Movie Review: 'Fantasia 2000'
Pros: Seven new segments and The Sorcerer's
Apprentice, nice mix of music
Cons: Would one host have been better than many?
Jury is still out on that one
In the late 1930s, Walt Disney and his team of animators
decided to revive interest in Mickey Mouse - whose popularity was being eroded
by his fellow Disney stable mate Donald Duck - by featuring the beloved rodent
in a fully animated version of the Goethe-Dukas fantasy The Sorcerer's
Apprentice.
Envisioned originally as a stand-alone "upgrade" of the then-popular "Silly Symphonies" shorts, this project grew in ambition and scale once the eminent conductor Leopold Stokowski got involved (he volunteered his services as conductor for The Sorcerer's Apprentice); from one relatively short (nine minutes or so) cartoon to a feature-length animated film featuring eight different visual interpretations of classical music pieces from at least three different eras: Baroque, Romantic and Modern Post-Romantic.
As Fantasia 2000's first host Steve Martin explains in the 1999 film's first interstitial segment, Disney and Stokowski had intended for their "Concert Feature" to be a constant "work in progress." The original concept "Uncle Walt" had once Fantasia had been completed was that with each re-release of the film, particularly its road-show version, some segments would be shed and new ones added - keeping, of course, The Sorcerer's Apprentice as the connecting link to each new edition of the movie.
Unfortunately, Fantasia suffered from a triple-whammy that precluded "Uncle Walt's" vision for the groundbreaking blend of classical music and animation.
First, the film was not a box office hit; Fantasia received warm critical praise from some reviewers of the time, but it got a lot of flak from classical music purists who groused that the stories on screen did not match the composers' original interpretive concepts and that the arrangements were not all that great either.
Second, when Fantasia was in production World War II broke out; by the time of its release (1940) Nazi Germany had overrun most of Western Europe - thus depriving Disney of a possibly more receptive audience and (of course) potential profit from more screenings in the Old World.
Third, the studio was on somewhat shaky financial ground during the war and - presumably - Disney decided that it would be best to shelve expensive and unprofitable Fantasia sequels in lieu of making more traditional fare along the lines of Pinocchio and Dumbo.
Fantasia eventually gained more popular acclaim and appeal after the 1960s and is now considered to be one of the most important animated films ever made, but the studio did not have the imaginative spark to follow it up either during Disney's lifetime or after his death of lung cancer in 1966.
Thus it wasn't until the late 1990s when Roy Disney, Walt's real life nephew, decided to fulfill his uncle's vision by producing 1999's Fantasia 2000, the 38th film in the Walt Disney Animated Classics series.
Fantasia 2000
Like its 1940 forebear, Fantasia 2000 features eight segments of animated re-imaginings of musical works, seven of them being new "chapters" while keeping The Sorcerer's Apprentice - soundtrack and all - as a tip of the hat to Disney's "work in progress" idea.
Of the seven new segments, six center on what most of us know as "classical pieces" while the remaining one is an adaptation of George Gershwin's jazz-classical fusion Rhapsody in Blue.
Also like the original Fantasia, Fantasia 2000 features interstitial segments in which a live master of ceremonies introduces each composition/animation combination.
Unlike the original Fantasia, however, which was "hosted" by Deems Taylor (with some help from Leopold Stokowski and Mickey Mouse), Fantasia 2000's eight segments are introduced by various hosts.
L. v Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C: Deems Taylor (archival footage)
Ottorino Respighi's "Pines of Rome": Steve Martin and Itzhak Perlman
George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue": Quincy Jones
Dmitri Shostakovich's "Piano Concerto No. 2, Allegro, Opus 102": Bette Midler
Camille Saint-Saens' "Carnival of the Animals": James Earl Jones
Paul Dukas' "The Sorcerer's Apprentice": Penn & Teller
Sir Edward Elgar's "Pomp and Circumstance - Marches 1, 2, 3 and 4": Leopold Stokowski (archival footage) Mickey Mouse, Donald and Daisy Ducks
Igor Stravinsky's "Firebird Suite (1919 Version)": Angela Lansbury
Each segment was conceived and executed by its own story writer and director, so not only are there different musical styles, hosts and stories, but very diverse styles of animation.
Because The Sorcerer's Apprentice is a carryover from the 1940 Fantasia, let's look instead at the seven new episodes of Fantasia 2000.
The Introduction blends archival footage of Deems Taylor and his explanation of how music and animation are mixed in Fantasia and the differences between program music and pure music with a very abridged rendition of the first movement of L. v Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C. The visuals here are highly abstract, with white butterflies and black bats flying about in a sky full of clouds and strobes of light which pierce the darkness.
The Whales: Another flight-of-fancy interlude, this time focusing on a pod of whales which, thanks to a supernova and Disney magic, can actually fly. The piece follows a family of whales - a bull, cow and calf - and follows, nature-film style, its travails as the baby gets trapped in an iceberg. Good use of Respighi's "Pines of Rome" symphonic poem.
The Big Apple in Depression Era: Set to Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" and clearly inspired by the caricatures of Al Hirschfeld, this bit tells the overlapping tales of several inhabitants of New York City in the 1930s.
The Steadfast Tin Soldier: Yes, the writer and animators tweaked Hans Christian Andersen's ending to a happier one than in the prose story, but the use of Shostakovich's "Piano Concerto No. 2, Allegro, Opus 102" and old-school Disney animation render this tweak moot and give viewers a lovely tale of romance, bravery and devotion that is reminiscent of both Disney 2D classics and Pixar's 3D Toy Story trilogy.
Carnival of the Animals: Camille Saint-Saen's popular work gets a whimsical twist when we are treated to the sight of a flock of flamingos (presumably from Florida) flummoxed by one of their own who enjoys playing with yo-yos.
Noah's Ark: Maybe as a counterpoint to the original's Greek mythology piece, this episode, which is set to four of Sir Edward Elgar's "Pomp and Circumstance" marches, is based on the Biblical tale of the Great Flood and Noah's ark. The twist: here we see the story from the point of view of Noah's assistant, Donald Duck.
The Cycle of Nature: Firebird Suite instead of Rites of Spring and a moose and spirit instead of dinosaurs, but once again we see the cycle of life, death and renewal in a segment which focuses on nature set to music by Stravinsky.
My Take: While I am not yet sure if I like Fantasia 2000's multitude-of-hosts approach, I have to say that I'm impressed with the diversity of the animation styles in it. It is, in a way, neat to see that each animation team had its own style and aesthetic philosophy, even though the segments with the New Yorkers and the flamingos do tend to be more spare and modernistic than the others.
Initially, I was put off by the way-too-1930s-caricature styling of the Gershwin piece's interpretation, but being a fan of Rhapsody in Blue I was eventually won over by the music and some of the nice little touches (such as a bit where we see the composer at work on a song) in the cartoon itself.
My favorite new segments, though, are the one with the whales and the Noah's ark episode with Donald and Daisy Duck. The former appeals to my whimsical side - whales in flight is a cool visual concept - while the latter contains a mix of classic story-telling, comical situations and a touching love story, all in a nice little package.
As to whether some of the segments in Fantasia 2000 mimic too closely the ones in the 1940 (actually, the restored roadshow version); I don't think that's detrimental to the sequel, considering that Roy Disney originally wanted to keep more than one of the Fantasia segments in Fantasia 2000. The hippo-ostrich-alligator ballet take on Dance of the Hours was slated to be one of these until the producer changed his mind and asked for a new segment to replace it.
My only gripe about Fantasia 2000 is that Walt Disney Studios only kept the Blu-ray/DVDs of this reissue on store shelves till March 15, 2011. Sure, that's not an unreasonably short allotment of time, but it did mean that fans either purchase it over a three-month period for reasonable prices or had to hope that eBay sellers offered new or slightly used copies in good condition once the movies go back into the "Disney vault" until a new playback medium emerges.
Envisioned originally as a stand-alone "upgrade" of the then-popular "Silly Symphonies" shorts, this project grew in ambition and scale once the eminent conductor Leopold Stokowski got involved (he volunteered his services as conductor for The Sorcerer's Apprentice); from one relatively short (nine minutes or so) cartoon to a feature-length animated film featuring eight different visual interpretations of classical music pieces from at least three different eras: Baroque, Romantic and Modern Post-Romantic.
As Fantasia 2000's first host Steve Martin explains in the 1999 film's first interstitial segment, Disney and Stokowski had intended for their "Concert Feature" to be a constant "work in progress." The original concept "Uncle Walt" had once Fantasia had been completed was that with each re-release of the film, particularly its road-show version, some segments would be shed and new ones added - keeping, of course, The Sorcerer's Apprentice as the connecting link to each new edition of the movie.
Unfortunately, Fantasia suffered from a triple-whammy that precluded "Uncle Walt's" vision for the groundbreaking blend of classical music and animation.
First, the film was not a box office hit; Fantasia received warm critical praise from some reviewers of the time, but it got a lot of flak from classical music purists who groused that the stories on screen did not match the composers' original interpretive concepts and that the arrangements were not all that great either.
Second, when Fantasia was in production World War II broke out; by the time of its release (1940) Nazi Germany had overrun most of Western Europe - thus depriving Disney of a possibly more receptive audience and (of course) potential profit from more screenings in the Old World.
Third, the studio was on somewhat shaky financial ground during the war and - presumably - Disney decided that it would be best to shelve expensive and unprofitable Fantasia sequels in lieu of making more traditional fare along the lines of Pinocchio and Dumbo.
Fantasia eventually gained more popular acclaim and appeal after the 1960s and is now considered to be one of the most important animated films ever made, but the studio did not have the imaginative spark to follow it up either during Disney's lifetime or after his death of lung cancer in 1966.
Thus it wasn't until the late 1990s when Roy Disney, Walt's real life nephew, decided to fulfill his uncle's vision by producing 1999's Fantasia 2000, the 38th film in the Walt Disney Animated Classics series.
Fantasia 2000
Like its 1940 forebear, Fantasia 2000 features eight segments of animated re-imaginings of musical works, seven of them being new "chapters" while keeping The Sorcerer's Apprentice - soundtrack and all - as a tip of the hat to Disney's "work in progress" idea.
Of the seven new segments, six center on what most of us know as "classical pieces" while the remaining one is an adaptation of George Gershwin's jazz-classical fusion Rhapsody in Blue.
Also like the original Fantasia, Fantasia 2000 features interstitial segments in which a live master of ceremonies introduces each composition/animation combination.
Unlike the original Fantasia, however, which was "hosted" by Deems Taylor (with some help from Leopold Stokowski and Mickey Mouse), Fantasia 2000's eight segments are introduced by various hosts.
L. v Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C: Deems Taylor (archival footage)
Ottorino Respighi's "Pines of Rome": Steve Martin and Itzhak Perlman
George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue": Quincy Jones
Dmitri Shostakovich's "Piano Concerto No. 2, Allegro, Opus 102": Bette Midler
Camille Saint-Saens' "Carnival of the Animals": James Earl Jones
Paul Dukas' "The Sorcerer's Apprentice": Penn & Teller
Sir Edward Elgar's "Pomp and Circumstance - Marches 1, 2, 3 and 4": Leopold Stokowski (archival footage) Mickey Mouse, Donald and Daisy Ducks
Igor Stravinsky's "Firebird Suite (1919 Version)": Angela Lansbury
Each segment was conceived and executed by its own story writer and director, so not only are there different musical styles, hosts and stories, but very diverse styles of animation.
Because The Sorcerer's Apprentice is a carryover from the 1940 Fantasia, let's look instead at the seven new episodes of Fantasia 2000.
The Introduction blends archival footage of Deems Taylor and his explanation of how music and animation are mixed in Fantasia and the differences between program music and pure music with a very abridged rendition of the first movement of L. v Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C. The visuals here are highly abstract, with white butterflies and black bats flying about in a sky full of clouds and strobes of light which pierce the darkness.
The Whales: Another flight-of-fancy interlude, this time focusing on a pod of whales which, thanks to a supernova and Disney magic, can actually fly. The piece follows a family of whales - a bull, cow and calf - and follows, nature-film style, its travails as the baby gets trapped in an iceberg. Good use of Respighi's "Pines of Rome" symphonic poem.
The Big Apple in Depression Era: Set to Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" and clearly inspired by the caricatures of Al Hirschfeld, this bit tells the overlapping tales of several inhabitants of New York City in the 1930s.
The Steadfast Tin Soldier: Yes, the writer and animators tweaked Hans Christian Andersen's ending to a happier one than in the prose story, but the use of Shostakovich's "Piano Concerto No. 2, Allegro, Opus 102" and old-school Disney animation render this tweak moot and give viewers a lovely tale of romance, bravery and devotion that is reminiscent of both Disney 2D classics and Pixar's 3D Toy Story trilogy.
Carnival of the Animals: Camille Saint-Saen's popular work gets a whimsical twist when we are treated to the sight of a flock of flamingos (presumably from Florida) flummoxed by one of their own who enjoys playing with yo-yos.
Noah's Ark: Maybe as a counterpoint to the original's Greek mythology piece, this episode, which is set to four of Sir Edward Elgar's "Pomp and Circumstance" marches, is based on the Biblical tale of the Great Flood and Noah's ark. The twist: here we see the story from the point of view of Noah's assistant, Donald Duck.
The Cycle of Nature: Firebird Suite instead of Rites of Spring and a moose and spirit instead of dinosaurs, but once again we see the cycle of life, death and renewal in a segment which focuses on nature set to music by Stravinsky.
My Take: While I am not yet sure if I like Fantasia 2000's multitude-of-hosts approach, I have to say that I'm impressed with the diversity of the animation styles in it. It is, in a way, neat to see that each animation team had its own style and aesthetic philosophy, even though the segments with the New Yorkers and the flamingos do tend to be more spare and modernistic than the others.
Initially, I was put off by the way-too-1930s-caricature styling of the Gershwin piece's interpretation, but being a fan of Rhapsody in Blue I was eventually won over by the music and some of the nice little touches (such as a bit where we see the composer at work on a song) in the cartoon itself.
My favorite new segments, though, are the one with the whales and the Noah's ark episode with Donald and Daisy Duck. The former appeals to my whimsical side - whales in flight is a cool visual concept - while the latter contains a mix of classic story-telling, comical situations and a touching love story, all in a nice little package.
As to whether some of the segments in Fantasia 2000 mimic too closely the ones in the 1940 (actually, the restored roadshow version); I don't think that's detrimental to the sequel, considering that Roy Disney originally wanted to keep more than one of the Fantasia segments in Fantasia 2000. The hippo-ostrich-alligator ballet take on Dance of the Hours was slated to be one of these until the producer changed his mind and asked for a new segment to replace it.
My only gripe about Fantasia 2000 is that Walt Disney Studios only kept the Blu-ray/DVDs of this reissue on store shelves till March 15, 2011. Sure, that's not an unreasonably short allotment of time, but it did mean that fans either purchase it over a three-month period for reasonable prices or had to hope that eBay sellers offered new or slightly used copies in good condition once the movies go back into the "Disney vault" until a new playback medium emerges.
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