Fantasia (1940)

The Nutcracker Suite

Stokowski’s interpretation of the classic Christmas ballet has a slinky unmechanical timing, lending a sensuality to the tiny naked fairies that bring garden flowers to life and effect the seasons’ changes.

Pastoral Symphony

An overload of Maxfield Parish sunsets and classical pavillions are the backdrop for some of the cutest characters ever to come from Disney. Cherubs, satyrs, unicorns, pegusi, and centars play and frolic in this drunken bachenale that sometimes look like burlesque pin-up doodles.

Dance of the Hours

The only sequence that seems to admire it’s formal ballet source, Dance of the Hours is the most successful, the most modern, and the funniest sequence in Fantasia. It’s an actual ballet as performed by African wildlife that would normally be seen at a shrinking watering hole, but here fantastically characterized as ostrich ballerinas and a corps of elephant dancers blown away on the wind. Attitude spills from Hyacinth, the hippo who is by turns dainty, annoyed, and rapturously pursued by an amorous alligator.

Night on Bald Mountain

The final and probably best known sequence is Night on Bald Mountain where Chernabog summons the dead to haunt a European village until dawn’s light returns him to stone. Watchout for nipples nipples nipples.

The world’s top conductor Leopold Stokowski was a bit of a rock star, associated with dating Greta Garbo and jetsetting around the world. Walt Disney pioneered family entertainment with the risky, but wildly successful Snow White. The two couldn’t have been more opposite, but when Disney described his idea to animate famous classical works and Stokowski offered to conduct, Fantasia quickly inflated from a series of classical shorts to an overblown road show presented in quadrophonic sound! Even “Smell-o-Vision” was considered to enhance the film, but was thankfully discarded when Disney couldn’t clear the air before the next scent was introduced (Smell-o-Vision, a system that puffed odors into the theater was actually used in the 1960 film Scent of Mystery and later lampooned with scratch-n-sniff cards as Odorama in the John Waters film Polyester).

Disney’s folly nearly bankrupted the studio. Given free-reign to interpret as they saw fit Uncle Walt basically handed over control to his top animators with uneven results. Many took every opportunity to add nipples and overt sexuality to what was thought would be adult entertainment. Some segments are dry and pompous, some remain at the pinnacle of animation as fresh and funny as when they were made. Disney always intended to re-release Fantasia with new sequences every year, so it’s possible his motive was to branch out his animation studio into different looks and specialized styles — a legacy that would be unique to Disney Studios and enable them to become the most accomplished animation studio in the world.