Word: fantasias
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...though Disney's toddling cannot keep pace with the giant strides of Ludwig van Beethoven, Fantasia as a whole leaves its audience gasping. Critics may deplore Disney's lapses of taste, but he trips, Mickey-like, into an art form that immortals from Aeschylus to Richard Wagner have always dreamed...
Containing everything from the Pierian well water of Johann Sebastian Bach to the violet-bordered stream of Schubert's Ave Maria, Fantasia is a long succession of very large orders. Some of these orders (the flower, fish and mushroom dances of the Nutcracker Suite, the hulking, saurian epic of Stravinsky's Rite, the eerie, fantastic Night on Bald Mountain) are so beautifully filled that they may leave callous critics whispering incredulously to themselves. Others (Mickey's Sorcerer's Apprentice, the hilarious ostrich and hippopotamus ballets) set a new high in Disney animal muggery. Others (the wave...
Mickey Began It. The idea for Fantasia had been germinating in Disney's mild-looking head for several years. Even before he did Snow White he had a vague notion of some day doing a serious opera in animovie style. As early as 1929 he raided the high-brow symphonic repertory to make Saint-Saëns' bone-rattling Danse Macabre into a Silly Symphony. But the idea did not really sprout until early in 1938, when Leopold Stokowski, on a visit to Hollywood, begged Disney to let him conduct the music for The Sorcerer's Apprentice...
Keeping his 1,200 artists, animators, sound engineers and helpers mum, Walt Disney started work, soon got the machinery of his new $3,000,000 Burbank, Calif, studio rolling on Fantasia. Deciding to go the whole artistic hog, they picked the highest of high-brow classical music. To do right by this music, the old mouse opera comedy was not enough. The Disney studio went high-brow wholesale, and Disney technicians racked their brains for stuff that would startle and awe rather than tickle the audience...
...Illustrator Kay Nielson (East of the Sun and West of the Moon) to design graveyards and ghosts, ended with a Walpurgis nightmare calculated to turn little children's hair white. But Illustrator Nielsen's jagged scenes, plus a new high in animation technique, made it by far Fantasia's best act. As Fantasia took shape, a whole new troupe of Disney comic characters appeared: Hop Low, the self-thwarting little mushroom, who tries to do the Chinese Dance from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite, but can't keep up with the big mushrooms; Ben Ali Gator...