Word: fantasia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...high culture and if he had been encumbered with such longings the barnyard vitality of early Disney would have been lost. When fine-art quotes appear in Disney's films, they are either apocalyptic and expressionist or else genteel: little in between. Their storehouse is, of course, Fantasia (1940). The cold crags and demon-infested clouds of the Night on Bald Mountain sequence refer straight back to the hellscapes of late-medieval religious art. Like many another image in Fantasia, it is also filtered through Art Deco, the popular style of the '30s. Using Deco idioms...
...appearance of abstract art in Disney's work was fleeting. There was the Toccata and Fugue in Fantasia, with its pastel runs of animated Kandinsky. Now and then the studio would come up with an image that, while not really abstract, seems a distant reference to early European constructivism like the gush of music drawn as prismatic blocks issuing from the mouth of a dancing horn in Make Mine Music (1946). And, more distantly still, some of the Disney fantasies do run parallel to themes of high art, without displaying any awareness of their patrician Doppelgängers...
Midler has been compared to everything from Dorothy Parker in drag to the entire chorus line of beruffled hippos in Fantasia, and she shows traces of a dozen other singers: Streisand's nose and extraordinary head tones, Garland's saturation emotions and devoted homosexual following, Fanny Brice's waifish vulnerability, Joplin's floozy eleganza in attire and her tendency to egg audiences on to hysteria. But Miss M's secret is that she is not really like those others: she is acting like them. "I just try to have a good time...
...mind-tripping Fantasia, however, has quietly played to a new "youth" audience for several years...
They were dream works, not in the pressagent's sense of the word, but in Jung's. Snow White's flight through a forest that seemed to come alive and clutch at her; the vision of the creation of the world in Fantasia; Pinocchio's search for his father, taking him through the grotesque amusement park on the island of lost boys and into the belly of a whale-these sequences strummed psychic chords that live-action comedies like The Barefoot Executive (1971) do not aspire to touch...