Disney Rewatch: Fantasia
Sep. 9th, 2019 09:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI 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?
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?
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Date: 2019-09-10 04:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-10 04:25 pm (UTC)