Word: fantasias
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Wrote Pundit Dorothy Thompson last week of Walt Disney's Fantasia...
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...
Long before Fantasia was finished, expenses began to mount, and fellow Hollywoodians began to whisper again about "Disney's Folly." With $200,000 spent on Stokowski's fancy recordings, and a technical bill that overtops Snow White's, the total figure for the production amounted to $2.250.000. Because Engineer Garity's new sound mechanism is so complicated and expensive, only twelve theatres at a time will be equipped to show Fantasia, and RCA sound-equipment manufacturers figure that it will take several years before small-town cinema houses can get the gadgets to perform...
...what he had had in mind all along in his Rite of Spring. Musicians and sound engineers who came to hear Soundman Garity's gadgets perform found that such recording had never before been even approached. Music lovers crowed that more ears would be saved for Beethoven by Fantasia than by all the symphonic lecture-recitalists in the U. S. The New York Academy of Sciences asked for a private showing of the Rite of Spring because they thought its dinosaurs better science than whole museum-loads of fossils and taxidermy...