The Making of Fantasia

in the late 1930s a young filmmaker named Walt Disney occupied a unique position in popular culture his creations were famous around the world the characters he had originated were beloved friends of people everywhere at the same time Disney's constant endeavor to improve and expand his filmmaking medium had made him a darling of the cultural elite a truly significant modern artist from a fusion of these qualities would evolve one of the most extraordinary and influential films of the 20th century in the short span of a decade Walt Disney had evolved from a penniless dreamer to an international celebrity even decades later however Disney was humble about his popular and artistic ascent I only hope that we never lose sight of one thing that was all started by a mouse it started with Steamboat Willie of course in 1928 in the advent of sound it was sound that put Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse on the map Walt Disney was a visionary he was an artist and so he he made the soundtracks innovative interesting creative people responded to Nicki and the music was kind of incidental it was commenting on the action Walt thought now if we do another series of shorts this would be in the late 20s and we had music and we then went off and illustrated the music which would be the silly symphony concept this was a series in which they experimented with special effects of color with the way that action can be matched to music Walt was first and foremost a storyteller but Walt was the storyteller as techno buff free tone Technicolor came along in 1932 and he took a chance on it he had an exclusive contract for two years with Technicolor and so his silly Symphony series just bounded ahead in terms of quality he had a sense of place that meant you walked in and lived in those wonderlands and so you needed a sense of depth and so he got his technicians to develop the multi-plane camera and with the multi-plane camera you go into those worlds but when you went into Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs you had a feeling of going into a story such as the best storytellers give you with their voice but Walt gave it to you with all your senses involved except smell and he was always working on that as won't Disney developed his craft over the years he recognized the growing importance and power of another substantial and personal element of his medium I think he loved music to start with I think he understood it as a as an equally powerful means of communication actually Walt was not a musician in the sense that he played an instrument he didn't read music but he had an instinct he had a very definite reaction to what was right for his films and he lived and breathed music in the sense that when he looked at a picture he could almost hear what he wanted to hear in his brain he was an actual musician without playing the instrument the late 1930s were heady times at the Walt Disney studio Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs had just been released to overwhelming critical and public praise the attendant financial success of Snow White afforded Disney the first real fiscal security had enjoyed in years he began ambitious plans for a new studio complex in Burbank a custom-designed facility to house the eclectic and unsurpassed talents he had assembled over the previous decade people who are at the studio then say it was a time of tremendous creative growth and enormous stimulation because they were being asked to think harder to perform more fully and to stretch themselves and push themselves in ways they'd never even thought of before we had a staff there that I know that Walt felt was the finest that could be assembled and that he could do anything with those people and that he had the money to do anything he wanted and this was a rare position to be in to have those two things you see the studio was in such a formative period at that time and there were men from literally from all over the world there are over a thousand artists and he had the finest draftsman and the finest painters in animation with such anomaly it's one thing to have live-action films but it's another thing to him an art form of its own that's sort of owned by one guy at the time you know Walt Disney held a unique position in America and certainly in Hollywood at that time he was considered a contemporary genius and his studio was a mecca for visiting dignitaries and celebrities throughout that decade Walt Disney's films during the nineteen thirty were like a lodestone or a magnet for all these creative people who wanted to to work for him or people that he wanted to go out and get for the studio for specific projects flush with critical and commercial success a confident and prosperous Walt Disney began what would become his most unusual innovative and personal film as it happened before Disney initiated his innovation with a steadfast Mouse Mickey was in 1937 world famous and world beloved Mickey is a cheerful fella who wants to have a spectacular lot of fun without being malicious this kind of character was not as much fun for the story department to write about then Donald Duck who was the essence of frustration for Donald things never really worked out for Mickey things always worked out to help keep his story team interested in Mickey Disney envisioned an advancement in the sophistication of Mickey's roles and acting ability Walt thought why not take a piece of so-called classical music really first-rate music top grade music Ducasse Sorcerer's Apprentice and fit Mickey's actions to that Sorcerer's Apprentice was a lavishly created film I mean Walt pulled all the stops up put the best people in the studio working on it a chance meeting at a Hollywood night spot brought Disney together with an unexpected and celebrated collaborator so the story goes Walt Disney met Leopold Stokowski at a restaurant called Chasen's in Hollywood and Mae had dinner together and while they were talking Walt explained that he was working on a new film well that's what started I was doing this Sorcerer's Apprentice with Mickey Mouse and I happened to have dinner one night with stakhovski Vince took off he said oh I would love to conduct that for you you know well that led to not only doing this one little short subject but it got us involved where I did all of Fantasia and before I knew it I ended up spending four hundred some odd thousand dollars getting music with szpakowski but we were in that it was a point of no return we would add made it to the American public of the 1930s famed conductor Leopold Stokowski was the embodiment of classical music Stachowski became a very popular figure because he was a charismatic man he had a very striking look to him which in fact was caricatured in many cartoons he was a celebrity even that part of the public that never listened to the classics they knew who he was so a collaboration between Walt Disney and Leopold Stokowski was a collaboration of two gigantically popular figures in America the common ground I think between Stachowski and Walt was that they were both really big-time in their own way Walt was very much of a self-promoter which is not a bad thing to say about anybody but he understood instinctively how to get publicity how to fascinate people he was a great storyteller and a lot of the stories he told her about Walt you know so it's it's this the way he was Stachowski it was very much the same way with music he was the popularizer of classical music in his day Stachowski and Disney assembled an elaborate Orchestra session to record the score for The Sorcerer's Apprentice the session was done in January of 1938 at the path a studios in Culver City where a shooting stage was configured as a recording stage to accommodate a 100 piece hand-picked studio Orchestra and they worked around the clock and then recorded interestingly from midnight until 3:00 in the morning and Tchaikovsky said that the reason for this is that the guys were all drinking coffee the musicians and everybody was up and keyed and induced a even more of a drive and a perfection but the expense and the effort involved in recording the orchestra bringing in Stachowski and going through all of this labor to make just one short subject even to wall start the seemed a little unwieldy the whole film was probably three times as expensive as the usual Mickey Mouse or silly Symphony so Walt's brother Roy who dealt with the budgets was very upset and said we're never going to make our money back on this but my dad really believe in when Walt was doing he just didn't want to spend too much money doing it because there had to be a little left over to pay salaries and all that sort of thing Stachowski meanwhile was all over all about this is a great beginning for something much larger which is to bring classical music to the world by way of animation and every piece of classical music in the world would lend itself to this approach you know and Walt hook line and sinker and of course it was a great idea in any case and so he said well let's make a feature let's do a whole bunch of musical pieces classical pieces will will create a concert yeah that's it we'll do a concert feature and have Stachowski conduct the whole thing we began to hear while talking about this concert feature and we said a lot what's he going to do what's he up to now because you never knew hot wall was going to be thinking of next and usually by the time we heard it it was pretty well set in vaults mine and then there were all these story conferences and they weren't story conferences as much as selecting a repertoire that they would use for the concert so you have not only Walt Disney and stakhovski they brought in teams Taylor who was a not only a composer but he was a writer and he was a critic a music critic in addition to advising on the content of the concert feature Taylor would assume an on-camera role as the master of ceremonies addressing the audience and establishing a musical and artistic context think of the most popular sports commentator Howard Cosell Bob Costas anybody who carried a name well that's what deems Taylor was the world of classical music in the 1930s and 40s they had a three week meeting in 1938 in the fall and they just sat around and listen to classical music and they thought we could do this with this and this with that and pretty soon Walt thought this can be a concert feature that never ends my room is just down the hall and over the side so that I could hear part of the music that's going on I'd say listening to what part of the hit no Beethoven rimsky-korsakov and all these things and I couldn't find out what Walt was thinking about but we knew it something very big and very different that was always the exciting thing about working up the studio you never knew what was coming up next and Walt was always miles ahead of you it was a wonderful thing this was sense that you had music and you had your story inside the music and you had to find it we could I think let loose our imaginations because with all we have for story with musical notes and we had to find images for those particular pieces but there's nothing more exciting if I'm music to match your idea for most of its development this concert feature was titled just that the concert feature both Disney and stakhovski knew that such a mundane title would never do for their flourishing masterwork Fantasia was one of the titles that they considered for the concert feature and it's a musical term meaning a free form of music and it said that they considered dozens of other titles but I've never been able to find out what they are and so Fantasia was the the one that stuck as the intoxicating collaboration of Fantasia ascended to ever loftier aspirations in music and art the enthusiasm of Walt Disney and Stachowski permeated the entire Disney organization well what was expanding his own horizons terrifically at that time now it suddenly he was into this classical music and dreaming of things that you wouldn't think of putting on the screen now all these violins going together and the things which ended up in the Toccata and Fugue which was just abstract music as they called it and the abstract symbols on the screen there gee who would dare put that up for anybody to look at the choice of the Toccata and Fugue was always considered to be a piece that would be abstract dreamlike a good way to begin the concert feature again this was a very daring thing to do because the only time that abstract films were done were by experimental artists generally probably over in Germany for the most part and here taking the Bach and which in itself was a daring thing to put what on a Disney film the design of it was based heavily on work done by Oscar fishing er who was a renowned abstract animator who made his own films in Germany in the 1920s and 30s he used geometric shapes like the circle and the triangle but in very intricate patterns and designs this was a type of film that was quite daring for the time in which it was made and particularly daring for Disney who was truly committed to representational art but the version that Oscar fishing er came up with was very abstract indeed and very fishing her indeed and as well got into Fantasia more deeply he wanted his abstraction so you end up with things like lines that go up and down that then become violin bows which is representational or they're put onto a horizon line or clouds are put in the background to orient the viewer rather than letting it just go as fishing girded with many things in abstractions in geometry geometrical shapes going at the same time so it's an interesting tension in this piece of music this this Toccata and Fugue section in which a battle for the audience is going on between Walt wanting to experiment more but being afraid to offend the audience given a fear of offending the audience it is interesting to note that Disney and Stachowski chose one of the most well known pieces of ballet music in the world Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite and then jettisoned its familiar story I think the Disney people said to themselves why should we be imitating what you can see in any high school auditorium every Christmas and they went off in a different direction they wanted more of an impression of the music as seen through the different phases of nature the seasons and I think what they did in this sequence which is so important is they demonstrated how they could personalize something abstract although they did toss out the the story of The Nutcracker the traditional story that we're all familiar with it still is balletic production except in this case it's not figures dancing so much human figures but it's leaves dancing and flowers dancing and mushrooms and that's out so it it still is a ballet but a ballet of nature and of natural forms nutcracker suite' is one of the most spectacular examples of animation that has ever been done animation at the time was the majority of it was a handmade art there are twenty-four drawings per second and each of those had to be transferred to cells celluloid acetate they had to be inked on the front painted on the back but on top of that then they had specialists come in with air brushes to soften the color then I had other people who would do dry brush they would take a bit of color and wipe that off on a cloth and then start to put it on so you get a sort of texture on it incredible stuff for each frame of those sequences it took an enormous amount of hand labor each cell which was only one twenty-fourth of a second it took them something I three or four hours to do with all those techniques and yet it's the simplest sort of thing it's what Disney artists saw when they went into a vacant lot and just looked at the plants that were growing and made drawings of them but Walt said the primary purpose of any of the fine arts is to arouse a purely emotional reaction in the beholder and here you get an emotional reaction from kapok seeds Fantasia's point of origin The Sorcerer's Apprentice now became the concert program's memorable centerpiece The Sorcerer's Apprentice is the only piece of music that was adhered to as it was written the story of the music was not altered in any way by the Disney artists it's the same story that dukkha intended in the music the abundant production values that stakhovski had lavished on the recording of the score were matched by Disney and his artists in the creation of the visuals not the least of which was a redesign for Mickey Mouse himself the design of Mickey Mouse had changed considerably from the 1920s in which he was a very rigid design of circles but to animate something that's a rigid circle is not that expressive and so little by little with different animators particularly Fred Moore he started to alter Mickey's design for the better he enlarged his cranium a little bit made a more childlike he most of all gave him a pear-shaped body rather than just a rigid circle that pear shape really worked as a malleable animatable form and that was very helpful when they got to do the sources apprentice which is a totally pantomime role so Mickey had to be extremely expressive in this on top of that they also changed his eyes we talked for some time of changing those eyes because he originally his eyes were this big mask around here well guys are that dealt larger and larger as you got more expressions and eyebrows and different things lines around the eyes until the area got so large when his eyes went over here for a looker over here it gave you a queasy feeling as an audience so the animator said can we put pupils inside the pupils and the big meeting big discussion about how are we going to do this when we do it or not and finally Milt Schaeffer said well maybe if we just changed one eye at a time so Mickey Mouse now had expressive eyes with pupils he had the pear-shaped body which was extremely expressive and with the acting of the animators he became as wonderfully expressive Charlie Chaplin you've got wonderful animators so les Clarke Fred Moore was the directing animator who really understood Mickey's personality and for the first time you have music which is fully commensurate with what that personality is I think most of the animators thought of Mickey as a kind of an incarnation of Walt although they drew the sorcerer to look like Waldman at the end when he raises that eyebrow that was that was Walt pure and simple in many ways the Rite of Spring was one of the most daring choices of music and the interpretation of it in in the whole of Fantasia it wasn't that long after the Rite of Spring had been composed and there was a riot at its opening that Disney decided to use it in his concert feature Stravinsky's ballet Rite of Spring was originally interpreted as a series of primitive dances the story that Disney and stakhovski chose to tell was nothing less than the origin of life on Earth to tell the the evolution of life on this planet was something that was a little bit more than a little daring at the time now this of course was long before Disney's dinosaur movie and long before all of this photorealism they're able to achieve now with computer animation but think what those artists and animators did back then think of what they achieved the multi-plane camera gets a lot of attention because it's truly spectacular but there were other things that were done in the camera department and in the special effects camera department what was referred to as the process lab very bland title but what went on behind the doors was magic I mean they were just Wizards back there and they're the ones who created many of the effects that you see the planets whirling through the sky the mud vats that you know bubble up the lava the smoke effects I had a good friend I remember who was telling me that he was out on the backlot one Sunday afternoon with five barrels of smoked oily rags that they deliberately set on fire and they were shooting high contrast black and white stock of the roiling black clouds that were boiling up out of this thing apparently there was a vat of water and cans of paint were turned upside down in the water as the paint spilled out it developed smoke patterns and these patterns were used in development of the smoke pouring out of the volcanoes that we see during the Rite of Spring this was a kind of special-effects that meant feeling your way back into a time before history and making a believable to audiences it's a great benchmark for special effects in addition to creating a prehistoric world Disney said his animators the challenge of creating credible prehistoric performers those dinosaurs have weight and power and substance there's nothing cartoony about them very little that they did up to that moment ever called on that degree of realism that degree of dramatic power Walter told the animators said Garda Anna made it like Pluto or like the dwarfs animated like a real dinosaur walking you know let's say yeah what do you mean it's like a real dinosaur to walk who's going to know when I was a kid they used to show just the Rite of Spring sequence in school in science class I remember this they thread up the 16 millimeter projector and show us the Rite of Spring as a kind of instructional film on the creation of the earth that's rather extraordinary for the untracked of Fantasia the Disney artists dreamed up a completely unusual personality abstract bringing character to the jagged optical line that carried the film's sound information the soundtrack in many ways the the soundtrack is more abstract than what they ended up with in several sections of the Toccata and Fugue it does start out as a single line and it's quite marvelous to see the single line have a personality but then it goes into these wonderful colorful abstractions very funny and illustrate the feel of the music and the texture of the music just through the shapes and the way things move interesting thing about the pastoral symphony is that it wasn't the original choice for the characters that are in it they had originally planned to use a lighter piece of music TNA's see Dilys the music wasn't big enough for what he planned so we put a debate oven into the Beethoven pastorale which is certainly a monumental piece and somehow the designs also went through some sort of metamorphosis you'll see in the concept art there's a certain virility to the centaurs particularly that is missing in the later film we never done centaurs before a half-human half-horse the guys were big robust macho centaurs but the girls ah what do you do would you have a young girl the front end and a horse on the rear how do you handle the anatomy and what do you show and what don't you show I have a whole stack of memos about how things should be drawn and long shots and close-ups and so forth that's pretty humorous in itself I thought the fantasy in that was great more so than probably any other segment all the characters in there were fanciful characters there's nothing in there that really exists in the real world as I was prejudiced through this thing because I was I keep trying to analyze this work yeah I always wanted to work on dance of the hours dance of the hours was a parody of the kind of highbrow dance segments that had invaded several prestige motion pictures of the time the choice of music was part of the joke ponch Elly's sweet from the Opera La Gioconda was considered even at the time according to a kindly worded studio communication over-familiar some people think that the dance of the hours section Disney's version of it gave the music what it deserved it's a rather an old warhorse piece of music that needed a good kick in the pants and it certainly got it in in this one of the parody of ballet that that the artist gave while ballet has inspired many beautiful works of art like this painting by Degas it had scarcely been touched on in the field of animation in fact our animators knew very little about it and because of thorough knowledge of a subject is essential in order to caricature it a new course was added to our studio school curriculum classical ballet obviously they worked very hard with genuine ballet farmers and choreographers but that's easier said than done it's one thing to observe it and sketch it it's quite another to sustain a whole sequence an entire performance of a ballet piece and keep it real but make it funny at the same time all these artists began to respect the ballet so they're kidding it but underneath the kidding is a realization that this is an art form like animation that does it strictly through movement although wildly comic and seemingly simple this sequence features not only plausible representations of complex ballet but also a meticulously designed production this piece in staging color and lighting is a literal dance of ours a pampered prima ballerina stretches toward the waking dawn a graceful be Emeth delicately glides on POIs in the midday son listen dancers float toward the warm evening sunset sinister interlopers and forbidden liaisons are diversions of the night I say that is an example of a perfect piece of animation and the marriage to the background and music it's perfect everyone's why you see something that's perfect that was one of them for the finale of Fantasia Disney and stakhovski envisioned a monumental clash of good and evil Modest Mussorgsky is baneful Night on Bald Mountain was paired with Schubert's hallowed Ave Maria in a sense I think this is one of the most adult things that Disney ever did during that period the designs for the Night on Bald Mountain sequence were done by Kynaston Connie Olsen was one of the three great illustrators of books at the turn-of-the-century and they did put him on the Night on Bald Mountain piece in the Ave Maria so it retains the integrity of of Nielsen's work his sensuous line the lush coloring that he had and the combination of touch of Aubrey Beardsley bit of Art Nouveau Japanese and Chinese wood cuts that look is so perfect in the story sketches it's all there all that has to be done to it is for it to be brought to life Walt wanted this sequence to really give you the chills doesn't mean literally being scared but being drawn into an atmosphere of unease and terror and evil and they used many skills to bring this off perhaps the greatest skill was the power of the great animator built tightly and it was just a perfect marriage of an image and the artist who could make that image move I think it's probably the most powerful thing we ever did because the directory will Jackson said I don't believe won't realized he was getting a character that powerful or he might have held back a little because that frightened a lot of people when I asked Bill about Night on Bald Mountain he said I imagined I was a mountain you see and made of stone but I could think and move I did not in Bald Mountain and the Ave Maria you couldn't have pieces that were more different from each other and yet they they blend rather well so there's a real nice sort of segue and going from the profane into the sacred the solemn processional of the faithful was accomplished by means of one of the most elaborate single shots in film history the scene was filmed continuously by a crew of nine men over six full days and nights using a horizontal multiplying camera set up across the entire 154 foot length of the Disney studio soundstage Disney and his team felt that the complexity of filming the scene was warranted by its ethereal design we again have the designs of K Neilson the procession going to the forest leads up to an actual sort of cathedral of trees and then in close to a giant stained-glass window and then even in closer and you come up to the design of a Madonna well as as you might guess this was a much more religious ending than what finally end up in the film well the world is waiting for sunrise and on a sunrise there's there's the essence of hope and they ended with the perfect image of hope Sun coming up in addition to their innovative work blending animation art and music during the production of Fantasia Disney and Stachowski originated a pioneering form of motion picture presentation Disney had already established a benchmark in visual presentation well to enhance that they decided and again Stachowski was very much involved with this that the sound had to be better than it would be for an ordinary feature film the plan was that rather than doing the tracks the music tracks in Hollywood that they would go back to the Philadelphia Academy of Music where Lee opposed had his Philadelphia Orchestra and the sound the acoustics and the whole ambiance sound wise was perfect and so the engineering team at Disney and a wiz named bill Garrity got to work with his people and with Stachowski and with others to create what we would think of now is stereophonic sound they gave it the name Fanta sound but I think even privately they hadn't yet envisioned that name stereophonic to to indicate sound that surrounds you sound that has many different speakers and channels 50 years ago I would have walked in there knowing what I know today and I wouldn't believe what they were doing they sat around and said you know we've got to do something about a mono sound it doesn't sound right let's come up with stereo let's design it left center right then they said let's put us around track and it'll give you an acoustical feeling the concert hall that's today's philosophy we are doing nothing different these people started from scratch and what they did is hum so not only did you have the Philadelphia Orchestra which Laureus sound to it conducted by the most famous conductor in the country at the time but you had it presented in a form of of sound that had never been heard in a movie theater before never I think Walt saw Fantasia as something other than an animated feature film he really envisioned something that would be a hybrid of a film presentation and a concert something brand-new that didn't exist before it was presented as what they used to call a roadshow attraction and that meant you had to purchase tickets as you would for a concert or a play you had two shows a day and people bought their tickets in advance and they had a reserved seat and it was an event given Disney's ambitious exhibition plans for Fantasia it's not really surprising that his film distributor RKO radio pictures balked at the enormous effort and expense of this Roadshow RKO did not want to handle Fantasia they didn't have any faith in it so the decision was made that we do everything ourselves now Disney was not only a filmmaker but a theatrical impresario he hired his own team to plan and supervise every aspect of the Fantasia Roadshow experience from curtain and lighting cues to the theater marquee and usher core the theatre staff was trained properly to take each patron to their seat we also have programs a beautiful program and we put that the use that was also part of a show it was not just sitting down but they had something in front of and something that they kept in something that they cherished this was an event this is the high event you might even get dressed up to go to and you paid a higher ticket price than you would for a regular showing of a movie your neighborhood theater so it was not just a film that they were going to it was an experience of course waltz timing couldn't have been worse the roadshow release of Fantasia was not a success for a variety of reasons I think the critics were baffled they didn't know whether to put the newspaper student or whether to send their musical critics to cover it or their movie critics there are some just ecstatic reviews of it they were just over the top unbelievable but there were others who were the music critics basically pardon me music critics who were purists about the music well actually it was not highbrow it was not lowbrow it was it was Disney it was it was it it was for everyone those people who knew what they were in for there were very very receptive and couldn't stop talking about it New York they ran for over a year packed houses they a day out day in day out people going back to a time time again in Los Angeles it ran for a year San Fransisco ran for what was 45 weeks 47 weeks something like that nearly a year now that's a very good record for a road show of a picture particularly in those days so it was well received in the big larger areas but I think the general public reacted to it favorably those who saw it but there was such a limited group who saw it really when you figure the amount of theaters played in there were no more than 12 venues that were ever equipped to shelf Madison and records show that there were never more than 16 prints manufactured Fantasia's release was so scattered and inconsistent because of the problems of the installation because of the problems of only having two shows a day that it was almost destined not to make money the cost of fitting this into a theater ran to about $85,000 this is pre World War two dollars a tremendous amount of money what's more World War two was already underway in Europe and there was the threat that they would not be able to release the film overseas dejected Disney returned the distribution of Fantasia to RKO radio pictures by January of 1941 RKO had been persuaded to continue the road shows under their banner which did happen beginning in April of 1941 but the apathy of the box-office the apathy of the public made RKO realize they weren't going to hit a home run with this and they determined with Disney's approval to cut the 124 minute Fantasia down to an 81 minute popular version which played out nationwide in 1942 all of the interstitials would mr. Taylor were cut the Toccata and Fugue was dropped in the program entirely making a very tight in perplexing 81 minutes of music which the heartland just didn't take to its heart now one of the things that Walt wanted to do is to make Fantasia a perpetual entertainment in that you could change the program I could could a concert they would do another number and perhaps after they'd been out for a year and a half add a number and maybe subtract a number and then in a few more months at another number and we can release it again or we can keep it in continual release and you will every year go to see Fantasia and it will always be new and Walt was developing a lot of new segments clair de lune SWANA Piniella ride of the valkyries art was being produced mr. kasky recorded the first four numbers for that and they are well on their way but then they just couldn't make it with the chart finances and the war and the problems of all all that it died the failure of Fantasia was a thorn in Walt's side for the rest of his life following Pinocchio and coming into the Fantasia yeah that's about did it you know that but that was an early success financial failure certainly an artistic success it wasn't like well some people would would question that too he'd put so much into this movie emotionally not to mention financially that he never really got over that he also knew that it was a sound idea no pun intended he knew that it was a good solid idea that putting images to music was was appealing and was a stimulus for his artists and he kept doing it he tried to do other types of Fantasia there were the packaged films in the 1940s make mine music and melody time some of it involved some classical music and mostly popular music he also did things later in the 1950s there was the Grand Canyon which was interesting because it was directed by James Algar who had directed The Sorcerer's Apprentice so there's a real matching picture to music in that as well time went by and it kept coming back and there would be an audience for it and then it would be reissued perhaps in another at five or seven years and suddenly it became more and more popular and its reissues and more and more people were warming to it over the decades and we're talking about many decades and as time went by it became kind of a classic and indeed it it was a classic it is a classic time heals a lot of wounds and a lot of opinions it's become a cult picture now and it plays somewhere every day all over the world Fantasia has been a milestone I think for the company right from the beginning because first of all they did a lot of stuff when they made it that they didn't even know themselves that they could do the sheer beauty of this picture just it was so different than anything has been done before god I mean this was a work of art and it still is for that matter I mean he's the first tell him anything really that significant that have been done in film I think that if Fantasia had proven to be a hit at the box office with with the general public there's no telling who he would have gone after in terms of writers and poets dancers painters to bring them in to this wonderful process of animation and of course big thing personally that I feel was a little tear in my heart is where would we be today if that picture had been as successful as well as we hoped it would be you

Channel: Como se Hizo Disney

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Keywords: como se hizo fantasia, the making of, fantasia, Walt Disney (Author), 1940, documental, classic

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Length: 47min 28sec (2848 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 15 2015