Word: fantasia
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...Bringing Fantasia back to life has been a long slog for the Roy Disney team. They considered including jazz, world music, the Beatles, Andrew Lloyd Webber; finally they stuck with the Old Masters. Among the candidates (some of which had been proposed for Walt's "organic" Fantasia): Flight of the Bumblebee; the Mozart piece that incorporates Twinkle Twinkle Little Star; Brahms' First Symphony; Dvorak's Ninth; even Beethoven's Ninth. Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini had a nifty concept (a nightmare and a dream struggling for a sleeping child's soul), but it fell through...
Back in that once upon a time, Walt Disney made miracles. In 1928 he presented a primitive Mickey Mouse in Steamboat Willie. By 1940 he'd brought sophisticated color and sound to cartoons, extended them to feature length and, with Fantasia, boldly merged classical music and abstract images. Those were revolutionary days for animation; more was conceived in those 12 years than in the 60 that followed. Fantasia 2000 may look a bit timid by comparison, but it provides some fine artists the chance to stretch and frolic, even as it reminds today's audiences of animation's limitless borders...
Musically speaking, Fantasia 2000 is a dumbed-down dud. The performances, mostly by James Levine and the Chicago Symphony, are competent but characterless. The selections are all abridged in one way or another, and some are mangled virtually beyond recognition. The first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, which normally takes between seven and eight minutes, here is over in less than three. The sole exception is the uncut version of The Sorcerer's Apprentice extracted from the original Fantasia, in which Leopold Stokowski hypnotized an anonymous band of Hollywood studio musicians into sounding just like the Philadelphia Orchestra...
...choice of music, it's as safe as a Home Improvement rerun, especially by comparison with Walt Disney's daring decision to include Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring in Fantasia just 27 years after its cataclysmic Paris premiere triggered a near riot. Couldn't the makers of this ultracautious sequel have found anything more adventurous to animate than Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue (yawn) or Shostakovich's Second Piano Concerto, a pleasant student piece written in 1957 for the composer's teenage...
...well be that the corporate conservatism of Fantasia 2000 accurately reflects postmodern American taste, and certainly some of the kids who see it will be hearing classical music for the first time. But it's hard to imagine their falling in love with Beethoven as a result...