Carol is a 1983 American animated short film produced by Walt Disney Productions and distributed by Buena Vista Distribution Company. It was directed and produced by Burny Mattinson...
.
Roy E. Disney
Roy E. Disney
Roy Edward Disney, KCSG was a longtime senior executive for The Walt Disney Company, which his father Roy Oliver Disney and his uncle Walt Disney founded. At the time of his death he was a shareholder , and served as a consultant for the company and Director Emeritus for the Board of Directors...
, the nephew of Walt, co-produced Fantasia 2000
Fantasia 2000
Fantasia 2000 is a 1999 American animated film produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation and released by Walt Disney Pictures. It was the 38th feature in the Walt Disney Animated Classics series and a sequel to 1940's Fantasia...
which entered production in 1990 and features seven new segments performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is an American orchestra based in Chicago, Illinois. It is one of the five American orchestras commonly referred to as the "Big Five". Founded in 1891, the Symphony makes its home at Orchestra Hall in Chicago and plays a summer season at the Ravinia Festival...
with conductor James Levine
James Levine
James Lawrence Levine is an American conductor and pianist. He is currently the music director of the Metropolitan Opera and former music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Levine's first performance conducting the Metropolitan Opera was on June 5, 1971, and as of May 2011 he has...
. The Sorcerer's Apprentice is the only segment retained from the original film. Fantasia 2000 premiered at Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall is a concert venue in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, United States, located at 881 Seventh Avenue, occupying the east stretch of Seventh Avenue between West 56th Street and West 57th Street, two blocks south of Central Park....
on December 17, 1999 as part of a five-city live concert tour, followed by a four-month engagement in IMAX
IMAX
IMAX is a motion picture film format and a set of proprietary cinema projection standards created by the Canadian company IMAX Corporation. IMAX has the capacity to record and display images of far greater size and resolution than conventional film systems...
cinemas and a wide release in regular theatres, in 2000.
Parodies and spin-offs
Fantasia is parodied in A Corny ConcertoA Corny Concerto
A Corny Concerto is an American animated cartoon short produced by Leon Schlesinger Productions and distributed by Warner Bros. It was directed by Bob Clampett, written by Frank Tashlin, animated by Robert McKimson and released as part of the Merrie Melodies series on September 25, 1943...
, a Warner Bros.
Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc., also known as Warner Bros. Pictures or simply Warner Bros. , is an American producer of film and television entertainment.One of the major film studios, it is a subsidiary of Time Warner, with its headquarters in Burbank,...
cartoon from 1943 of the Merrie Melodies
Merrie Melodies
Merrie Melodies is the name of a series of animated cartoons distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures between 1931 and 1969.Originally produced by Harman-Ising Pictures, Merrie Melodies were produced by Leon Schlesinger Productions from 1933 to 1944. Schlesinger sold his studio to Warner Bros. in 1944,...
series. The short features Elmer Fudd
Elmer Fudd
Elmer J. Fudd/Egghead is a fictional cartoon character and one of the most famous Looney Tunes characters, and the de facto archenemy of Bugs Bunny. He has one of the more disputed origins in the Warner Bros. cartoon pantheon . His aim is to hunt Bugs, but he usually ends up seriously injuring...
in the role of Taylor, wearing his styled eyeglasses, who introduces two segments set to pieces by Johann Strauss
Johann Strauss II
Johann Strauss II , also known as Johann Baptist Strauss or Johann Strauss, Jr., the Younger, or the Son , was an Austrian composer of light music, particularly dance music and operettas. He composed over 500 waltzes, polkas, quadrilles, and other types of dance music, as well as several operettas...
. In 1976, Italian animator Bruno Bozzetto
Bruno Bozzetto
Bruno Bozzetto is an Italian cartoon animator, creator of many short pieces, mainly of a political or satirical nature. He created his first animated short "Tapum! the weapons' story" in 1958 at the age of 20. His most famous character, a hapless little man named "Signor Rossi" Bruno Bozzetto...
produced Allegro Non Troppo
Allegro non troppo
Allegro Non Troppo is a 1976 Italian animated film directed by Bruno Bozzetto. Featuring six pieces of classical music, the film is a parody of Disney's Fantasia, though possibly more of a challenge to Fantasia. The classical pieces are set to color animation, ranging from comedy to deep tragedy...
, a feature-length parody of Fantasia. Walt Disney Pictures
Walt Disney Pictures
Walt Disney Pictures is an American film studio owned by The Walt Disney Company. Walt Disney Pictures and Television, a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Studios and the main production company for live-action feature films within the Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group, based at the Walt Disney...
used the story of The Sorcerer's Apprentice as a basis for its eponymous fantasy-adventure film
The Sorcerer's Apprentice (2010 film)
The Sorcerer's Apprentice is a 2010 fantasy adventure film produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, directed by Jon Turteltaub, and distributed by Walt Disney Pictures, the team behind the National Treasure franchise...
in 2010.
Theme parks
The Sorcerer's Hat
The Sorcerer's Hat is the icon of Disney's Hollywood Studios, one of four theme parks at Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Florida. It replaced the Earful Tower as the theme park's icon in marketing material...
is the icon of Disney's Hollywood Studios
Disney's Hollywood Studios
Disney's Hollywood Studios is a theme park at the Walt Disney World Resort. Spanning 135 acres in size, its theme is show business, drawing inspiration from the heyday of Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s...
, one of the four theme parks located at Walt Disney World Resort
Walt Disney World Resort
Walt Disney World Resort , is the world's most-visited entertaimental resort. Located in Lake Buena Vista, Florida ; approximately southwest of Orlando, Florida, United States, the resort covers an area of and includes four theme parks, two water parks, 23 on-site themed resort hotels Walt...
. The structure is of the magic hat from The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Also located at the resort is Fantasia Gardens
Fantasia Gardens
The Fantasia Gardens Miniature Golf complex is a miniature golf course located at the Walt Disney World Resort. Located across from the Swan and Dolphin resorts, it offers two 18-hole courses themed after the movie Fantasia. It is opened from 10am - 11pm daily...
, a miniature golf course that integrates characters and objects from the film in each hole. The fireworks and water show Fantasmic!
Fantasmic!
Fantasmic! is a Disney nighttime show at Disneyland in the Disneyland Resort, Disney's Hollywood Studios in Walt Disney World and Tokyo DisneySea in Tokyo Disney Resort. The show features fireworks, live actors, water effects, fire, music, several boats, decorated rafts and projections onto large...
features scenes from The Sorcerer's Apprentice and other Fantasia segments on water projection screens, and involves the plot of Mickey as the apprentice doing battle with the Disney Villains.
Video games
In 1991, a side-scrolling eponymous video gameFantasia (video game)
Fantasia is the title of a side-scrolling video game developed by Infogrames and produced by Sega for its own Mega Drive/Genesis system. The game was loosely based on the popular Walt Disney musical film of the same name...
developed by Infogrames
Infogrames
Infogrames Entertainment SA was an international French holding company headquartered in Paris, France. It was the owner of Atari, Inc., headquartered in New York City, U.S. and Atari Europe. It was founded in 1983 by Bruno Bonnell and Christophe Sapet using the proceeds from an introductory...
was released for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis
Sega Mega Drive
The Sega Genesis is a fourth-generation video game console developed and produced by Sega. It was originally released in Japan in 1988 as , then in North America in 1989 as Sega Genesis, and in Europe, Australia and other PAL regions in 1990 as Mega Drive. The reason for the two names is that...
system. The player controls Mickey Mouse, who must find missing musical notes scattered across four elemental worlds based upon the film's segments.
The Disney/Square Enix
Square Enix
is a Japanese video game and publishing company best known for its console role-playing game franchises, which include the Final Fantasy series, the Dragon Quest series, and the action-RPG Kingdom Hearts series...
crossover game series Kingdom Hearts features Chernabog as a boss in the first installment. The Night on Bald Mountain piece is played during the fight. In Kingdom Hearts II
Kingdom Hearts II
is an action role-playing game developed by Square Enix and published by Buena Vista Games and Square Enix in 2005 for the Sony PlayStation 2 video game console...
, Yen Sid is given a speaking role and is voiced in English by Corey Burton. Yen Sid also appears in Epic Mickey
Epic Mickey
Epic Mickey is a 2010 Mickey Mouse action-adventure platforming video game designed by Warren Spector and developed by Junction Point Studios for the Wii console...
, a game released in 2010 for the Wii
Wii
The Wii is a home video game console released by Nintendo on November 19, 2006. As a seventh-generation console, the Wii primarily competes with Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3. Nintendo states that its console targets a broader demographic than that of the two others...
console, and Chernabog makes a cameo appearance in the form of a painting.
Credits
Musical score conducted by Leopold StokowskiLeopold Stokowski
Leopold Anthony Stokowski was a British-born, naturalised American orchestral conductor, well known for his free-hand performing style that spurned the traditional baton and for obtaining a characteristically sumptuous sound from many of the great orchestras he conducted.In America, Stokowski...
and performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra
Philadelphia Orchestra
The Philadelphia Orchestra is a symphony orchestra based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the United States. One of the "Big Five" American orchestras, it was founded in 1900...
, except as noted.
| Segment | Personnel |
|---|---|
| Live-action scenes | |
| Toccata and Fugue in D Minor | |
| Nutcracker Suite | |
| The Sorcerer's Apprentice | |
| The Rite of Spring | |
| Intermission/Meet the Soundtrack | |
| The Pastoral Symphony | |
| Dance of the Hours | |
| Night on Bald Mountain and Ave Maria |