Disney Rewatch: Fantasia

[osprey_archer]

I watched Fantasia right after attending a wedding and reception, and therefore ended up sleeping through, uh, a certain amount of the movie, but on the bright side! I slept through the parts that I always skipped anyway as a child! Apparently my Fantasia opinions have been extremely constant throughout my entire life.

So I missed the part at the beginning which is just sound pictures of the music. But I woke up in time for the Nutcracker Suite, A++ still love both of the flower dances (the Waltz of the Flowers AND the Cossack flowers!), although my beloved mushroom dance has been somewhat spoiled now that I can recognize the mushrooms as Chinese caricatures. (The littlest mushroom was probably my favorite character in all of Fantasia, unless it was maybe the little black pegasus, who was clearly the best of all the little pegasi.)

It was also great to see the fish doing their Dance of the Seven Veils to the coffee dance and realize that the goldfish in Pinocchio was basically a dry run for these fish with their ridiculously long and diaphonous yet gorgeous transparent fins.

Then I slept through the part that is showing the beginning of all life on earth with amoebas and I think some sort of proto-amphibian crawling onto the sand? But finally woke up for good in time for the dinosaurs, about which I have always had mixed opinions. On the one hand: dinosaurs. (Like any self-respecting five-year-old I loved dinosaurs.) But on the other hand, these dinosaurs are kind of slow and lumbering and, as I knew because I watched the dinosaur documentary with Bob Bakker and Jack Horner 500 times, scientifically inaccurate (although possibly accurate to 1940s understandings?), and also all they do is suffer. First the T. Rex kills the poor stupid stegosaur, ruining my opinions of stegosaurs forever, and then they all die a slow lingering death under a broiling sun because the Chicxulub incident was not yet a twinkling in anyone’s eye.

(Is the asteroid that created the Chicxulub crater still considered the likeliest culprit in the dinosaurs’ extinction? I haven’t updated my dinosaur knowledge in ~25 years.)

Then there is the best part! A.K.A. the Greek mythology horsies! Unicorns, pegasi (this is where the little black pegasi comes into his own), AND centaurs, although I did not find the centaurs as interesting in my youth because all they did was court each other which took away time during which the pegasi could have been cavorting. (I found Bacchus baffling, and frankly still find him baffling today. Why does he look like a giant baby in a onesie?)

Then the ballet-dancing animals! I enjoyed these as a child, but always with some nervous tension, because the dance gets super out of control by the end (I absolutely did not understand that there was a courtship thing going on; as far as I could tell it was just all chaos and animals chasing each other), but also because if you don’t stop the VCR fast enough once the animals destroy the balance, then you might be forced to watch a three whole seconds of “The Night at Bald Mountain,” which will ruin your day, or at least the next half hour, which is basically the same thing to a preschooler.

Which leads us to… THE NIGHT ON BALD MOUNTAIN. It is no longer as horrifying as I remember it, possibly because no film sequence of this earth is as horrifying to an adult as “Night at Bald Mountain” is to a four-year-old, but all the poor writhing demons and the misty skeletons being summoned from their graves remain pretty appalling. (There are lust demons who are maybe precursors to “Hellfire” in The Hunchback of Notre Dame?) The “Ave Maria” sequence at the end - which I never watched as a child, we never made it that far - does not make things better even a little bit; it’s much too static to wash away the impression of GIANT MOUNTAIN SATAN.

All in all, Fantasia is a bizarre film experiment, and I applaud it for being so weird and yet (mostly) so entertaining. How often does such an ambitiously bonkers film turn out so well?

Comments

[kore]

TO THIS DAY I refuse to watch the Bald Mountain sequence, man. Nooooooo fucking thank you. I had nightmares for years about it, I don't need to test if that might happen again.

The “Ave Maria” sequence at the end - which I never watched as a child, we never made it that far - does not make things better even a little bit; it’s much too static to wash away the impression of GIANT MOUNTAIN SATAN.

My poor mom was like "Look, the sun came out! Everything's all better!" and I was like "NOOO NO IT ISN'T" I think it's a little better now, but there were something like two or three generations of little kids being really terrified by Disney movies. (My stepsister showed Dumbo to her kid when he was tiny. Dumbo is safe, right? No, there's a big FIRE in it. Whoops.)

That film, like some of the Looney Tunes cartoons, introduced a lot of kids to classical music, too -- my mom used to refer to it when she was teaching kids. Rites of Spring was "the dinosaur music" -- a pretty fucken weird choice if you ask me. Did you ever see that Italian film that was kind of a takeoff on Fantasia? They used Bolero! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegro_Non_Troppo

[osprey_archer]

Just because the sun came out that doesn't mean everything's better. Giant Mountain Satan is till there. LURKING IN THE DARKNESS.

In Fantasia, the conductor dude actually explains the reasoning behind using "Rites of Spring" - it's paired with the amoebas/dinosaurs because that was the springtime of the world! But you still have to wonder about the meeting where they came up with this idea. Indeed, every single meeting about Fantasia must have been fascinatingly bonkers.

[kore]

AND WHAT HAPPENS THE NEXT TIME IT GETS DARK? HE COULD STILL BE RIGHT THERE.

it's paired with the amoebas/dinosaurs because that was the springtime of the world! But you still have to wonder about the meeting where they came up with this idea

......that totally does not make it make MORE sense to me, yeah. Especially when I associate that music with Nijinsky and dodgy female sacrifice and really pissy theatre critics!

[ancientreader]

In answer to your question about Chicxulub: Yep, no serious contenders. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died is about a guy who seems to have found a site laid down in the middle of the process. Like, that day.

I never saw any of the Disney movies as a child, because pre-VCR days and not enough money to go to the movies, but I guess yay because at least "Night on Bald Mountain" didn't scare me when I saw Fantasia in college!

[kore]

Heh, I saw it in college too, on a double billing of Allegro Non Troppo (linked above) and I thiiink a cartoon short of The Dot and the Line -- we saw Phantom Tollbooth at some point too.

I still left and stood out in the hallway outside while GIANT MOUNTAIN SATAN happened. Some friends came with me!

[osprey_archer]

I feel that "Night on Bald Mountain" - indeed, many Disney sequences that I remember as deeply terrifying - are actually not terrifying at all, or at worst only mildly frightening, when you see them as an adult. I'm not sure if Disney animators realized how completely terrifying some of this stuff was from a small child's point of view.

[kore]

Man I hope they didn't realize how completely terrifying it was. ("The shrieks of children, like music to our ears....!")

[potofsoup]

aaaa I was just thinking yesterday that I should introduce toddler Rutabaga to Fantasia! I have very fond memories of the pegasi, as well.

[osprey_archer]

The pegasi are the best part! Or at least one of the best parts, I suppose everyone has a different favorite bit in Fantasia. It's nice that there's such variety to it.

[genarti]

I must not have seen Fantasia until I was a few crucial years older, because I remember loving "Night on Bald Mountain" -- the drama! the music! Whereas a lot of the other parts were a lot more candyfloss to me, though some of it was beautiful -- the mushrooms (though now erk, of course), the goldfish, etc. And I had totally forgotten the amoebas-through-dinosaurs bit, but you've called back a dim memory of them collapsing under the broiling sun. I think I mostly liked that section, being the science-minded kid I was, but got upset about watching all the dinosaurs die.

(I suspect the dinosaurs were at least reasonably accurate by 1940s understanding, if not necessarily cutting-edge, based on a 1954 encyclopedia we had when I was a kid. Definitely heavy on the "cold-blooded, lumbering, sluggish, dragging their tails everywhere as they heavily trundled along" interpretation.)

[osprey_archer]

Yes! The dinosaurs all collapse under the broiling sun at the end! But first you have some shots of them trying to get something to drink by sticking their snouts in the few mudholes left on the parching earth. Truly an apocalyptic image. I watched it because dinosaurs, but it was a case of "I can't tell if I like this or not but it's definitely compelling."