A Non-review by Professor Popinjay
Fantasia (1940)
Fantasia 2000 (1999)
Disney’s Fantasia was meant to be an ongoing project with new featurettes being constantly added and other parts gradually being retired with every new theatrical release. Personally I thought this was a neat idea but sadly Disney kicked this off all wrong and it failed.
This was partially due to the insistence by Disney to equip each theater that was to show Fantasia with Fantasound, a procedure that would run about 85,000 dollars per theater. The other problem was that most of it was boring af!
Now don’t get me wrong, I love classical music as much as the next man. Probably MORE than the next man so long as the next man isn’t Itzhak Perlman or Yo-Yo Ma. Owning the Fantasia Soundtrack on CD was definitely part of fostering my love.
When I was in third grade a violinist performed for my class a classical piece. She then asked if anyone knew what song she played. I excitedly responded with “A Night on Bald Mountain by Mussorgsky!” as if I expected the whole class to say it with me. I thought everyone had been listening to the Fantasia soundtrack religiously like I had. That might’ve been about the time my classmates began to realize there was something a little different about me. I would relish this realization.
One time I was listening to music on my portable CD player after a youth event. A friend asked what I was listening to. “The Blue Danube” I responded. “Oh?” Said he. “Are they good?”
He assumed The Blue Danube was a band. It was a very educational conversation for the both of us. We eventually concluded that I was listening to a band called Straussy-Strauss and the Danube Bunch.
Sometimes I’ll start whistling “The Hungarian Rhapsody” or “Rhapsody in Blue” or “Bohemian Rhapsody” and I’ll have an audience by the end of it. Apparently it’s unusual to whistle the entirety of an 8-11 minute song.
I would drive certain friends nuts because I would whistle ahead of music I knew well while listening to a recording. While I was whistling ahead of Sergei Prokofiev’s Piano Concertos No. 2 and 4, my ex-wife, upon realizing I was whistling the music before the music got there, shouted at me “That’s NOT NORMAL! People don’t have obscure classical music memorized like you do!”
I was just flabbergasted that she considered Prokofiev’s Concerto’s No. 2 and 4 obscure!
But half of 1940s Fantasia was just excerpts from Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker Suite and the other half was Igor Stravinsky’s The Right of Spring which goes on for 22 minutes too long. Combined with the Arabian Dance from Nutcracker these two pieces make for a total freaking snooze fest!
Frankly I think if they were going to use so much from The Nutcracker Suite, why not just do an animated feature of The Nutcracker Suite. It makes zero sense. So many other companies have picked up The Nutcracker and done their own thing with it but it could have been Disney’s a long time ago and everything else would be a knock-off by now. Shoot, I don’t know why I am arguing on Disney’s behalf. They already own everything else.
Even what I would call the spotlight feature, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice with Mickey, has the pacing of frozen molasses. It just takes FOREVER to get going.
Fantasia (1940) has some amazing animation, much of which has become iconic if for no other reason than it’s been around forever. Some segments are entertaining but sitting down to plod through this in its entirety is rough. I recommend it for insomniacs and somnambulists.
Fantasia 2000 (1999) on the other hand is almost entirely a breath of fresh air in comparison. My only real complaint about it is that along with the new features they (gnomes) included The Sorcerer’s Apprentice again. Zzzzzzzz!
The rest of the featurettes are great though! Whether they are abstract drawings or fully rendered cgi, the short films (with the exception of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice) are each fully engaging and interesting from start to finish. Even the inevitable slower parts of the music are complimented by imagery that tells an interesting story. No drawn-out ten-minute shots of galaxies slowly swirling about or volcanoes spouting smoke on primordial Earth. Now we have whales flying out of the water to Respighi’s The Pines of Rome, an Al Hirschfeld art-style segment about New York life during the Depression to George Girshwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” (watch it with me to hear me whistle the whole thing!), and a grand finale with Igor Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite depicting a forest spirit coping beautifully with the onset and aftermath of a forest fire, followed by the continuing of growth and life! It’s magnificent!
Best of all, Donald and Daisy Duck get the spotlight for a while in an adorable Noah’s ark story set to Sir Edward Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance” (that song we hear at graduation ceremonies).
Even the segues from one featurette to another are festooned with interesting and hilarious people such as Bette Midler and Steve Martin.
Fantasia 2000 was so well done it makes me wish Disney had done it correctly from the first instalment. If they were all like this, I’d love to see a new edition year after year. I’d make it a tradition. As it stands however, I’m happy we have what we have. Word on the street is that Fantasia projects were set for 2006 and another for 2021 but the projects were scrapped both times. It seems the only person to whom this project sparked any interest is a third grader with a love for classical music and superb animation, but he couldn’t afford enough tickets to make this project worth recurrence.
I remember overhearing a customer at my place of employment musing about Fantasia 2000. He said, “You ever watch that Fantasia 2000? It had them whales flying around and shit. Gotta wonder what them fellers down there in Californy are smoking.”
I find myself inundated by people of this mindset. I’ve no inclination to describe them further as I’m sure any description would defy consistency and be full of exceptions. It’s just sad to me that beauty is subjective and what is considered by some to be a masterpiece is not comprehended by a narrow-minded majority.
Or perhaps that sense of wonder and passion is just somewhere else. Research reveals several conglomerates of amateur, fledgling, and semi-professional animators and musicians working together to perpetually create music video pieces akin to Disney’s Fantasia. Walt’s original plans for Fantasia may not have played out the way he wanted, but I think he would agree, inspiring creative people to get in on the game is a far greater result.
“If you can dream it, you can do it.” -Walt Disney
One such project that comes to mind is the phenomenal Epic, a musical journey from the perspective of the Trojans. It might not be classical music in this case, but it is still really really really good and it’s made simply by people passionate about the craft.
Professor Popinjay's Compendium of Perspicacity 
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