Word: fantasias
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...Fantasia...
...along comes Steve Krantz, producer of Fritz and likewise of this sequel - as squalid and witless an assembly of animation as could be imagined. By comparison, the Bakshi version looks like Fantasia. To escape the shrill accusations of his wife, Fritz drifts off into cannabis reveries where his libido can run unchecked and where his paranoia eventually assumes control. He idles back to the high-stepping 1930s, then works his way up to the present and a visit with a Bowery bum, whom he accidentally immolates. In the film's most elaborate episode, he eases himself off into...
...John Birch Society, and if that's the case you might as well see the movie because it's sort of fun. But don't be fooled by all the hype: It's not all that great and if you're going for the art it's no Fantasia...
...point at which the flow reversed and Disney's iconography began affecting high art can be identified almost to the frame: it happened when, in Fantasia, Mickey Mouse clambered up on the (real) podium and shook hands with the (real) conductor Leopold Stokowski. High and low art collapsed into one another. It was inevitably Mickey who made Stokowski more of a star by the handshake, not the other way round. The gesture made Pop art possible and, after a gestation of nearly 20 years, it duly arrived in a flurry of mice: Roy Lichtenstein is said to have happened...
...within the natural bounds of his style, especially up to the late '30s and his masterpiece Pinocchio, Disney repeatedly pulled sequences and single images that seem destined to survive as long as the history of cinema itself: the hilarious ballet of hippos, crocodiles and bemused ostrich in Fantasia, the terrifying image of little Jiminy Cricket perched on the eyeball of Monstro the Whale in Pinocchio, the sight of Dopey with diamonds screwed into his face like monocles, whirling his multiplied eyes within their facets. Such things are the real stuff, and any smart five-year-old can distinguish them...