Fantasia

The title of this article is ambiguous. Further meanings are listed under Fantasia (disambiguation) .

Movie
German title	Fantasia
Original title	Fantasia
Country of production	United States
original language	English
Publishing year	1940
length	124 minutes
Age rating	FSK 6
Rod
Director	James Algar , Samuel Armstrong
script	Lee Blair , Elmer Plummer
production	Walt Disney
camera	James Wong Howe , Maxwell Morgan
occupation
Deems Taylor Leopold Stokowski The Philadelphia Orchestra
chronology
Successor  → Fantasia 2000

Fantasia is the third full-length cartoon from Walt Disney Studios , from 1940. The entire film is accompanied by classical music , played by the Philadelphia Orchestra , which is conducted by Leopold Stokowski . Based on the principle of the Silly Symphonies ( cartoons without speaking part, just underlaid with classical music), Fantasia was created, a classic in film history, which can also be viewed as an early form of music video and was the first feature film to use a multi-channel sound system. Stokowski and the orchestra can be seen between the individual cartoon segments; music critic Deems Taylor speaks the unifying comments. A long-planned sequel was realized in 1999 with Fantasia 2000 .

content

The basic idea of ​​the film is to show a classical concert in which the audience does not get to see their own visual ideas about the music during the presentation of the pieces of music, but rather those of the Disney cartoon artists, which in some cases differ considerably from the original themes of the pieces . Between each piece one sees the orchestra, the conductor and the moderator Deems Taylor, however, in newer versions of the film by a speaker from the off was replaced. There is also a shortened break in the middle of the film as well as improvisation scenes with the orchestra to get as close as possible to the concert atmosphere. The pieces used are:

• Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565 The toccata is a work for the organ that isattributed to Johann Sebastian Bach and was arranged by Stokowski for the orchestra. First you can see the silhouettes of the musicians of the Philadelphia Orchestra, who are mostly illuminated as shadow images in front of a wall. As the piece progresses, these images give way to abstract figures, inspired by the works of art by the German filmmaker Oskar Fischinger , who worked personally on this section for a while. This is the first Disney film to use abstract drawings.
• Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky : Pieces from the Nutcracker Suite , Op. 71a. Not the entire suite from the ballet of the same name was used; the overture and the march of the tin soldiers are missing. The order of the remaining pieces does not match the original arrangement. Cuts have been made to some pieces. The film shows the change of the seasons from summer to winter: animals, plants, mushrooms and fairies dance to the music.
• Paul Dukas : The Sorcerer's Apprentice . A symphonic poem based on the poem of the same name by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe about a young man who abuses magic and can no longer get it under control. This piece has only been shortened slightly. In the film, Disney's Mickey Mouse takes on the title role, which with the characteristic red robe and blue wizard's hat should develop into a trademark for Mickey Mouse. Mickey's outstretched hand, but then with a sparking wand, was later converted into a statuette for the Disney Legends awards. Following this segment, Micky Stokowski congratulates in the silhouette on the successful performance.
• Igor Stravinsky : Le Sacre du Printemps . The ballet music was shortened by more than ten minutes and rearranged. The film shows images from the early history of the earth; from the formation of the continents to the first single-cell organisms to the demise of the dinosaurs . The prehistoric animals were depicted relatively realistically. However, the Tyrannosaurus in the film has three fingers, although it was already known at the time that two fingers would have been correct. However, Walt Disney chose the misrepresentation because he thought it looked better.
• After the break, the speaker introduces “the real star” of the film in a short interlude: the sound, represented by a vibrating line. The tone is obviously not used to the limelight, but when some instruments give sound samples, he tries to portray them.
• Ludwig van Beethoven : 6th Symphony in F major, Op. 68 “Pastorale”. More than half of this work was deleted (mostly the repetition of individual passages was dispensed with so that the main themes can all be heard). The film takes place in the mythological world of ancient Greece and describes how the preparations for a festival in honor of Bacchus , god of wine, begin at sunrise, which is interrupted by Zeus shortly before sunset . The main actors are centaurs and centaurs , a Pegasus family , fauns and the gods of Olympus . This part is designed in the typical belittling Disney style and uses the mythological figures very freely (since there are neither female centaurs nor other winged horses except Pegasus in the classical sagas). This part met with criticism at the premiere because of the bare breasts of the centaur women. When the film was re-released in the 1960s, there were also complaints that a centaur with the upper body of an African woman and the lower body of a donkey served her fellow women and worked as a slave. Two other African female centaurs have the lower bodies of zebras. Disney responded to the racism allegations and had the donkey centaur from 1969 deleted from all copies of the films. The zebra centaurs remained, however.
• Amilcare Ponchielli : The Dance of the Hours - an allegorical ballet from the opera La Gioconda was the only piece of music that remained unchanged. Ostriches, hippos, elephants and alligators satirize the typical mannerisms of classical ballet and dance a dramatic story about a stolen princess and wild pirates, with different animals representing different times of the day.
• Modest Mussorgsky : A Night on the Bald Mountain . A symphonic poem that has been re-orchestrated and slightly shortened by Leopold Stokowski. The film follows the plot given by the music: Chernobog (a demonic being) summons the souls of the dead from their graves to celebrate a witch's sabbath on the bare mountain . When a church bell announces the morning, the ghost disappears. This piece of music goes seamlessly into the next:
• Franz Schubert : Ave Maria . Originally an art song for soprano and piano; here the soprano Julietta Novis is accompanied by the choir and orchestra. Veiled figures with candles in their hands stride through the forest as the sun rises. This sequence presented the draftsman with unexpected difficulties, as the figures move very slowly and fluently and every irregularity was noticed immediately. The scene had to be re-recorded three times before the desired effect was achieved. The scenes were only completed a few hours before the premiere.

Another short film, which uses Claude Debussy's piano piece Clair de Lune from the Bergamasque Suite in an orchestral version, was removed from the film shortly before completion. It shows the meeting of two egrets in a moonlit swamp. This segment could be restored only in 1996 and is in the bonus material of Fantasia - DVD to find in 2002.

The cuts were made to fit all of the pieces in 124 minutes; otherwise the film would have a running time of more than three hours.

Even if the film consists of several small sequences, there are still some motifs that hold the entire work together visually and in terms of action. The films deal with the passage of time; represented as the change of seasons, the history of prehistoric creatures or the course of the day from morning to evening.

History of origin

In the late 1930s, Disney's Mickey Mouse was slowly losing popularity with audiences. The cartoon series from the Mickey Mouse short films earned the supporting character Donald Duck his own short film series, which proved to be more profitable and popular. Walt Disney wasn't ready to give up his favorite character. Originally, the silent Seppel (from the first full-length cartoon by Walt Disney Studios " Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs ") was supposed to appear as a sorcerer's apprentice. However, Disney decided to make a " comeback " movie for Mickey Mouse. For this, the draftsman Fred Moore redesigned the figure. Mickey Mouse grew plump, had a human skin color, eyebrows, and had visible pupils. The changes in the face, in particular, increased the character's expressive capabilities. The individual animations of the characters and the special effects (especially the water and the falling stars) were executed in great detail.

In 1938 work began on the sorcerer's apprentice , which initially followed the concept of the Silly Symphonies and was to appear as an independent short film. Shortly thereafter, Disney happened to meet the famous conductor Leopold Stokowski . Stokowski offered Disney to record the score for the cartoon for free and actually managed to get a hundred professional musicians excited about the project.

It all cost the studio a total of $ 125,000, a sum that Walt Disney and his corporate partner and brother Roy knew they couldn't make back. The average budget for an animated short film at the time was $ 30,000. Disney made a profit of no more than $ 10,000 per cartoon. The Walt Disney Studios' most successful drawn short film to date is The Three Little Pigs from 1933, with grossing $ 60,000. Stokowski advised Disney to integrate the sorcerer's apprentice into a full-length film in which the latter would only be one of the many animated scenes with musical accompaniment. The music critic Deems Taylor was hired to give a short introduction, written by himself, before each section of the film. Stokowski suggested the title “Fantasia” (roughly: “a mixture of well-known themes with variations and interludes”). The working title for this film up to this point was The Concert Feature , in German something like “Der Konzertfilm”. When work on the sorcerer's apprentice was nearing completion in early 1939, the production of the remaining short films began.

In order to offer the audience a better concert experience, the soundtrack (for the first time for a feature film) was recorded in multi-channel sound. The specially developed system was called Fantasound . It was also planned to use the widescreen format , which was new at the time , three-dimensional images in the toccata and fugue in D minor, BVW 565 and sprayed fragrances in various segments. However, these techniques would have exceeded the budget of the already expensive film and made marketing more difficult.
The entire film cost about $ 2.28 million to make and has returned about $ 76 million to date.

Release history

Walt Disney wanted Fantasia to be more than just a movie for viewers: an event for which people “dressed up” and reserved seats beforehand. Special programs were created for the film in which production sketches, photos, dedications and a short summary of each short film were printed. In order to make the experience perfect and to be able to use the new spatial sound, at least thirty additional loudspeakers were set up around the seating area in each cinema. Disney saw the film more as a concert than a classic cartoon. Therefore Fantasia originally has neither opening credits nor closing credits , although this was more than unusual at the time.

The work was shown in several US cinemas in 1940 and premiered on November 13, 1940 in New York City in the Broadway Theater . Fantasia was initially a financial failure that nearly bankrupted Walt Disney. On January 29, 1941, RKO Pictures received the distribution rights to the film and remixed the film's soundtrack to a monophonic soundtrack in order to be able to distribute the film more easily. In late 1941, RKO Pictures had managed to cut the 125-minute film down to 81 minutes by removing Toccata and Fugue in D minor BWV 565 and greatly shortening Deems Taylor's introductions. On January 6, 1942, this version of the film was released across the country. For the first time, cinemas in all the states of North America played the film, but it did not meet the public's taste and was used as a B-movie by most movie theaters . In 1946 the section cut out in 1941 was reinserted, but Deems Taylor's introductions were still played in the short version. This version of Fantasia is called the General Release Version , in contrast to the Original Roadshow Version . Later a stereophonic soundtrack was mixed and the film was cut to widescreen format.

Fantasia was unable to make a profit for over twenty years despite several re-performances. However, in 1969 the film became very popular with young people who wanted to enjoy the film in a new way under the influence of drugs such as LSD or hashish . Disney saw it as a chance to sell Fantasia better and advertised it on psychedelic posters as a "trip film", which contributed significantly to the success of this re-production. At this time, the African donkey centaur was also removed from the short film about the Pastorale . This was done primarily through enlargements, scene repetitions and in one scene of an elaborate retouch.

When the film was due to return to US cinemas in 1982, the entire soundtrack of the film was digitally re-recorded in stereo with a studio orchestra, conducted by Irwin Kostal . Deems Taylor's comments between pieces were followed up by a voice imitator. For the 50th anniversary of the film in 1990, Walt Disney Pictures had the original image and music restored and all cuts from the General Release Version (except for the sequence with the donkey centauress) restored. In addition, a (completely new) trailer was added. This revision of the film first appeared on VHS a year later . Ten years later, all scenes with Deems Taylor were reinserted into the film, bringing the film back to its original length of 124 minutes. Since some of the original sound recordings could not be found, Deems Taylor's comments were repeated. Although the film was advertised as the unabridged original version, the scenes with the colored centaur were still missing. This version was published again in 2010 with improved picture and sound quality.

German publication history

Fantasia first ran in German cinemas in 1952. Since later re-releases were based on the current American versions, which contained the intermediate scenes in different lengths, Deems Taylor had to be re-dubbed several times. There are a total of four German dubbed versions, the last of which was not made until 2010. In
1991, a VHS with the restored General Release Version was also released in Germany . This is also included on the 2002 DVD. Only the version from 2010 contains the largely restored original roadshow version .

On June 20, 2014, the German Disney Channel broadcast the film for the first time in a 119-minute version on free-to-air television .

Sequels

During its creation it was planned to re- publish Fantasia regularly in an edited form. Some short films should be replaced by new scenes with different music, based on a concert tour. So Fantasia should be kept as a permanent work in progress . However, the film's financial failure, as well as the marketing and production restrictions caused by World War II, prevented this.
Numerous concepts for new Fantasia short films were in the works by the early 1940s . Some of them, like the one for Nikolai Rimski-Korsakow's flight of the bumblebee and the already completed Clair de Lune short film, were used in 1946 and 1948 for the films Make Mine Music and Music, Dance and Rhythm . These were based on Fantasia , but without the moderated intermediate scenes and mainly with contemporary American pop music . They were also produced much cheaper than Fantasia , which shows the quality of the drawings.
The non-animated short film Grand Canyon , made in 1958, is also based on the Fantasia concept by showing natural scenes synchronized with the Grand Canyon Suite by Ferde Grofé .

After that, the idea of ​​a sequel to Fantasia was only taken up again in the late 1970s . It was decided to make a film called Musicana , which was to use pieces from different countries instead of purely classical music. In terms of content, for example, the appropriate local mythologies should be processed. Due to the difficult conditions in the Disney studio at the beginning of the 1980s, however, the film did not go beyond the concept phase.

Furthermore, a Fantasia- like film with orchestral versions of songs by the Beatles was planned.

Finally, Roy E. Disney successfully implemented a sequel concept, Fantasia 2000, in the 1990s . Its planned continuation under the working title Fantasia 2006 was in work at the beginning of the 2000s and, like Musicana, should use music from different countries. In the end, however, only four individual short films were released.

According to Disney producer Don Hahn , no further Fantasia sequel is currently in the works, even if the spirit of the project lives on in the current Pixar shorts, for example .

Awards

• Special Award for Walt Disney at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, 1940
• Honorary Oscar for outstanding contribution to the use of sound in film for Walt Disney, William E. Garity and JNA Hawkins at the 1942 Academy Awards
• Honorary Oscar for the unique visualization of music, which served the way of viewing the film as entertainment and as an art form, for Leopold Stokowski and his staff at the 1942 Academy Awards
• Video Premiere Award for best DVD add-on for Jeff Kurtti and Michael Pellerin at the DVD Exclusive Awards 2001
• The Wiesbaden film evaluation agency awarded the production the title valuable .
• Entry into the National Film Registry in 1990

Reviews

• “The result is a technically perfect, imaginative and highly entertaining animated film that is also a radical experimental film. Semi-abstract plays of color illustrate Bach's “Toccata und Fuge” (orchestration and conducting: Leopold Stokowski) with the participation of the German film pioneer Oskar Fischinger; Mushrooms dance to Tchaikovsky's “Nutcracker Suite”; Mickey Mouse plays the "sorcerer's apprentice" from Paul Dukas, intoxicatingly staged by James Algar; There are dinosaurs at Stravinsky (“Sacre du printemps”), Greek centaurs at Beethoven's “Pastorale”; Ponchielli's “Dance of the Hours” became a terrific ballet for hippos; Finally, there follows a peaceful tableau of Schubert's “Ave Maria”. ” -“ Lexicon of international film ”(CD-ROM edition), Systhema, Munich 1997

• “Original illustration of classical and modern pieces of music with ingenious ingenuity in shapes and colors.” - 6000 films. Critical notes from the cinema years 1945 to 1958 . Handbook V of the Catholic film criticism, 3rd edition, Verlag Haus Altenberg, Düsseldorf 1963, p. 110

media

DVD and Blu-ray Disc publications

• Fantasia . Special Collection. Walt Disney Home Video 2002
• The Fantasia Collection (3-DVD set). Walt Disney Home Video 2000 (extensive additional material, but only English sound)
• Fantasia . Special Edition: Blu-ray + DVD. Walt Disney 2010

Soundtrack

• Walt Disney's Fantasia. The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack . 2 CD set. Pickwick, Walt Disney, Buena Vista 1990, CD020 & 021 / DSTCD 452 - digitally restored original recording with the Philadelphia Orchestra under the direction of Leopold Stokowski
• Walt Disney's Fantasia . 2 CD set. Disneyland, Buena Vista Records, Burbank 1982, CD-001 / DIDX 723 & DIDX 724 - digital new recording under the direction of Irwin Kostal

literature

• Frank Thomas , Ollie Johnston : Disney Animation. The Illusion of Life . 575 S. Abbeville Press, New York 1981, ISBN 0-89659-698-2 .
• John Culhane: Walt Disney's Fantasia. Abradale Press, Abrams, Times Mirror, New York 1987, ISBN 0-8109-8078-9 .
• Elmar Biebl, Dirk Manthey, Jörg Altendorf et al .: The films of Walt Disney. The magical world of animation. 2nd edition, 177 p. Milchstraße, Hamburg 1993, ISBN 3-89324-117-5 .
• Leonard Maltin : The Disney Films . 3rd edition, 384 pp. Hyperion, New York 1995, ISBN 0-7868-8137-2 .
• Christopher Finch : Walt Disney. His life - his art (Original title: The Art of Walt Disney. From Mickey Mouse to the Magic Kingdoms ). German by Renate Witting. (Limited exclusive edition.) Ehapa-Verlag, Stuttgart 1984, 457 pages, ISBN 3-7704-0171-9 , (current English-language edition: The Art of Walt Disney. From Mickey Mouse to the Magic Kingdoms. Abrams, New York 2004, 504 pp., ISBN 0-8109-4964-4 ).
• Irene Kletschke: Sound images. Walt Disney's "Fantasia" (1940). Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 2011, ISBN 978-3-515-09828-1 .
• Philippe Cordez, Romana Kaske, Julia Saviello, Susanne Thürigen: The Properties of Objects: Walt Disney's Fantasia , in Dies. (Ed.), Object Fantasies. Experience & Creation , Munich: De Gruyter, 2018 (Object Studies in Art History, 1), pp. 7–17.

See also

Allegro non troppo , interpretation of the amalgamation of classical music with animation by Bruno Bozzetto . Fantasia is also parodied at times.

The brooms from Fantasia have made several guest appearances in other films and series inside and outside the Disney multiverse.

• In the Darkwing Duck episode "The Hocus-Pocus Academy", two brooms can be seen carrying buckets of water in a short scene.
• In the video game " Micky Epic " and " Micky Epic 2: The Power of 2 " the brooms appear as phantom creatures and thus as antagonists, with whom friendship is also possible.
• In the film " Duel der Magier " the young protagonist Dave enchants some brooms to make them do the same job as in Fantasia.

Web links

• Fantasia in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Comparison of the cut versions DVD - original version of Fantasia at Schnittberichte.com
• Series of articles on Fantasia in "In the Shadow of the Mouse" in Sir Donnerbold's Bagatelles

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Lexicon: Fantasia (English)
2. ↑ Trickfilmstimmen.de
3. ↑ schnittberichte.com
4. ^ André Previn : No Minor Chords: My Days in Hollywood , Doubleday 1991
5. ↑ Don Hahn discusses Fantasia 2000 and Waking Sleeping Beauty (English)