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

Mixed Nutcrackers - Nutcracker: The Motion Picture (1986)

Is it the form, the ballet, or just me?  I ask because I really am giving pure ballet the fairest shake I can manage when watching these films predicated on capturing the dances above telling a story, but there's something in their construction which leaves me incapable of engaging to the degree I'd like, and ending up kinda bored.  With the Bolshoi production we watched to start this holiday project, such issues weren't a problem, what with it serving as my introduction to the piece and the form on stage in general, and also its being an introductory piece viewed more as context than a work unto itself.  With Nutcracker: The Motion Picture, there's just enough of the stuff I know about moviemaking and conventional narrative-based storytelling for me to get acquitted and start settling in for a proper watch, only for the film to shift into pure dance for a solid forty minute period, with very little in the way of prior narration or contextualizing shots to string it along.  My eyes glaze over, and I have a highly difficult time getting back into the swing of things.  Hence my question: is it my inexperience with the technical side of ballet that means I cannot adequately discuss and analyze large portions of the movie in the proper manner, the fact that The Nutcracker will almost always transform into exhibition rather than story when bound to Tchaikovsky's compositions, or am I simply not a ballet person?

However y'slice it, I struggle in finding an overarching perspective to use as framework for this review.  It is, then, perhaps inevitable I finally break down and rely on my old friend, Bullet Pointing The Review For The Sake Of Getting It Done And Not Sitting Round Without Writing Anything For Another Goddamned Day.  Little as I like calling their assistance, they're quite handy when invited over.  So, let's disjointedly discuss!

• Per the Wikipedia page, director Carroll Ballard thought Godfather Drosselmeyer a creepy character without a sympathetic angle, and elected to change this by giving him more focus throughout the film.  His methods for doing this involve affording Drosselmeyer an extended montage wherein he conceptualizes and crafts all the ballet's players, sets, and props before falling asleep as a miniature stage opens on Clara's dream; filming Drosselmeyer's dancer in close-up and emphasizing his desire for Clara's attention during the Christmas party scenes; and positioning a dream version of Drosselmeyer as not only mischevious imp in the background of act 1's back half and select portions of act 2, but an actively intervening figure who serves as taskmaster over the dancers in the Land of Sweets, and seems to covet Clara's hand in marriage over the Nutcracker's.  If any of this is meant to immediately and obviously clear away the pedophilic underpinnings inherent to the work's exploring a preteen's sexual awakening by way of her creepy godfather's attentions, I don't quite see how.  No matter how much Clara's narration insists she loved Drosselmeyer as a paternal figure despite all the times he's distressed and frightened her, all we as the audience see is the frightening parts, and a dream version whose advances and machinations recast otherwise delightful dances as insidious attempts to steal Clara away from the other, far more valiant suitor.  That one can read the Nutcracker Prince as a stand-in for Clara's innocent romanticism doesn't help Drosselmeyer's case, nor does the fact that he's acted as a vaguely concerning person on all three levels of the film's reality.  I read the director saying "sympathetic," but all I see is "more overtly villainous."
• The above said, I think Ballard's other attempts to make the movie more cinematic do function fairly well, particularly his conception of the war between toys and mice.  The Pacific Northwest Ballet's production already looks to have involved quite a lot've moving parts to achieve the classic effect of the set and its prominent Christmas tree growing around Clara, and subsequently swarming the stage with a large number of bodies dressed as toy and mice soldiers.  Ballard gives the whole thing a nice boost with some highly intricate effects work that's still grounded in the props and possibilities of a stage production, and adds in an ever-mutating Mouse King who physically grows and shifts behind the cuts to become this thirty-foot tall, six-headed (almost seven, give me SEVEN, dammit!) monster by the sequence's end.  I've no idea if Ballard or Kent Stowell and Mauriece Sendak (choreographer and production designer on the stage production) came up with the Nutcracker's dancer running round in a gigantic mascot head for the battle scene, but whoever did so had a killer idea.  It photographs really well on film, and the clumsy, leaping movements it draws from the dancer gives the Nutcracker a great deal of personality, far beyond the generic prince he becomes for act 2.  The bit with Clara and the Nutcracker crawling into the Mouse King's gigantic discarded robes also makes a good effect.
• Despite the Christmas party sequence being shot on a set with enough coverage to establish a firm set of filmic fourth walls all round, I'd call it a good decision for Ballard to have leaned into his material's stage origins more and more as the film goes on.  The battle sequence, once through with its shifting, expanding props, takes place in a great black void somewhere between film and stage in nature, and once Clara and the Nutcracker Prince fall in love during the snowflake dance, their surroundings look far more like a theatrical production, painted backdrop and all.  When the film makes a shift to act 2, it employs the classic waving bits of cardboard water effect on a grand scale to achieve the look of Clara and the Prince sailing to a grand palace, and then stages the vast majority of the following dances on an obvious stage.  Think the way Gilliam shot the play portions of The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen, straight on with the curtains and the surrounding area clearly visible, the lights plainly just off-camera.  Doing this builds an understanding amongst the audience about diving deeper into a dreamscape whilst embracing the stage's ability to feel more believably unreal than anything too concretely cinematic, and personally gives me something to appreciate while failing to engage with the dancers.
• In view of the above, I'm not quite sure the opening dream sequence was quite the best idea.  It takes the form of Clara tossing in fits in her sleep as blue-screened versions of herself, her younger brother, an ambiguous prince, and a mouse dance and fight their way across her mattress.  Clever, but not quite in line with how the film proceeds otherwise, and a bit of a dead end for anything other than unsettling the audience after a series of scenes that have already done the same.  The film takes its time getting into anything familiar, and while I can appreciate the impulse in trying to make this The Creepier Take on The Nutcracker, the music and dances otherwise carry on like we're working a more conventional angle, so the early and uncharacteristic nature of this dream both throws the pace off balance and contributes to a bit of (I suspect) unintended tonal dissonance.
• I can confirm after this viewing, the Arabic dance DOES go on substantially longer than the surrounding three other cultural dances.  Still absolutely no idea why Tchaikovsky wrote it that way, and in this production its length does no favors to the bird-plumage-leotarded solo dancer's efforts in a moment when I'm already struggling to stay in the film.  The Chinese and Russian dances, however, do benefit from its length, as the already surprising and delightful bit of a squat lion-costumed man being used as a maypole by many children, and the three bounding, shirtless, gold-spackled black dancers woke me right the hell up more than I suspect the same material would've with a less lengthy lead-in.
• Regardless of how little I know of ballet, regardless of how ill-able I am to discuss its particulars and the details of the dancers' efforts (I know absolutely nothing of positions, job names, or technique descriptions), and even knowing a filmic production like this would be able to run multiple takes and not do it all in one go, the strength and skill involved in making Clara and the Nutcracker Prince's final, triumphant dance work is stunning and admirable all the same.  Finishing it with a quick return to the bobble-headed regular Nutcracker gives me a nice last reason to smile as well.

I've no pretty bow to tie this all up with, no elegant package to box it within, but I hope the above is at least adequate reading.  Writing about Nutcracker: The Motion Picture in full would doubtlessly devolve into my whinging about how bored and unentertained I am by a medium I rarely imbide, and doing so seems so out of spirit for the project and season.  I'd far rather run the risk of making little sense by dancing round a few bullet-pointed ideas than ram through a conventionally-styled review in which I let my ignorance of how to talk about much of the film's contents dominate.  Knowing how, unfortunately, 1993's The Nutcracker is also primarily filmed ballet fills me with a bit of dread, but if we need to invite my overly-long-named friend to get through that too, so be it.  Just so long as there's something interesting to talk about.

3.5/5

Mixed Nutcrackers - The Nutcracker at the Bolshoi Theater (1989)

(T'ain't the poster for the 1989 production.  Please roll with it nonetheless.)

Yep!  In case you thought I was at all sane and would afford the much-delayed Season Challenge stuff its proper day in the sun, we're plowing ahead with another holiday marathon, and one even larger than the last to boot!  Here on Mixed Nutcrackers, we'll take stock of multiple filmic adaptations of ETA Hoffmann's 1816 story The Nutcracker and the Mouse King and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's 1892 ballet The Nutcracker, and see if any of em are worth half a damn!  There's Rankin-Bass/Sanrio collaborations, Macaulay Culkin's unfortunate youth, Tom and Jerry for some reason, and inexplicable attempts to merge light children's fantasy with epic war dramas!  Plus, y'know, some nutcrackers, some sugar plums, and a whoooooooole lotta renditions of Tchaikovsky's most famous compositions.  We're already overexposed to the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, Dance of the Reed Flutes, and the Trepak melody thanks to their idle usage in various Christmas movies and advertisements, so catching ten works with these numbers in their proper context over the course of a month or so is sure to drive us completely and utterly mad.

Which is the whole reason of the season, is it not?  Deliberately exposing yourself and friends to potential annoyances?  Yeah.

Before we start in earnest, though, there's a little bugbear requiring our attention: I've approximately zero familiarity with any version of The Nutcracker, much less the ever-in-production ballet with such ubiquity it's been celebrated and derided alike as Baby's First Ballet.  Though I can no doubt pick up on the particulars of a story initially written and popularly performed for the five-to-ten demographic by watching the other films in this marathon, it seemed untowards to enact this whole shebang without giving the source material the time of day.  So, in this opening entry, we'll take some time to discuss Hoffmann's initial story, and a production of Tchaikovsky's famous ballet, as a matter of prelude.  For reference's sake, my choices here were a public domain audiobook of the story provided by YouTube channel FullAudiobooks, and an upload of the Bolshoi Ballet Company's 1989 production found here.  They're both worth a look if you too need a crash course on what this whole nutcracking business is about.

I think the original Hoffmann story acquits itself best in the early going, before any hint of magic beyond Godfather Drosselmeyer's mechanized marvels rears its head.  The descriptions of Marie's home in full, warm Christmas splendor and the barely contained, excited habits she and brother Fritz keep as they discover new toys and leap from fascination to fascination has about it a comfortable, friendly vibe I very much enjoy.  One feels one hardly needs more than the children's personalities, the simple conflict between Marie's greater appreciation towards a wider variety of possibilities and Fritz's stubborn attempts to act a grown soldier, to remain satisfied.  With a different turn, the story could handily end at Drosselmeyer repairing Marie's beloved Nutcracker and ending on a message about the value of kindness and appreciative thinking.  Might not've provoked such fascination in Alexander Dumas decades later, or Tchaikovsky's compositions, but it'd make a tight, nostalgic little yarn confined entirely to a little lesson on Christmas Eve values.

As there is more to The Nutcracker and the Mouse King than its opening, I find it curious how the story loses some of its charm in my eyes the more fantasy elements it introduces.  The battle between the toy soldiers and the Mouse King's forces is quite fun with how it gradually unfolds from a few strange occurrences to full-small-scale war, Drosselmeyer's story about how the Nutcracker came to be is a nice self-contained yarn though a bit long-winded and convoluted in the way old fairy tales trend towards, Marie trying to save herself from the Mouse King gets a bit repetitious, and the solid chunk dedicated towards Marie and the Nutcracker Prince travelling through the Land of Sweets loses me entirely.  It's doubtlessly down to my age at first exposure, as one hardly expects a story structured and worded with kids in mind to fully thrill an adult, but it falls into a bit of a pattern wherein we're only watching wonder after wonder pass by with minimal involvement from the principles, none of which captures my imagination too much.  Much as I'd hope to find a little childlike sparkly-eyes in any children's work, no dice here.  This proves slightly concerning, as the whole Land of Sweets sequence provides the majority of compositions in Tchaikovsky's personally selected Nutcracker Suite, as well as character and imagery fodder for much of the adaptations to follow.  Hopefully, my not finding the big "isn't this all so spellbinding and awe-inspiring" beats from Hoffmann's story too enchanting doesn't imply a lack of enjoyment in the future.

(I'll briefly remark - between Marie finding something of her godfather's countenance and character in the nutcracker, her transferring her feelings towards him onto the lifeless doll, inventing a youthful nephew for him after hearing about one in his story, and ultimately being proven right, with the young man agreeing to marry him at the ripe old age of eight in the closing pages DOES make the story vaguely uncomfortable in places.  S'mostly a sweet runaround about a girl imagining herself an adventure and romance; some parts still impart some iffy implications.)

With regards to the Bolshoi Company's production of The Nutcracker, I'll have to lay down critical perspective for the moment.  I do not know enough about ballet (or dance in general) to provide any meaningful critique of how it plays out, or designed, or performed.  Ballet when used for cinematic effect, yes; ballet on its own terms, no.  For all I know, this could be the single greatest production of The Nutcracker ever undertaken, and all others are pale imitations of its perfection, or it could be a good effort since surpassed by grander stagings.  How'm I to tell when all I can see is people dancing what I presume is very well, and a fantasia of colors and costumes playing out across the screen?

Well, putting things thusly IS a little disingenuous.  I might not have any overarching opinion on the ballet or its execution, but I CAN at least provide a few stray thoughts.  For example, I thought it impressive how a few dances employed a larger number of performers to supplement the main talent - one can take it as either additional characters joining in on the fun or fight, or an expansion of their mindset to a multitude of persons that express their thoughts and feelings in a grander manner than usual.  The decision to portray Drosselmeyer as a literal magician when presenting his gifts in the early first act communicates much the same notion about his interventions into the magical world as the story's hints towards his greater involvement without needing words, and fits the dancer's limber, spirtely movements incredibly well.  Mouse King's defeat playing more as retreat than distraction leading to a decisive final blow makes a good way to position Marie's involvement as central, though it did confuse me somewhat when the second act contained the Nutcracker Prince recounting his victory with a more traditional final duel on-stage until I thought to look at the Wikipedia summary.  It's incredibly odd how the Arabic Coffee dance in the Land of Sweets lasts longer than the Spanish Chocolate, Chinese Tea, and Russian Candy Cane dances combined - maybe something to do with the length of compositions, maybe it's that way in the original work?  So much has been rearranged since the initial, poorly-received 1892 production, so it'd come across as odd to me if that particular of timing were grandfathered in.

Naturally I'm most impressed by Natalya Arkhipova's rendition of the Sugar Plum Fairy dance.  This is going to sound so, SO mealy-mouthed and ill-educated, but there's a clockwork quality to her movements, very fast motions executed in tiny chunks with a definite pause in-between.  If one considers how those pauses vanish from sight near entirely during the faster spins, and how many mental calculations it must take to hit each point just so in such a compressed time frame even with the rigorous years of training high-end ballet demands, it becomes downright miraculous to think anyone could get it right in one go, much less night after night for a whole holiday season.  The different qualities of movement (twirls, gliding limbs, high kicks, etc) corresponding to individual instruments and conversing with one another as the various segments of the orchestral pit intersect is also quite impressive.  So concludes the extent of my ability to technically or artistically critique this ballet.

This formality out of the way, I'd say we're free to explore the nine(!) following Nutcracker-based works this Chrimbo season.  If I'm not driven to a frenzied rage by Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy's opening celesta notes by month's end, I hope y'all enjoy the marathon!

(And hey - maybe if y'all are good this year, I'll host last year's marathon here too.)