And yet again Disney broke new ground, as the idea of the Silly Symphonies was extended into full feature format to encompass
The Sorcerer's Apprentice and bring Mickey Mouse into the public eye. The gloved rodent's popularity had declined somewhat with the attention being taken up by
Snow White and then
Pinocchio, and Disney felt it was time to remind people of his earliest creation. Moving away, for the first time, from the idea of having songs written for the movie and returning to the
Silly Symphonies format of setting cartoon sequences to classical music,
Fantasia was born.
The idea was quite courageous. Given that his audiences had so far seen the happy tale of a young woman living with seven dwarfs, followed by a puppet discovering how to be a real boy, and that even the previous shorts had all followed some sort of definite storyline or plot, the plan to have a series of separate “longer” shorts, all set to classical music (which might be a turn-off for younger audience members, you would think) that really never meshed to tell one cohesive story, must have seemed a pretty big gamble, but it would pay off. Securing the services (for free!) of the conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski, Disney was ready to create a real extravaganza, and though I've seen it once and was not terribly impressed, you can't argue with box office returns of between seventy and eighty million, for an initial outlay of just over two.
There would be no real cast for this outing, as there was no speech, only music, and one narrator, but that didn't stop the budget equalling the previous movie. Again, World War II would restrict the distribution of the movie, and combined with the expense of fitting out theatres with Disney's new
Fantasound state of the art stereophonic sound system, would lead to slow uptake on the movie, but Disney insisted on the new system, as the movie stood or fell as much on the audience's enjoyment of the music as the animation.
Fantasia thus became the first feature film to use stereo sound. It was also the longest animated movie at the time, clocking in at a somewhat attention-challenging two hours and six minutes.
Fantasia also became, if not the first animated movie, then the first full-length one, to mix live action and animation, as the opening sequence is live action with the orchestra tuning up. Personally, I think this takes from it, but that's just me. A brief rundown of the various sections follows.
Opening with, as mentioned, the narrator introducing the film against the background of the orchestra tuning up, we get
Toccata and Fugue by Bach. This is a pretty abstract piece, moving on to a scene of growth and flowering, the changing of the seasons in Tchaikovsky's
The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, with fish, flowers and mushrooms all dancing, then the most famous sequence, where Mickey Mouse is reintroduced to cinema audiences for
The Sorcerer's Apprentice followed by Stravinsky's
Rites of Spring, showing the birth cycle of our planet.
A scene from Greek mythology plays out against the backdrop of Beethoven's
Pastoral Symphony before
Dance of the Hours takes us into a comic ballet scene with hippos and elephants, and finally
Night on Bald Mountain features a
danse macabre as the Devil summons forth the dead from their graves. An odd one to end on, though the dead are sent back to their rest at the end and it finishes with the
Ave Maria and a procession of monks.
In essence, it has to be accepted that
Fantasia was an animated movie – perhaps the first one ever – if not actually intended for then definitely aimed at adults. It's hard to see what children would have got out of it, other than the dances and the flashing lights, and of course Mickey Mouse and his unruly mop. But over the course of two hours, you could see kids very easily getting bored, and the music would likely have done little to assuage that boredom. So really,
Fantasia sets the most precedents, at this point, for an animated full-length movie:
1. It has, basically, no cast
2. It has no speech save that of the narrator
3. It survives entirely on classical music as a soundtrack
4. It was the first to use stereo sound
5. It was the longest featured animation at that point
6. It was the first to try to reintroduce an old (perhaps even, at this time, in danger of being forgotten) character and succeed in raising him back to, and then astronomically above, the original level of his popularity
7. It was the first animated film made primarily for adults
8. It was the first full-length animation to mix in live action (Winsor McCay did this of course, but his movie was much shorter and more basic)
9. It was the first animated movie not to follow a definite, planned storyline and to use different sequences (Lotte reiniger's
Die Abenteure des Prinzen Achmed uses sequences, but they're all from the same source)
That's a lot of firsts. Disney was always a man to take a gamble. They laughed at his plans for
Snow White in the same way as Winsor McCay's associates laughed when he claimed he could make drawings move, and both proved their doubters completely wrong. RKO worried about his insistence in installing his
Fantasound system in theatres, and the length of
Fantasia, and they were proved wrong too.
Inevitably, much of the staid and stuffy classical music community railed and sniffed at the movie, declaring their music was being debased, and arguing over which parts had been changed or omitted. Stravinsky, the only living composer at the time of those whose music was used, was unimpressed. I suppose when you've created serious music it's a bit of a culture shock to see hippos dancing to it! Lighten up, guys!
With or without these objections, it would seem that Walt Disney was unstoppable, and his studios would certainly dominate cinema animation for decades to come, though soon enough others would get in on the action, as we will see. Nevertheless, for now everything Disney touched, while not initially turning to gold, would turn out to be a winner. And that would be doubly true of his next two outings.