Mixed Nutcrackers: Fantasia (1940)

Call this a belated Christmas present. After a solid month of delaying season challenge stuff so we could wade through ten different Nutcracker adaptations of varying quality, we come to Fantasia, a film wholly divorced from the rest of the marathon save its use of Tchaikovsky's music in one segment, and to pull a quote from Deems Taylor, this is all to the good. Strip away the decades of filmic evolution that led Disney so far astray as to make something so uninspired and wretched as The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, roll back the years of artistic waxing and waning, settle on down for an older form of animated experimentation, and you find Fantasia, the single most diamond perfect film Walt Disney ever produced. I am tired from spending so much time plowing through Mixed Nutcrackers this last month, and from spending so much time over this last year watching and writing about so many movies, so I am going to simply extend the Christmas gift of watching Fantasia to gushing about its varied virtues in a series of bullet points. There will, as per usual, likely turn into more full-blown paragraphs, only justified as bullet points by the lack of structural linkage between each. It's my present to me, though, so we do things how I like.

• The flow of Toccata and Fugue in D Minor hypnotizes me anew with each watch. Credit some of the effect to Deems Taylor's introductory statements, which put one in the proper frame of mind for interpreting the abstract imagery on display, but the actual lulling spell of the images on their own tell quite the story as well. From simply playing with angled colored lights on Leopold Stokowski as he conducts facing away from the audience, to filling the screen with massive fragmenting shadows of the orchestra's sections, to the abstract interpretation of musical notes floating in space as your mind drifts away from the physical and into the purely artistic. The little blue plunking ripple dots playing through the hair to represent fingers covering holes on a woodwind are always a favorite, as are the slightly jagged wavering yellow lines dancing in a stutterstep one after the other across the sky for the strings. When the piece moves beyond awareness of even the instruments and gets into simple phantasmagorical landscapes conjured by sound alone, those rolling pink-and-black-striped hills alongside the constant return to a rolling river of red akin to volcanic flows always leave one floored by how smooth and utterly natural they look for something done entirely by hand. Ending the segment on a return to Stokowski, at first a small figure conducting a brilliant sunrise before we zoom in to find him commanding little more than a glaring, solid block of red, makes the perfect scene-setter for the rest of Fantasia. We're here to watch a dance between sound and vision, overseen by a massive crew so powerful and firm a guiding hand that it looks as if a single figure instructs its complexities by magic, and it is beautiful.

• Of all the pieces in Fantasia, the Nutcracker Suite sounds most different from its traditional interpretation - most other pieces undergo some form of rearrangement to suit the story flow, but where the Rite of Spring and the Pastoral Symphony mostly resemble the conventional choices in modern, standardized orchestration, and Night on Bald Mountain practically set the piece's standard sound, the Nutcracker Suite was a solid decade and change out from its reinvention and revitalization in the New York ballet. As such, the instrumentation on many of its movements isn't quite what you've come to expect from their use as Christmas staples in prior decades. The Russian Dance, for instance, features reedier sounding strings and a heavier emphasis on percussion than the newer variations, while the Sugarplum Fairy Dance has a gentler, slightly eerier vibe than the more familiar crystalline, ringing interpretation. With how omnipresent many of these pieces are in the broader popular culture (and even how familiar pieces like the Arabic Dance are to the ballet community), the deviating musical choices here help make Fantasia's version of Tchaikovsky's music fall upon fresh ears every time, exactly as radical visual reinterpretations like this should.

• Disney's animation department was really well truly at the top of their game in 1940, right? The sparkling play of dewdrops across multiplane background elements and spider's silk as fairies prepare a garden for the dawn, the elegant, flowing gossamer on the fish fins as they whirl in an underwater dance, the beautiful skipping dance of flower petals and leaves on the wind in time with the music without feeling like they're doing anything other than following a natural current upon the air, the way palpably chilly patterns of ice appears at the fairies' feet when they skate across the water as individually designed snowflakes drift down from the sky? Not to mention working multiple approaches to humanizing the non-human, from the elongated lithe torsos on the fairies, to the fish with little more than solid heads attached to practically strips of fabric, to the two wholly different modes of making anthropomorphized flowers dance between the Russian Dance and Waltz of Reed Flutes that are equally suited to the flying leaps and spinning grace of both pieces, to the unfortunate but still adorable mushrooms pitter-pattering about during the Chinese Dance? I love looking at this segment so much, and have to wonder what if Walt's ambitions came to fruition, what if we really did see animation take a turn towards Fantasia's ambitions in the following decades, without the war and the strike and the public disinterest? It's a massive shame more works at this level never came to be, even if it does leave Fantasia feeling wholly unique.

• If Mickey Mouse is gonna hang about the movie, he might as well hang about in the best-looking Mickey Mouse short ever drawn, yeah? The Sorcerer's Apprentice is a little bit unusual for Fantasia, considering it's the only segment to function like a morality play, what with Mickey skiving off his master's discipline-building task to take the easy route of enchanting a broom to carry the water for him, and finding his efforts arrested by an inability to stop what he's started. It still works well as part of the whole, though, entirely because it ALSO functions as a chance for the animation team to show off how good they'd gotten at character animation on their flagship face, how the water effects in Pinnochio weren't merely a one-off fluke, how they could take something so simple and silly as a broom with arms and transform it into a series of arresting images by multiplying the thing and sending it on a shadow-heavy unstoppable march. The additional minor fun of playing with smoke to form bats and butterflies, the shooting stars in Mickey's dream, and Bill Tytla showing off by animating the only realistically-proportioned human in the film with some of its most subtly expressive movements enhances the fun all the more. This isn't really Mickey's movie, but he advances the project's ambitions so much by showing how a simple Mickey Mouse cartoon, once the realm of light entertainment for the real show, can stand as a legitimately artistic, lovingly-crafted work alongside the more immediately art-like pieces before and after.

• I'm legitimately joke angry about the galaxy that starts The Rite of Spring. Just... look the thing up sometime, find a copy of Fantasia and LOOK at it. The thing's an equal to any galaxy you see animated by computers for bottom-of-the-barrel programs on the Science Channel nowadays, and they did it by HAND. S'enough to make a full-grown person cry at its beauty and the skill necessary to get it twinkling and rotating like that. Makes the sorta wonky sun we see a few seconds later all the funnier lookin', tho.

• While the creature design in The Rite of Spring is hopelessly outdated by modern palentological standards, it holds infinite charm for me all the same. Contrast between the natural elegance of lava bubbling and flowing and tearing the earth asunder, and the pencil sketch-like early single cell organisms in the Cambrian seas make the slow march towards complex life highly satisfying to watch, particularly once we make the leap to the dinosaurs and see the sheer diversity on offer. They're quite unlike anything in the Disney style without deviating so much as to be unrecognizable as something from their house, and whether we're considering the swooping pteranodons, the massively bulky stegosauri, or the monstrous early vision of a T-rex, each offers some insight into how the late 1930s' understanding of fossil records mingled in conversation with an artist's impulse for what's most striking and memorable. I'd love to see someone, anyone, Bogleech, run a retrospective on all the designs on display here, and how they stack up to what we know now. Even if many of the ideas are a little bit silly (there's a jellyfish using its tentacles to snare a fish and chew with its membrane), an article to this effect would delight me to an equal extent as the segment itself.

• I don't know why, but I've always liked the effect of rendering one of the brontosaurs in a panning shot as primarily painted background element for the main body, with an animated neck and head stretching out into the distance. Gets across depth in the shot quite well, and I notice it in particular every single time I watch Fantasia.

• Leave it to Disney's Golden Age animator stable to construct a memorable, charming character from nothing but pleasing abstract shapes and pitch-perfect timing. The part where Taylor interviews the soundtrack and coaxes the simple vertical line to demonstrate its potential by vibrating in time to different instruments is an easy highlight. The fat, jiggly slabs meant to represent a bassoon's lowest notes are the absolute best, though the cheeky little triangle ting at the end of the percussion section and the wild flare they put into animating the brass make solid contenders for the title. Its little jig to the right before sliding off-screen also pleases one to no end.

• Confession time: While Fantasia is very much the perfect movie, and while I will fight anyone who says otherwise verbally and physically, the Pastoral Symphony is always where I start to fidget in my seat just a little bit, and check the time remaining where the previous segments kept me wholly engaged and enraptured. This, I think, comes more down to my own issues with sitting still and focusing for extended periods of time than any fault of Fantasia's, for the Pastoral Symphony's vision of Grecian mythology is still a wondrous thing to look at, all gentle pastels and soft character designs and gentleness right up until Zeus shows up for a little bit of what Zeus does second best. The pegasi look majestic, their children adorable, the centaur's appropriately suave and dopey, that little romance between the blue centaurs gets me right there in the chest, the 40s Disney vision of Dionysus is about as perfect as you can get, and I am once again made angry by how lovely Iris' rainbow and the starry Athena shooting a flaming arrow cross the sky look for how much effort it must've taken to get them looking just right. It's mostly just... I don't have much to say regarding overall effect or place in the program here; it's gorgeous and gorgeosity made manifest through paint and paper and celluloid, and I've little more to contribute to the larger conversation than "purdy." Which is fine, cause sometimes a piece of art appeals to you aesthetically for no real deeper reason, and you can love it for what it is on a surface level just as is.

• If there's one spot where the modern, widely available version of Fantasia legitimately clunks, it's when they have to awkwardly repeat some shots of a centaur strutting and posing for the camera in order to realign the visuals to the music after chopping out a solo shot of Sunflower the Racist Caricature. I'm not at all sure how you could make up for the time difference with any elegance short of biting the bullet and reinstating her for historical purposes, but even without knowing why the repetition happens, one can still tell it's not a natural choice by the original team. 

• Every time I watch Fantasia, without exception, without fail, The Dance of the Hours starts up, and I expect it to be the place where my opinion lessens and I go, "Well this one part isn't quite so good as the rest." The whole thing's more directly comedic than any of the other segments, basing itself around the joke of performing a ballet with awkwardly shaped animals not at all suited for executing pirouettes or pliés or grand jetés. We're effectively watching a more conventional funny animal cartoon in the midst of a film about to thunder into one of the best animated finales ever put to screen, so the expectation for it to suck the joy out've the room comes wandering in uninvited without fail. And yet, I always enjoy The Dance of the Hours. As a technical achievement it's not quite the equal to those it follows, but it's a damned impressive funny animal cartoon with a wide display of body shapes and weights and impossibilities made feasible thanks to expressive characters, personable sight gags, and a sympathetic environment shifting through times of day across lovely looking color shifts. As a part of Fantasia, it works well for the same reason Mickey's appearance earlier in the film does: Disney built its bones on these funny animal cartoons, so even though they're reaching for higher and higher artistic ambitions with ideals towards the mainstream recognizing animation as a serious technique, they're not gonna forget where they came from. They're gonna elevate the funny animal cartoon by putting all their skills to use for the BEST, most graceful funny animal cartoon they can possibly manage, and I'll be smacked if they didn't produce something with admirable pacing, imaginative twists and turns, and a killer ending with the whole anarchic jumble the finale became capping with a pull back to the palace doors slamming so hard they fall off their hinges. Fantasia leaps my worries about this segment every year, solidifies itself as a favorite by assuring me it displays mastery of every technique it tries, and leaves the air clear for ideal enjoyment of its final part.

• That Fantasia positions The Dance of the Hours' funny animal cartoon right next to its exploration of the profane and the sacred in Night on Bald Mountain/Ave Maria speaks to Walt Disney's confidence in animation's potential as a high-minded, cultured artform to equal painting or opera. You can explore the medium's most pedestrian, every-day, mass-appeal application to its fullest extent with no shame about laughing at the absurdity of hippos and elephants serving as ballerinas, turn around for a trip into the deepest bowels of hell rising up to manifest themselves upon this sinful earth in a gorgeous and frightening danse macabre, and then depict a pilgrim's journey of the long winding path to find beauty and divinity in the simple act of watching a sunrise, and have it all WORK because you're good at your job and have a vision in your mind, a spark in your eyes, and an army of hands and machines capable of bringing it all to life. Fantasia's last and best segment is so much better for working in conversation with something so simple and pleasing as "the animals they are too ungainly to dance," and illustrates Fantasia's main point better than any other individual part. It's all art, it's all beautiful, it's all worthy of love and care and admiration and immortality and all the other fine descriptive words for something so insightful and perfect. Even that which we might consider lesser deserves appreciation at the same level as the holy.

• And yeah, even leaving aside how they interact with the movie at large, Night on Bald Mountain/Ave Maria are technical accomplishments beyond compare, in the Disney oeuvre and in the larger animation industry. I've never understood or found sources explaining just what they did to make the ghostly spirits rising from their graves and flying to the mountain peak look the way they do, but it communicates the dead rising to roam the earth better than anything else I've ever seen. Tytla's work on Chernabog is nothing short of masterful, be it his powerful flexing as he unfolds his wings, his sweeping gestures as he summons the damned to his domain, the way his face twists and contorts itself into new expressions in close-up, or the way he becomes a pillar of evil's eternal power in the sequence's final shot before cowering back to inert rock. The maelstrom of hellfire which consumes his followers and sweeps demonic figures across the camera is beautiful as it is terrible. I am all about the way they render Chernabog's exposure to the ringing light of church bells by transitioning his figure from the solid inky blacks to what look like heavy pencil sketch fills and back on each chime. And as to the pilgrims' progress through several Disney's most complex ever multiplane camera shots, well... they inspire one. Inspire one to contemplate the purpose of a disciplined walk, lit candle in hand, face obscured, following a winding path through the damp, dense woods, knowing evil lurks out there somewhere, following the hard trail laid down by ancestors long past, for the purpose of appreciating the effort behind each step, the beauty of the world scantly illuminated by your tiny light as dawn builds all around. The revelation of just how profound the simple sight of clouds drifting through the sky on a sunny morning can be with thoughts of grace in your skull. How all this, how the wild torment of wicked madness and the slow, methodical approach to showing the beauty and specialness in something that happens every day when seen with the right eyes, is directly reflective of the work necessary to make something like Fantasia possible.

God, I love this movie. Can we not talk about any other movies from now on? Can I just keep watching Fantasia once every few weeks, jotting down some new thoughts about something I noticed fresh this time, and forget about all the other bad films out there? I know we can't, for Fantasia wouldn't appear half so special if it didn't have the whole cinematic landscape to tower over as a magnificent, impeccable work of filmmaking, but... I don't wanna come down, man. The whole world seems beautiful as Fantasia from up here. I'll press on as always, cause I won't find new towers to survey the land from and find peace atop, but you won't catch me at all liking it. And we can always return here whenever we like, for the simple pleasure of being and seeing.

5/5