I was slightly nervous about making myself sit down for two hours to watch this one. As much as I enjoy animation and (at least some) classical music, I am an expert on neither, and I remembered being slightly bored when I tried watching it a few years ago. I don't think I ever particularly took to it as a kid ether, which I guess is good because I can't remember ever having nightmares from the "Night on Bald Mountain" segment.
Anyway, it turned out I shouldn't have worried: my attention only lagged for a little during the middle, and I got through it just fine.
That said, I think for me, this concept would work better as a series of shorts than as a two-hour movie. I'd have a much easier time focusing on and appreciating them individually than I would watching them all back-to-back, I think. But this may not be any fault of the movie's; I am an uncultured swine with the attention span of a gnat. If you're more into art and music than I am and haven't had your brain totally rotted by the Internet, maybe it's the most captivating two hours you could ever spend! (And I should emphasize again that I do love most of the segments.) This will also be an easy response to format, because I can just go through the different segments.
So.
1. Toccata & Fugue in D Minor (Bach)
Shamefully, my first thought when this started was, "hey, I have this on Magic Piano!" That is the level of appreciation for the finer things I'm dealing with here.
The whole "drawing sound/the concert experience" thing is a REALLY cool idea. People must have been weirded out when Fantasia premiered and THIS was their introduction to it though (assuming they didn't already know very much about the movie). I'd be interested to see what the animation process was like for this! Seems like a difficult thing to collaborate on- how do you get four or five different people to all agree on what a piece of music should "look" like? (Even if they were all smoking the same crack pipe, I'm given to understand it would have different effects on different people.) Crazy shit, my friends.
2. Nutcracker Suite (Tchaikovsky)
Disney's Fantasia: the reason I associate the "Nutcracker Suite" with morning dew and flowers and frost and not, y'know. Anything from The Nutcracker. Anyway, those are some racially questionable animated mushrooms, huh!
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| I'm... is this offensive? I'm pretty sure this is offensive, right? |
Now, the fish I'm positive are offensive. Or, at the very least, troubling. What is it with 1940s!Disney's preoccupation with weirdly feminized/sexualized fish? (Looking at you, Cleo.) They're fish! I know they're "Arabian" and that means they MUST be all coy and heavy-lidded and sexily-veiled and harem-y, but... wait. No. No, that doesn't mean that at all! God damn it, Disney, this is why we can't have nice things.
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| This ethnically-stereotyped fish wants to sleep with you. WHAT THE FUCK. |
I absolutely love "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy," and I love Fantasia's interpretation of said, but the ending should look so much more epic! That's the best part of the music, and the animation is just... slowly-falling and twinkling snowflakes. Skating would look so much more dynamic! I am disappoint.
(I should mention I have no idea what the ballet is supposed to look like, so maybe the music is actually intended to go with fairly languid action, but damn it, it doesn't sound that way.)
3. The Sorcerer's Apprentice (Dukas)
It feels like Mickey should get entrance applause here. And appearances like this are why I still have affection for Mickey even though he's an unrelenting dickbag to his girlfriend and his dog in House of Mouse.
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| Awwww! |
Anyway, it's appropriate that he should be in this movie (instead of Dopey, like some people originally wanted), given that the whole "syncing animation to music" thing is, y'know. Named for him, and everything. And this style actually impresses me a lot more than the "pure music" thing they did with the Fugue. That is undoubtedly cool, but this is more circumscribed: tell a coherent story and coordinate it perfectly with a preexisting piece of music. And the segment feels completely natural the whole way through, and it just works, and I think that is so freaking cool. (Yeah, Sleeping Beauty will just blow my little MIND when I get to that.)
4. Rite of Spring (Stravinsky)
Ahem.
The volcano part is really cool! But this is probably the low point of my attention in this movie. It get insanely fucking depressing too! SPOILER ALERT: the stegosaurus dies horribly. And that upsets me because in second grade when we all had to study a dinosaur, I had the stegosaurus, and stegosauruses are my favorite, you guys, and this was so painful for me. ;___; I'm not even including a picture because it's too upsetting.
Oh, and then all the dinosaurs (who we'd previously seen peacefully eating leaves, and leading their little ones along, and generally being weirdly cute for giant reptilian monsters) go on a death march, slowly starving to death in a horrible fashion. Time passes and their bleached bones are crushed by volcanic movement.
You know, for kids!
5. Pastoral Symphony (Beethoven)
My VHS from the 1990s doesn't have Sunflower, of course. I've never actually watched the scenes with her in them, though I've seen screencaps and... to be honest, I don't really feel any need to watch them. It's offensive on a level that makes the orientalist harem-slutfish look tasteful.
I have no good way to segue out of that. Racism is bad, kids. Don't do it. Anyway, to move right along and address the version of this scene that I watched:
Disney's mythological setting is pretty, but I find the countryside evoked by Beethoven a lot more appealing, and sort of wish they'd done something with that, even though it would sort of defeat the point of the movie. *shrug* Whatever. The important thing here is:
BOOBIES. Freaky, nipple-less boobies. Attached to pastel-colored lady centaurs.
This is a weird movie, y'all. And cupids have weird ideas about fashion.
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| Pink-Haired Lady Centaur is right to look doubtful. |
FOREVER ALONE
FOREVER ALONETTE
... And then they have sex? And then... a naked baby's ass becomes a heart? SO ROMANTIC OMG.
OH NO, OMINOUS MUSIC. WHATEVER COULD IT BE?
Zeus: Y HALLO THAR
I didn't know Zeus moonlighted as a militant temperance reformer.
So, basically he fucks all the shit up, and then gets sort of bored and casual about the shit-fucking-up. This is exactly as big a douchebag as Zeus is. Disney got it in the 1940s, but they lost it by the time they did Hercules.
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| I too enjoy the occasional glass of rainbow. THIS MOVIE. |
5. Dance of the Hours (Ponchielli)
I don't actually have a lot to say about this one. I can't decide if the alligators are murderous rapists, or gentlemen, or what. They kind of started out murder-and-rape-y, but then the hippos were all "Dammmmn, I wanna take a ride on your disco stick. Chase me, big boy!" and then the alligators are like "kindly allow me to twirl you, milady!" and I just... don't get what is happening. Then again, I was pretty exhausted after the Rite of Spring and the Pastoral, so it's entirely possible I just missed something. Whatever.
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| DAT ASS. |
6. Night on Bald Mountain (Mussorgsky)/Ave Maria (Schubert)
THIS IS THE FREAKIEST OF SHIT, YO. But it's intended to be the freakiest of shit, so it's awesome. But scary (seriously. I'm 21 goddamn years old and I still sort of ran to turn the lights on as soon as the movie was over).
Also, an incredibly important and insightful observation:
Only evil has nipples in the Fantasia-verse. ~*THE MORE YOU KNOW*~
Then blah blah blah, good triumphs, light chases out the darkness, whatever. FREAKIEST. OF. SHIT.
It's so cool.
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