Masterpiece: `A Promising Monstrosity' --- Walt Disney's valiant effort to move animation beyond mere cartoons
By John Canemaker
1117 words
10/22/2005
The Wall Street Journal
(Copyright (c) 2005, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)
`FANTASIA," Walt Disney's 1940 animated "concert feature," visualizing classical music conducted by Leopold Stokowski, remains the most experimental long-form film ever produced by a Hollywood studio -- a singular effort by the quintessential animation factory to move beyond cartoon narrative conventions and explore alternative storytelling possibilities through color, graphics, mood, sound and motion.
Technically, it was the first film to utilize stereophonic sound. For example, bells in Shubert's "Ave Maria" rang from the back of the theatre and an earthquake in Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" seemed to happen right under the moviegoers' seats.
More important, however, the bold creative reach of "Fantasia" continues to stir audiences and inspire filmmakers: especially animators who despair of their medium ever moving beyond fairytales, family fare and bathroom humor.
"This is not the cartoon medium," Walt Disney admonished the production's crew in 1938. "It should not be limited to cartoons. We have worlds to conquer here."
Instead of finding the conventional narrative methods of "Pinocchio" (also released in 1940) and "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" (1937), "Fantasia's" audiences experienced nonlinear, free-form, even abstract storytelling.
Mickey Mouse, battling magical brooms to Dukas's "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," was the only familiar character in an odd cast of centaurs, fauns, unicorns, dancing mushrooms and flowers, hippos in tutus, gods, monsters, Kandinsky-like motion graphics; at one point, even the film's soundtrack got into the act as a personality-plus entertainer.
The $2 million-plus experiment failed at the box office, its innovations provoking bitter conflicts between music and film critics. Audiences, dismayed by its length (125 minutes plus intermission) and unfamiliar format, stayed away. "Fantasia" did not turn a profit until the 1960s, when new audiences attuned to drug-culture experiences discovered its "trippy" visual splendors.
The movie, to be sure, is an imperfect creation. But that is what makes it so exciting and alive. A contemporary review called it "a promising monstrosity." To me, the film is a sacred monster: a sprawling mass of aesthetic lapses and failures of taste and nerve that reside simultaneously beside splendid, brave, beautiful and (to use my students' favorite adjective) awesome creativity.
When other animation studios were turning out cat-and-mouse chases, Disney proposed a progression of abstract forms as the "story" in Bach's "Toccata and Fugue." Although compromised by representational images, most of it is nonobjective, a daring choice in an era when abstract art was little appreciated.
Equally audacious was the choice to visualize Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring." Only 27 years removed from its riotous Paris premiere, its atonality, crashing chords and free musical form were still considered avant-garde.
Disney took the music on a "documentary" tour of the Earth's origins with realistically drawn volcanoes, earthquakes and dinosaurs. Scientifically inaccurate (the battling T. Rex and Stegosaurus lived 100 million years apart), its thrilling animation and music nevertheless instilled a love of science and prehistoric life in generations of children, including Stephen Jay Gould and Steven Spielberg.
As for the sublime ballet satire starring Nureyev-like alligators and seductive hippopotami, Michael Powell said it best: "Go see it, if you're in the business. You can learn more from seeing `The Dance of the Hours' by Walt Disney than from spending a year glumly staring at the television screen."
Disney once described "Fantasia's" format as "flexible and fun to work with -- not really a concert, not a vaudeville or a revue, but a grand mixture of comedy, fantasy, ballet, drama, impressionism, color, sound, and epic fury." He understood that animation's inherent unruliness would allow him to mix elements of design, settings, costumes, lighting, color, music and dance to create a synthetic reality.
Has there ever been a lovelier evocation of Victorian fairy paintings than the "Nutcracker Suite"? And while much in the Beethoven "Pastorale" sequence is candy-colored kitsch -- bare-breasted but nipple-free "centaurettes" resembling Lana Turner in an MGM college musical and too many bare-bottomed cupids fluttering about like vinegar flies -- when audiences soar alongside Pegasus through clouds over Mount Olympus, they experience a staging of mythology that no medium but animation could do as well.
Brilliant performances abound: Animator Art Babbitt offers one minute of pure charm in the choreography of "The Nutcracker's" dancing mushrooms, creating a delightful personality in one feckless little fungus. In emotional and physical contrast, animator Vladimir Tytla powerfully evokes revelry and remorse in his devil-giant on Bald Mountain.
Disney envisioned "Fantasia" as less a movie than a fusion of art and technology, an ideal that visionaries from Pythagoras to Scriabin also dreamed of. "Fantasia" was planned as a "perpetual" entertainment, with new segments playing in repertory -- a multimedia event on the order of Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk, from which audiences would gain a new aesthetic experience.
Preproduction proposals reveal ideas for viewing the "Toccata" through 3-D glasses and shooting the film in a wide-screen format. Also suggested: wafting floral scents into the theater for the "Nutcracker" and incense for "Ave Maria."
Ultimately, technical and financial constraints permitted only the innovation of dimensional sound: music recorded on eight separate channels and played back in theaters equipped with 36 speakers behind the screen and 54 others in the orchestra and balcony. The film's visual miracles were entirely hand-crafted, using pencil, paint and mechanical and optical wizardry.
What could fulfill "Fantasia's" monstrous promise today? Certainly not the pale sequel "Fantasia 2000" (1999), which timidly imitated the original rather than using it as a starting point.
A modern project in the spirit of "Fantasia's" innovation might integrate the latest technological breakthroughs -- sentient CGI, for example -- with hand-drawn animation. It could select its visual and aural inspiration from all the world's cultures, blending dance, acting, poetry, song and music in ways not yet imagined.
But the risks today would easily equal those facing Disney in 1940 -- and, more important, would require a visionary equal to Disney to achieve it.
And so, I fear that "Fantasia" will remain a unique experiment, a lonely signpost on a road not taken. As Otis Ferguson wrote in 1940 in the New Republic, "Dull as it is toward the end, ridiculous as it is in the bend of knee before Art, and taking one thing with another, it is one of the strange and beautiful things that have happened in the world."
---
Mr. Canemaker is professor/director of animation at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. His animated film "The Moon and the Son" was shown at the Telluride Film Festival.
By John Canemaker
1117 words
10/22/2005
The Wall Street Journal
(Copyright (c) 2005, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)
`FANTASIA," Walt Disney's 1940 animated "concert feature," visualizing classical music conducted by Leopold Stokowski, remains the most experimental long-form film ever produced by a Hollywood studio -- a singular effort by the quintessential animation factory to move beyond cartoon narrative conventions and explore alternative storytelling possibilities through color, graphics, mood, sound and motion.
Technically, it was the first film to utilize stereophonic sound. For example, bells in Shubert's "Ave Maria" rang from the back of the theatre and an earthquake in Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" seemed to happen right under the moviegoers' seats.
More important, however, the bold creative reach of "Fantasia" continues to stir audiences and inspire filmmakers: especially animators who despair of their medium ever moving beyond fairytales, family fare and bathroom humor.
"This is not the cartoon medium," Walt Disney admonished the production's crew in 1938. "It should not be limited to cartoons. We have worlds to conquer here."
Instead of finding the conventional narrative methods of "Pinocchio" (also released in 1940) and "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" (1937), "Fantasia's" audiences experienced nonlinear, free-form, even abstract storytelling.
Mickey Mouse, battling magical brooms to Dukas's "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," was the only familiar character in an odd cast of centaurs, fauns, unicorns, dancing mushrooms and flowers, hippos in tutus, gods, monsters, Kandinsky-like motion graphics; at one point, even the film's soundtrack got into the act as a personality-plus entertainer.
The $2 million-plus experiment failed at the box office, its innovations provoking bitter conflicts between music and film critics. Audiences, dismayed by its length (125 minutes plus intermission) and unfamiliar format, stayed away. "Fantasia" did not turn a profit until the 1960s, when new audiences attuned to drug-culture experiences discovered its "trippy" visual splendors.
The movie, to be sure, is an imperfect creation. But that is what makes it so exciting and alive. A contemporary review called it "a promising monstrosity." To me, the film is a sacred monster: a sprawling mass of aesthetic lapses and failures of taste and nerve that reside simultaneously beside splendid, brave, beautiful and (to use my students' favorite adjective) awesome creativity.
When other animation studios were turning out cat-and-mouse chases, Disney proposed a progression of abstract forms as the "story" in Bach's "Toccata and Fugue." Although compromised by representational images, most of it is nonobjective, a daring choice in an era when abstract art was little appreciated.
Equally audacious was the choice to visualize Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring." Only 27 years removed from its riotous Paris premiere, its atonality, crashing chords and free musical form were still considered avant-garde.
Disney took the music on a "documentary" tour of the Earth's origins with realistically drawn volcanoes, earthquakes and dinosaurs. Scientifically inaccurate (the battling T. Rex and Stegosaurus lived 100 million years apart), its thrilling animation and music nevertheless instilled a love of science and prehistoric life in generations of children, including Stephen Jay Gould and Steven Spielberg.
As for the sublime ballet satire starring Nureyev-like alligators and seductive hippopotami, Michael Powell said it best: "Go see it, if you're in the business. You can learn more from seeing `The Dance of the Hours' by Walt Disney than from spending a year glumly staring at the television screen."
Disney once described "Fantasia's" format as "flexible and fun to work with -- not really a concert, not a vaudeville or a revue, but a grand mixture of comedy, fantasy, ballet, drama, impressionism, color, sound, and epic fury." He understood that animation's inherent unruliness would allow him to mix elements of design, settings, costumes, lighting, color, music and dance to create a synthetic reality.
Has there ever been a lovelier evocation of Victorian fairy paintings than the "Nutcracker Suite"? And while much in the Beethoven "Pastorale" sequence is candy-colored kitsch -- bare-breasted but nipple-free "centaurettes" resembling Lana Turner in an MGM college musical and too many bare-bottomed cupids fluttering about like vinegar flies -- when audiences soar alongside Pegasus through clouds over Mount Olympus, they experience a staging of mythology that no medium but animation could do as well.
Brilliant performances abound: Animator Art Babbitt offers one minute of pure charm in the choreography of "The Nutcracker's" dancing mushrooms, creating a delightful personality in one feckless little fungus. In emotional and physical contrast, animator Vladimir Tytla powerfully evokes revelry and remorse in his devil-giant on Bald Mountain.
Disney envisioned "Fantasia" as less a movie than a fusion of art and technology, an ideal that visionaries from Pythagoras to Scriabin also dreamed of. "Fantasia" was planned as a "perpetual" entertainment, with new segments playing in repertory -- a multimedia event on the order of Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk, from which audiences would gain a new aesthetic experience.
Preproduction proposals reveal ideas for viewing the "Toccata" through 3-D glasses and shooting the film in a wide-screen format. Also suggested: wafting floral scents into the theater for the "Nutcracker" and incense for "Ave Maria."
Ultimately, technical and financial constraints permitted only the innovation of dimensional sound: music recorded on eight separate channels and played back in theaters equipped with 36 speakers behind the screen and 54 others in the orchestra and balcony. The film's visual miracles were entirely hand-crafted, using pencil, paint and mechanical and optical wizardry.
What could fulfill "Fantasia's" monstrous promise today? Certainly not the pale sequel "Fantasia 2000" (1999), which timidly imitated the original rather than using it as a starting point.
A modern project in the spirit of "Fantasia's" innovation might integrate the latest technological breakthroughs -- sentient CGI, for example -- with hand-drawn animation. It could select its visual and aural inspiration from all the world's cultures, blending dance, acting, poetry, song and music in ways not yet imagined.
But the risks today would easily equal those facing Disney in 1940 -- and, more important, would require a visionary equal to Disney to achieve it.
And so, I fear that "Fantasia" will remain a unique experiment, a lonely signpost on a road not taken. As Otis Ferguson wrote in 1940 in the New Republic, "Dull as it is toward the end, ridiculous as it is in the bend of knee before Art, and taking one thing with another, it is one of the strange and beautiful things that have happened in the world."
---
Mr. Canemaker is professor/director of animation at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. His animated film "The Moon and the Son" was shown at the Telluride Film Festival.