Fantasia

Fantasia (1940)

Runtime: 125 minutes

Directed by: Many Dudes

Starring: Besides the cartoon stuff, there’s narrator Deems Taylor, composer Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra

From: Disney

Here’s a movie that I’ve seen available as a rental at Blockbuster for awhile and just earlier this week I decided to pick this up. I had seen the movie once before, but it was when it came out on VHS back 20 years ago, so it was that long since I had seen it. I didn’t remember too much about the film but as a kid I think I enjoyed it; some of it was over my head, though. I don’t plan on seeing Fantasia 2000, though; I’ve heard some negative things about that.

This, though, has become a classic after being a disappointment at the box office when it was released. It was ahead of its time, I guess. I’m sure it helped that when it was shown again in the late 60’s, people saw it while drugged out of their minds and enjoyed the abstract visuals and accompanying music.

Me, seeing it as an adult, it’s a great piece of work. Sure, narrator Deems Taylor delivers some stuffy narration, but otherwise it is a tremendous piece of art. You get 8 different segments accompanied by various classical pieces of music from the likes of Bach, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, and Beethoven. Like I said, the wordless animation manages to work in telling a story and it fits like a glove with the classical music. There’s not too much else to say about it, as it’s really a movie best seen rather than described by me. It’s especially nice on Blu-Ray. Sure, if you watch it that way the aspect ratio is 1.33/1, meaning that there are black bars to the right and left of the picture, but there is an option where those get replaced by images that fit with what’s on the screen at the time; that’s what I did and it’s nice.

By the way, speaking of movies I’ll never see, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. I don’t plan on ever watching that live-action flick from last year, as it looks just plain bad. I’ll stick with the great 10 minute segment you see here, thank you very much. Also, I thought it was odd that one thing from the movie’s been edited out since the 60’s, which is a character in the Pastoral Symphony segment that was deemed to be offensive to African-Americans. You can find the original segment on YouTube with only a little digging. I’ve seen it that way and yeah, it’s politically incorrect, but I don’t know if it’s bad enough that it needs to be banished forever.

Then again, despite making a huge ride out of it at Disney Parks, who knows if the U.S. will ever get a proper release of Song of the South (which can also be found on YouTube with little effort, and of course I’ve seen it in the past few years that way; one of these days I’ll do a review of that too). I thought it was odd that got removed when there’s a brief segment called “Chinese Dance” (it’s part of the Nutcracker Suite) involving mushrooms dancing around, and well, they looked stereotypically Chinese, with the slanted eyes and all. Curious. Heck, those mushrooms were even on the cover of the Blu-Ray!

But anyhow, it is a unique experience you should watch if you’ve never viewed it before. I'll be back Friday night with a new review.