Disney animators set pictures to Western classical music as Leopold Stokowski conducts the Philadelphia Orchestra. 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice' features Mickey Mouse as an aspiring magician who oversteps his limits. 'The Rite of Spring' tells the story of evolution, from single-celled animals to the death of the dinosaurs. 'Dance of the Hours' is a comic ballet performed by ostriches, hippos, elephants, and alligators. 'Night on Bald Mountain' and 'Ave Maria' set the forces of darkness and light against each other as a devilish revel is interrupted by the coming of a new day. Quotes [ first lines]: How do you do? Uh, my name is Deems Taylor, and it's my very pleasant duty to welcome you here on behalf of Walt Disney, Leopold Stokowski, and all the other artists and musicians whose combined talents went into the creation of this new form of entertainment, 'Fantasia'.
Walt Disney's timeless masterpiece is an extravaganza of sight and sound! See the music come to life, hear the pictures burst into song and experience the excitement that is Fantasia over and over again.
What you're going to see are the designs and pictures and stories that music inspired in the minds and imaginations of a group of artists. In other words, these are not going to be the interpretations of trained. Crazy Credits The 'Fantasia' title card for all releases prior to 1990 (including the original roadshow version) was slightly different from the one seen in the 1990 re-release and in the videocassette version. In the original title card, the letters spelling out the word 'Fantasia' are of a slightly different shade of color, as is the blue background, and the title card reads 'In Technicolor', just below the word 'Fantasia'. There is also an RKO logo at the bottom. In the 1990 version, there is no RKO logo, and below the title it says 'Color By Technicolor'. Alternate Versions For its 50th Anniversary re-release in 1990, Disney went back to the original Fantasound tracks originally recorded by the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the picture and soundtrack restored from whatever elements were available at the time to resemble the 1946 re-release version of 115 minutes.
The only new alterations made were: • The edits made to the 'Pastoral Symphony' that are present in all post-1969 prints of the film. • The addition of an end credits sequence played against footage of the on-screen orchestra exiting the stage, as first seen preceding the intermission in the Roadshow Version. The 1990 version has been released on VHS and LaserDisc. No other version of Fantasia features a credits sequence (the credits were made available to the 1940-1941 roadshow patrons in a specially prepared commemorative booklet). This without a doubt the greatest animated film in history. While highly acclaimed and well-known today, it was not terribly popular when it was first released. The idea of 'Fantasia' is to take great pieces of music and draw animated sequences that match them.
In doing so, it reverses the purpose of a movie's score; the movie serves and matches the music, not the other way around. This set up also means that there is no typical formula plot that is present in the vast majority of movies.
In the first piece, the animation is vague and abstract, but in later ones it is of definite actions, objects, and stories. The two most famous(and my favorite) parts are probably 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice' and 'Rite of Spring'. 'Fantasia' is not only the best animated film ever made, but one of the greatest films period.
' wasn't a huge hit when it was first released 75 years ago (on November 13, 1940). Since then, however, over the course of multiple re-releases, the feature has earned a reputation as a masterpiece for its blend of lushly recorded classical music and dazzling Technicolor animation. It eventually became a huge success in both theaters and on home video and spawned several sequels and spinoffs, not to mention parodies by other studios. Still, as many times as you've enjoyed the ballet-dancing hippos or 's botched attempt at using magic to shirk drudgery, there's a lot you may not know about 'Fantasia.' Read on, and watch out for those magic mushrooms.
The germ of the film began when bumped into legendary Philadelphia Orchestra conductor Leopold Stokowski (pictured) outside Chasen's restaurant in Hollywood. Disney told Stokowski of his idea to make one of his trademark 'Silly Symphony' shorts out of Paul Dukas's composition 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice,' scored by a full orchestra and starring Mickey Mouse. Stokowski offered to conduct the score. When the production ran over budget (costing $125,000), instead of scrapping the short, Disney decided to turn it into a full-length feature, with multiple animated shorts scored to a full symphonic concert program of celebrated classical works. Stokowski and his orchestra ended up scoring the entire movie and being shown in 'Fantasia's' live-action segments. 'Fantasia' was the first movie to be screened in stereo.
Disney sound engineers created an elaborate sound system called 'Fantasound' for the film, recording the orchestra on a then-unprecedented nine-track polyphonic master, then mixed down to three tracks. To play the soundtrack, theaters had to be equipped with a Fantasound system that included 90 speakers placed throughout the auditorium. That meant the film had to be booked as a touring road show, with Disney technicians mounting the speakers at a venue in each city ahead of the film's debut there.
Originally, Disney animators made nine sequences for the film, including one set to Debussy's 'Clair de Lune' featuring birds flying across a moonlit sky over the Florida Everglades. The segment was cut for length, but it appeared a few years later in another Disney musical anthology film, 1946's ',' scored to the song 'Blue Bayou.' It appears as an extra on some special-edition DVDs of 'Fantasia,' with the original Stokowski recording of the Debussy piece restored. Disney envisioned 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice' (pictured), and later the 'Fantasia' feature, as a comeback vehicle for Mickey Mouse -- his popularity had slumped in the late 1930s. In fact, 'Fantasia' rebooted him with a new look, the familiar pupil-eyed face we know today. The centaurettes in the segment scored to Beethoven's 'Pastoral' symphony were the source of more than one controversy.