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MovieMail's Review
Walt Disney’s visionary fusion of classical music with his animation wowed the world but barely made a profit until the 1960s! Nick Riddle takes an apprenticeship on this landmark cartoon.
The 1930s were arguably the golden age of animation; certainly the end of that decade marked Walt Disney’s creative peak.
After the triumph of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves in 1938, Disney unleashed another couple of all-out classics: Pinocchio and Fantasia. Neither of them actually turned a profit on their original release, and Fantasia didn’t break even until the late 1960s when music and bright colours were where it was really at.
But what a tremendous piece of work it is, unflaggingly inventive, deftly switching between the sinister, the spectacular and slapstick.
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is rightly considered the film’s dramatic centrepiece, and The Dance of the Hours its comic highlight, but the whole thing abounds with gorgeously rendered sequences.
The animators are bold in their use of colour and unafraid to dabble in the abstract; and even in segments that now seem a tad misconceived, such as the fluffy pastel colours and frolicking centaurs in Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, there are gags and painterly touches to admire.
Anyone with the vaguest interest in animation should have Fantasia in their collection.
English, Dutch, Russian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian , Hard of Hearing - English
DVD Extras
Audio Commentary with historian Brian Sibley
Disney Family Museum.
Film Description
The famously ambitious animated epic from Disney studios in which eight animated segments are set to classical music selections from Bach, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Mussorgsky, Schubert, Beethoven and others. Also featured is the famous 'Sorcerer's Apprentice' routine, in which Mickey Mouse (voiced by Walt himself for the last time) creates magical mayhem when he tries to get his chores done with the aid of a spell or two.
