Word: fantasias
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This long sequence is a blend of smartly staged action and mechanical and photographic effects as spectacular as anyone has achieved. It simply blows one away. The trip into the black hole that follows owes too much to 2001, but there are some amusing visual references to Fantasia, which partly compensate. It is good to see the Disney craftsmen doing what they do best on such a grand and risky scale. If one has time for only one space opera this season, this is the one to choose. - Richard Schickel
...spirit of Tenniel also hovers over Frogs and the Ballet (Gambit; $9.95). Ever since Disney presented a group of pirouetting alligators in Fantasia, reptiles have been as comfortable onstage as they are in the swamp. The Muppets are further evidence, bolstered by Donald Elliott's informative guidebook and Clinton Arrowood's corps d'amphibians.' In fact, the text is a straightforward introduction to the dance. But somehow, when the steps are illustrated by frogs in tutus and tights, an air of lunacy pervades the proceedings and the young reader is suddenly an attendant at the wedding...
...this compilation, Jones has cut pieces from 16 Road Runners together into a seamless super-chase. It is reason enough to attend this movie, but there are others. Among them are two classic Jones-supervised shorts, What's Opera, Doc?, a send-up of Walt Disney's Fantasia in which Bugs Bunny makes a ravishing Brunhilde opposite Elmer Fudd's stalwart Wagnerian hero. In Duck Amuck, Daffy Duck, whose specialty is egocentricity, suffers the indignity of having his costumes and backgrounds constantly redrawn by a demented animator whose hand and brush become Daffy's antagonist...
Librettist Mitchell, 46, is known as an anti-elitist who believes art should be "useful" to a broad public. Schat, 44, a political radical, was one of the collaborators on the 1969 Dutch opera Reconstruction, a political fantasia on Don Giovanni in which the Don represented imperialism and the Commendatore turned out to be Che Guevara. Thus it comes as no surprise that Houdini is suffused with a romantic-and at times sentimental-populism. In the final scene, Houdini appears from beyond the grave with the message that "there is no heaven but the people/ Let the people...
...this point Shaw is explicit. In his preface to the play, he calls Heartbreak House "cultured, leisured Europe before the war." Elsewhere he dodges the issue of what it all means: "How should I know? I am only the author." Shaw subtitled the play "A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes" as homage to Anton Chekhov, whose Three Sisters appeared earlier this semester at the Loeb. The imprint of Chekhov's style is apparent in Shaw's reliance on dialogue, rather than physical action or plot development, to express characterization and the atmosphere of pre-war England...