Word: walts
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...today who his heroes were, he names two: Thomas Edison and Walt Disney. The former was a brilliant innovator and a horrid businessman, the latter a good innovator and a great businessman. It wasn't Disney's movies that impressed Bezos but his theme parks. He went to Disney World six times. "The thing that always amazed me was how powerful his vision was," Bezos says. "He knew exactly what he wanted to build and teamed up with a bunch of really smart people and built it. Everyone thought it wouldn't work, and he had to persuade the banks...
...side and achieved critical success. Toy Story is the first animated feature to ever be nominated in the Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen category and it received numerous nominations and awards in the areas of animation, music, direction, special effects, and more. As Peter Scheider, president of Walt Disney Studios explains, "Disney and Pixar have been partners for over ten years now and the relationship is a seamless one. Clearly they are an amazing animation studio with a brilliant technique and great instincts for storytelling I think it's been an amazing partnership of sharing on both sides...
Bringing Fantasia back to life has been a long slog for the Roy Disney team. They considered including jazz, world music, the Beatles, Andrew Lloyd Webber; finally they stuck with the Old Masters. Among the candidates (some of which had been proposed for Walt's "organic" Fantasia): Flight of the Bumblebee; the Mozart piece that incorporates Twinkle Twinkle Little Star; Brahms' First Symphony; Dvorak's Ninth; even Beethoven's Ninth. Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini had a nifty concept (a nightmare and a dream struggling for a sleeping child's soul), but it fell through...
Back in that once upon a time, Walt Disney made miracles. In 1928 he presented a primitive Mickey Mouse in Steamboat Willie. By 1940 he'd brought sophisticated color and sound to cartoons, extended them to feature length and, with Fantasia, boldly merged classical music and abstract images. Those were revolutionary days for animation; more was conceived in those 12 years than in the 60 that followed. Fantasia 2000 may look a bit timid by comparison, but it provides some fine artists the chance to stretch and frolic, even as it reminds today's audiences of animation's limitless borders...
...choice of music, it's as safe as a Home Improvement rerun, especially by comparison with Walt Disney's daring decision to include Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring in Fantasia just 27 years after its cataclysmic Paris premiere triggered a near riot. Couldn't the makers of this ultracautious sequel have found anything more adventurous to animate than Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue (yawn) or Shostakovich's Second Piano Concerto, a pleasant student piece written in 1957 for the composer's teenage...