An ongoing series of tributes to movies that inspire me. First up: the 1940 masterpiece that invented a whole new way of marrying images to sound.
Some experiences are buried so deep in your memory that they’re almost like dreams. They blur into colors and motion and bits of music. They hover in your subconscious, influencing the way you perceive the world, occasionally poking out to flash across your mind in one beautiful, brilliant impression. So it is with Fantasia, one of the first movies I ever remember seeing.
My sister Laura and I were raised on the Disney classics. Our VHS library was stocked with the old warhorses: Snow White, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi, etc. But we also had the good fortune to be born in 1990 (me) and 1991 (Laura), just as the Disney renaissance was taking off, so my childhood was packed to the brim with Disney classics. Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King: these movies forever set my benchmark for animated excellence.
But it’s Fantasia that I actually remember watching, in the living room of our house in North Spokane, Washington. The short gray carpet, the blue foam couch, the wooden cabinets as tall as me, and the square TV perched on the corner of the shelf that sang a high-pitched keening tone whenever you turned it on: this is where I played and dreamed as a kid. And where I sat mesmerized as the images and music of Fantasia danced across the screen, fascinated by the way they intertwined and spoke together.
Throughout the 1920s and 30s, Disney and his animators had been perfecting the art of the animated short, including in the Silly Symphony series of cartoons set to music. Fantasia, released in 1940, was both a natural evolution and a quantum leap forward for the art of animation, a feature-length series of animated sequences set to classical music. This was a revolutionary way to combine images and sound, planting the seeds for the development of the music video decades later.
At the age of four, I was on board with the concept from the narrator’s introduction. I understood that I was about to see images that might appear in your head as you listen to music. Sometimes, the piece of music would tell a story, so the images would tell a story. Sometimes, the piece of music would be abstract, “music for its own sake,” so the images would also be abstract, like in the first sequence, Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.
I’m not synesthetic; I don’t see colors when I hear musical notes. But Fantasia, especially this first sequence, was a quasi-synesthetic experience, as I instinctively accepted that certain images and sounds just went together. A musical phrase of burbling oboes was also a shadow rolling across a hill, and it just made sense. Bright, ethereal, chugging violins were also columns of clouds thrusting majestically into the sky. Fantasia is not necessarily a movie that holds a kid’s attention, but during this sequence, I was glued to the screen, floating in a glittering palace of sense impressions.
The first half of the movie has a dreamlike quality perfectly suited to the gauzy haze of early childhood. Once you’re past the pure abstraction of Toccata and Fugue, there’s the imaginative multicolored parade of The Nutcracker Suite. My and Laura’s favorite parts were the Chinese and Russian dances. The high energy of the Russian dance always got us to jump to our feet and shake our wiggles out, the way only two- and four-year-olds can.
Then there’s the dark whimsy of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the first sequence that tells a definite story. Audience identification is a tricky thing. When we watch a movie and really get involved in it and feel what the characters are feeling, are we still just watching or does part of us believe we are those characters? I guess it depends on how deeply you’re willing to invest in the dream. What I know is that Mickey Mouse in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, along with Pinocchio in Pinocchio, were some of the first characters I identified with, whatever that means to a kid. (It helped that Mickey’s robes were red, my favorite color!) One of my most beloved childhood toys was Mickey in his sorcerer’s robes.
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is easy for a kid to connect to: the drudgery of doing chores and cleaning up (Mickey having to haul buckets of water), the excitement of trying something dangerous while the adult’s away (Mickey animating the broomsticks to do his work for him), the horror of creating a big mess and knowing you’ll get in big trouble when Dad / Mom / the sorcerer gets home. All this is why The Sorcerer’s Apprentice was my favorite sequence, the one I wanted to watch over and over and over. It still conjures feelings of awe and trepidation at the crashing waves and armies of marching broomsticks.
And that’s as far as we got. The Rite of Spring was the big barrier for me and Laura. As soon as the volcanoes started erupting, we were out: too scary. It wasn’t until sometime in my teen years that it actually occurred to me: I need to finish this movie. Even watching it while older, I was still staggered by the weight of it.
And as a teen, I could appreciate how bold The Rite of Spring was in 1940: just 15 years after the Scopes Monkey Trial, as the narrator puts it, “a coldly accurate reproduction” of the scientific tale of the formation of life on Earth. I found it quaint and charming how the narrator had to explain what dinosaurs were to the audience, and how we didn’t know about the asteroid yet, so the sequence went with the theory that “great droughts and earthquakes turned the whole world into a gigantic Dust Bowl.” The Rite of Spring is phenomenal cinema: the dark, cosmic loneliness of planets and galaxies, the brutality of magma oozing and mountains crumbling, the primitive spectacle of dinosaurs fighting, then the sad horror as they wander in the desert to die. It’s really not meant for kids.
Night on Bald Mountain / Ave Maria is also stunning, a juxtaposition of two compositions, the first demonic, the second angelic, that represent, as the narrator explains, “the triumph of hope and life over the powers of despair and death.” Bald Mountain presents the sinister spectacle of a looming devil and cavorting demons menacing a European-style town, while Ave Maria concludes the film with an ending sequence of mysterious beauty. It can still bring tears to my eyes: the parade of pilgrims, each with a bobbing lantern, through a washed-out, misty landscape of fog, the stillness, the serenity.
Finally seeing the full splendor of Fantasia, I was knocked out by its artistry and ambition. What other movie (besides maybe The Tree of Life), tries to tell the entire history of life of Earth and the story of the ultimate triumph of good over evil purely through images in just two hours?
Fantasia has been a personal touchstone for my entire life, igniting my appreciation for the way that music and images go together. When, as an adult, I got my first job that paid well enough so that I had some spending money left over, I allowed myself to buy one “luxury item” per week: a book, a CD, a movie on Blu-Ray. What was the very first movie I bought? You guessed it.
Fantasia is a magnificent work, the one brief moment when this greatest of popular filmmakers intersected with high art. It was to be a short-lived moment; the film was a financial failure due to the outbreak of World War II cutting off access to European film markets. During the war, the struggling Disney company was forced to pivot towards shorter features (Dumbo is only 64 minutes) and propaganda cartoons. Fantasia, then, represents a singular moment in the history of the Disney company and film history, when the man who brought the world Mickey Mouse and Disneyland tried to get you to sit down, listen to classical music, and let images carry you into a palace of imagination.