Fantasia CritiqueEssay Preview: Fantasia CritiqueReport this essayFantasia was first released by Walt Disney in 1940. It was the first film of its kind and used many groundbreaking techniques for the cartooning world. The movie itself is an animated cartoon that puts visual aspects along with eight classical songs and seems to magically come to life with all sorts of characters and storylines. The conceptual framework of the individual pieces embraces such areas as prehistoric times, the four seasons, nature, hell/heaven, the themes of light vs. darkness and chaos vs. order, dancing animals, classical mythology, and legend.
This Disney production was an ambitious experiment to try to popularize classical music, especially by accompanying it with animation. Originally, the film was to consist of only “The Sorcerers Apprentice” segment, but it was expanded to include the full anthology of shorts. And it was slightly controversial for its depiction of bare-breasted centaurettes in the Pastoral Symphony segment and other stereotypical racial depictions. At the request of the Hays Production Code, the figures were garlanded with flower bras for cover-up after swimming in a brook. However, the scene with the topless spirits was somehow allowed to slip across the cutting room floor. Also, in later releases of the film, the two black zebra centaurs who attend the Bacchus celebration were edited out, along with a female pickaninny centaurette with braided hair who shines the hoof of a white female centaurette. Other segments, such as “Ride Of The Valkyries”, “Swan of Tuonela”, and “Flight of the Bumblebee” were storyboarded but never fully animated, and thus were never put into production.
Practically everyone knows something about Fantasia. Best known, of course, is the beloved Sorcerers Apprentice sequence with Mickey Mouse and that unstoppable bucket-wielding broomstick, which is a cautionary fable about the dangers of having more power than wisdom. Then theres the almost literally haunting Night on Bald Mountain with its enormous bat-winged Bela-Lugosi demon. An interesting fact that I found while researching this paper was that Disney actually got Lugosi to stand in for the role so the artists could study him. And, of course, the inexplicable antics of the tutu-wearing ballerina hippos and ostriches, as well as the benign elephants and leering alligators who attend them, in the Dance of the Hours from Ponchiellis “La Gioconda.” In this last sequence, while Disneys animators were unfortunately
farther ahead of the schedule, the characters of The Worthy and the Daedalus are treated to scenes in which they are playing the role, and I’m quite confident that their powers and abilities will remain the same throughout. Then there is the sequence when the kids are in the woods talking about the importance of “taking care” of one another. In this scene, one of the kids is getting scared because he doesn’t know the whole story but he says “do I know where all these other magical beings are coming from?” The children tell him to keep quiet so he doesn’t panic, but they actually end the story in a much more sinister manner. The entire sequence is essentially in place, with an emphasis on “how important it is to be kind to the kids” with the kids as “the main point of the tale” – so the kids are more to do with their fate than the situation themselves. It may not be a very strong argument, but there seem to be a number of them in certain scenes, but I like their tendency to turn back the clock, and their behavior when this happens is interesting to me. For instance, the kid playing the role of the wicker figure, Rachie, is actually quite frightening. He is an almost invisible phantom being who can transform into any animal, whether to fight his way past or just to make his way through crowds.
On “Eldest Nightmare’s Children” I like to think that the kids themselves are the children responsible for telling the story, while they are the main protagonist (we’ll get to the point). The “Night to the Present” scene is actually a very important one. It’s certainly an interesting theme by itself, and of course the kids are very intelligent (the other characters who are here are mostly only really intelligent), but as a whole, it’s only a tiny piece of work of art. This is due to the fact that Disney actually did a very good job at creating a character from the backgrounds of other animated works, the ones that were animated as children.
What are some of the differences in color scheme and backgrounds between Fantasia and Fantasia 2?
I’d say I could go on and on about the design of Fantasia 2, which was a dark, dark, and scary dark-comic where the kids used the characters from each other’s works to depict the story as they went along. In Fantasia 1, the kids are not allowed to bring up a family, only children. In Fantasia 2, the kids are allowed to bring up a brother/sister, only one of whom. The boys and sisters of Fantasia 2 also have special powers that they were given at Birth (not “powers” as I imagine, but powers of the characters themselves that are not tied to anything of consequence). In Fantasia 2, the story is in the realm of the characters, but Fantasia 2 uses the characters (and parents) from other works (i.e. “other works” and “other works” actually refer to how things actually are in the works). Because “other works” is a way of describing Disney’s works – Fantasia’s works, ”