The movie opens with live shots of silhouetted musicians ambling to their seats, conspicuously relaxed despite their tailcoats. This isn't a picture just for music lovers. I had a lot of ideas, but they voted some of them down. Then the boys listened and they had ideas. When I heard the music it made pictures in my head. Maybe it can give other people the same thing. When it opened, he talked to a reporter from the New York World-Telegram about classical music. Pete Seeger dropped out of Harvard to invent a new "folk music." Thornton Wilder wrote "Our Town." Gershwin had done it with "Rhapsody in Blue." Thomas Hart Benton returned from Paris to paint murals of farms and industry. Disney, let us not forget, was a genius whose medium was the American psyche - its fascination with technology along with its yearning for old Europe, its cultural inferiority complex along with its democratic desire, back at mid-century when so much seemed possible, to make new art in a new land by putting high and low culture together. This was more than aesthetic social climbing. Bankrolled by the eruption of profits from "Snow White," he was thinking about something even bigger, with a working title of "Concert Feature." "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" ate up an incredible $125,000, but Disney didn't care. Soon, Disney was asking them to "please avoid slapstick gags in the ordinary sense work instead toward fantasy and business with an imaginative touch." But would the great Stokowski conduct music for slipping on banana peels? No, it was time for Disney's animators to start behaving themselves.
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(He conducted the 100-man orchestra while she sang.)ĭisney said he'd been thinking about another in his series of Silly Symphonies, this one set to Dukas's "The Sorcerer's Apprentice." Would Stokowski be interested in collaborating? He would. Stokowski was the epitome of the high-culture genius - the flyaway hair, the European-style gravitas, a persona he had cultivated well enough that he had recently appeared, playing himself, in a movie called "One Hundred Men and a Girl" with Deanna Durbin. In 1937, at Chasen's restaurant, he met Leopold Stokowski, who was conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra and one of America's great self-publicists and crowd pleasers in 20th-century classical music. Give them respectability! And what had more respectability, what stood more for the upper classes and high culture, than classical music?Īccording to John Culhane in "Walt Disney's 'Fantasia,' " Disney "had vowed, when he was snubbed as a mere 'cartoon-maker' 17 years before, that his animated productions would someday be treated to the same kind of gala premieres accorded live-action films." In the late '30s, he wanted to take the animated cartoon children of that match and marry them up, up, up in class. The history: Disney had married tawdry Hollywood technology to vulgar newspaper entertainment in the 1920s. I saw it again in 1969, when it was admired for reducing young minds to psychedelic rubble with its oh-wow interior world of color and form - more about that in a moment.) (I saw it in 1946, at the age of 5, when it was admired for improving young minds by exposing them to the great composers. The problem being that icons tend to be disappointments, or bores, pallid homage to gentility. Probably Ralph Nader, the ghost of Lillian Hellman and the Kennedy School of Government would endorse it too, if you asked them - all the best people. It has been endorsed by decades of scientists and educators. "Fantasia" - two hours of animation set to the music of Bach, Tchaikovsky, Dukas, Stravinsky, Beethoven, Ponchielli, Mussorgsky and Schubert - is an icon, all right. You know you are supposed to like "Fantasia" the way you are supposed to like "Tom Sawyer," or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, or Bob Hope, or the recent PBS series about the Civil War - cozy icons you're obliged to enjoy as if they stand for something higher.
No doubt dutiful, reverent, forward-thinking, nostalgic, self-improving parents will be hauling children to it by the Volvo load. It opens once again at area theaters on Friday. "Fantasia," Walt Disney's glorious monument to mid-century middlebrowism, is celebrating its 50th birthday.