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Fantasia is a 1940 American animated musical anthology film produced by Walt Disney Productions, with story direction by Joe Grant and Dick Huemer and production supervision by Walt Disney and Ben Sharpsteen. It consists of eight animated segments set to pieces of classical music conducted by Leopold Stokowski, seven of which are performed by ...
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- Deems Taylor
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- Night on Bald Mountain
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- Characters
Fantasia (1940 film) characters. This section excludes...
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The Rite of Spring (French: Le Sacre du printemps) is a...
- Symphony No. 6 (Beethoven)
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- (101K)
- Animation, Family, Fantasy
- James Algar, Samuel Armstrong, Ford Beebe Jr.
- 1941-09-19
- Overview
- Program description
- Production
- Reception
- Additional material
- Legacy
is a 1940 American animated film, produced by Walt Disney Productions and given a wide release by RKO Radio Pictures. With story direction by Joe Grant and Dick Huemer and production supervision by Ben Sharpsteen, it is the third feature in the Disney Animated Canon. The film consists of eight animated segments set to pieces of classical music conducted by Leopold Stokowski; seven of which are performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra. Music critic and composer Deems Taylor acts as the film's Master of Ceremonies, who introduces each segment in live action interstitial scenes.
Disney settled on the film's concept as work neared completion on The Sorcerer's Apprentice, an elaborate Silly Symphonies short designed as a comeback role for Mickey Mouse (who had declined in popularity during that time). As production costs grew higher and the project getting pushed back, he decided to make a feature-length film with other segments set to classical pieces. The soundtrack was recorded using multiple audio channels and reproduced with Fantasound, a pioneering sound reproduction system that made Fantasia the first commercial film shown in stereophonic sound. Mickey was redesigned by Fred Moore into his current design starting in The Pointer;, here, though, he is dressed in a red sorcerer robe and, to complete the look, he dons his master's Sorcerer Hat. The energy absorbs into his blood, whereupon he performs magical feats not unlike those of his mentor.
was first released in theatrical roadshow engagements held in thirteen U.S. cities from November 13, 1940. It received mixed critical reaction and was unable to make a profit. In part, this was due to World War II cutting off the profitable European market, but due as well to the film's high production costs and the expense of leasing theaters and installing the Fantasound equipment for the roadshow presentations. Also, audiences who felt that Disney had suddenly gone "highbrow" stayed away, preferring the standard Disney cartoons. The film was subsequently reissued multiple times with its original footage and audio being deleted, modified, or restored in each version. As of 2012, Fantasia has grossed $76.4 million in domestic revenue and is the 22nd highest-grossing film of all time in the U.S. when adjusted for inflation. Walt's nephew Roy E. Disney co-produced a sequel released in 1999 titled Fantasia 2000.
The film gained a huge cult following since its first release, and is notably important to film industry as a milestone in the creation of the modern "music video".
The host and narrator of the film, Deems Taylor, introduces each piece in the program and gives background on the composer's original intent. Of course, there was no intent to deceive anyone into thinking that Disney's interpretation was the "original intent" of the composer.
Some of the selections were shortened from their full length, for the sake of the film's running time. Of the eight pieces, four are presented virtually complete: Toccata and Fugue, The Sorcerer's Apprentice, the Dance of the Hours (which is actually expanded), and the Ave Maria. The Nutcracker Suite is shorn of its Miniature Overture and March, the twenty-five minute Rite of Spring (the longest segment in the film) is ten minutes shorter than the original 35-minute work, and the Pastoral Symphony segment is performed in a 20-minute version rather than Beethoven's complete 40-minute original. There are also small internal omissions in Night on Bald Mountain.
Origins
In 1936, Walt Disney felt that the studio's star character, Mickey Mouse, needed a boost in popularity. He decided to feature the mouse in The Sorcerer's Apprentice, a deluxe cartoon short based on the poem written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and set to the orchestral piece by Paul Dukas, that was also inspired by the original tale. The concept of matching animation to classical music was used as early as 1928 in Disney's cartoon series, the Silly Symphonies, but he wanted to go beyond the usual slapstick, and produce shorts in which, as he put it, "sheer fantasy unfolds...action controlled by a musical pattern has great charm in the realm of unreality. " Upon receiving the rights to use the music by the end of July 1937, Disney considered using a well-known conductor to record the music for added prestige. He just happened to meet Leopold Stokowski, conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra since 1912, at a restaurant in Hollywood by chance and discussed his plans for the short. Stokowski was happy to collaborate on the project and offered to conduct the piece at no cost. Following their meeting, Disney's New York representative ran into Stokowski on a train headed for the East. In writing to Disney, he reported that Stokowski was "really serious in his offer to do the music for nothing. In addition, he had some very interesting ideas on instrumental coloring, which would be perfect for an animation medium." In his excited response, Disney wrote that he felt "all steamed up over the idea of Stokowski working with us...The union of Stokowski and his music, together with the best of our medium, would be the means of a success and should lead to a new style of motion picture presentation." He had already begun working on a story outline and wished to use "the finest men...from color...down to animators" on the short. The Sorcerer's Apprentice was to be promoted as a "special" and rented to theaters as a unique film, outside of the Mickey Mouse cartoon series. An agreement signed by Disney and Stokowski on December 16, 1937, allowed the conductor to "select and employ a complete symphony orchestra" for the recording. Disney hired a stage at the Culver Studios in California for the session. It began at midnight on January 9, 1938, and lasted for three hours using eighty-five Hollywood musicians. As production costs of the short film climbed to $125,000, it became clearer to Disney and his brother Roy, who managed the studio's finances, that the short could never earn such a sum back on its own. Roy suggested keeping any additional costs to a minimum. He said, "Because of its very experimental and unprecedented nature...we have no idea what can be expected from such a production." Ben Sharpsteen, a production supervisor on Fantasia, noted that its budget was three to four times greater than the usual Silly Symphony, but Disney "saw this trouble in the form of an opportunity. This was the birth of a new concept, a group of separate numbers—regardless of their running time—put together in a single presentation. It turned out to be a concert—something novel and of high quality." Ideas to produce a complete feature film were pursued in February 1938, when inquiries were made to extend Stokowski's contract. In August, Disney asked Stokowski's representative to have him return to the studios to select material for the new film, which was initially titled The Concert Feature. The pair further thought of presenting the film with an on-screen host to introduce each number in the program. Both had heard composer and music critic Deems Taylor provide intermission commentary during radio broadcasts of the New York Philharmonic and agreed he would be most suitable for the role. Disney did contact Taylor about the project, but by then work on Pinocchio, Bambi, and development on his new Burbank studio kept him too busy to work on the new feature. In a change of plans, Taylor was asked during a call on September 3, 1938, leave to come to the studios as soon as possible. He left New York City for Los Angeles by train two days later for a month's visit.
Development
Taylor arrived at the studio one day after a series of meetings began to select the musical pieces for The Concert Feature. Disney made story writers Joe Grant and Dick Huemer gather a preliminary selection of music and along with Stokowski, Taylor, and the heads of various departments, discussed their ideas. Each meeting was recorded verbatim by stenographers with participants being given a copy of the entire conversation for review. As selections were considered, a recording of the piece was located and played back at the next gathering. Disney did not contribute much to early discussions; he admitted that his knowledge of music was instinctive and untrained. In one meeting, he inquired about a piece "on which we might build something of a prehistoric theme...with animals." The group was considering The Firebird by Igor Stravinsky, but Taylor noted that his "Le Sacre du printemps would be something on that order," to which Disney replied upon hearing a recording, "This is marvelous! It would be perfect for prehistoric animals. There would be something terrific in dinosaurs, flying lizards, and prehistoric monsters. There could be beauty in the settings." Numerous choices were discarded as talks continued, including Moto Perpetuo by Niccolò Paganini with "shots of dynamos, cogs, pistons, and whirling wheels" to show the production of a collar button. Other deletions were Prelude in G minor and Troika by Sergei Rachmaninoff and a rendition of "The Song of the Flea" by Mussorgsky which was to be sung by Lawrence Tibbett. On September 29, 1938, around sixty of Disney's artists gathered for a two-and-a-half hour piano concert while he provided a running commentary about the new musical feature. A rough version of The Sorcerer's Apprentice was also shown that, according to one attendee, had the crowd applauding and cheering "until their hands were red. " The final pieces were chosen the following morning, which included Toccata and Fugue in D minor, Cydalise et le Chèvre-pied by Gabriel Pierné, The Nutcracker Suite, Night on Bald Mountain, Ave Maria, Dance of the Hours, Clair de Lune by Claude Debussy, The Rite of Spring, and The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Disney had already begun working out the details for the segments and showed greater enthusiasm and eagerness as opposed to his skepticism while starting Pinocchio. was soon removed from the Fantasia program, but Disney and his writers encountered problems setting a concrete story to Cydalise. Its opening march, "The Entry of the Little Fauns", attracted Disney to the piece, which at first provided suitable depictions of fans he wanted. On January 5, 1939, following a search for a stronger piece to fit the mythological theme, the piece was replaced with Beethoven's sixth symphony sections. Stokowski disagreed with the switch, believing that Disney's "idea of mythology...is not quite what this symphony is about." He was also concerned about the reception from classical music enthusiasts who would criticize Disney for venturing too far from the composer's intent. On the other hand, Taylor welcomed the change, describing it as "a stunning one", and saw "no possible objection to it." The new feature continued to be known as The Concert Feature or Musical Feature as late as November 1938. Hal Horne, a publicist for Disney's film distributor RKO Radio Pictures, wished for a different title and gave the suggestion Filmharmonic Concert. Stuart Buchanan then held a contest at the studio for a title that produced almost 1,800 suggestions including Bach to Stravinsky and Bach and Highbrowski by Stokowski. Still, the favorite among the film's supervisors was Fantasia, an early working title that had even grown on Horne, "It isn't the word alone but the meaning we read into it." From the beginning of its development, Disney expressed the greater importance of music in Fantasia compared to his past work: "In our ordinary stuff, our music is always under action, but on this...we're supposed to be picturing this music - not the music fitting our story." Disney had hoped that the film would bring classical music to people that, including himself, had "walked out on this kind of stuff."
Design and animation
Animation on The Sorcerer's Apprentice began on January 21, 1938, when James Algar, the director of the segment, assigned animator Preston Blair to work on the scene when Mickey Mouse wakes from his dream. Each of the seven hundred members of staff at the time received a synopsis of the Goethe tale and were encouraged to complete a twenty-question form that requested their ideas on what action might take place. Layout artist Tom Codrick created what Dick Huemer described as "brilliantly colored thumbnails" from preliminary storyboard sketches using gouache paints, which featured the bolder use of color and lighting than any previous Disney short. Mickey was redesigned by animator Fred Moore who added pupils for the first time to achieve greater ranges of expression. Most of the segment was shot in live action, including a scene where a UCLA athlete was asked to run and jump across one of the studio's sound stages with barrels in the way, which was used for reference when Mickey traverses through the water. Disney had been interested in producing abstract animation since he saw A Color Box by Len Lye from 1935. He explained the work done in the Toccata and Fugue was "no sudden idea...they were something we had nursed along several years but we never had a chance to try". Preliminary designs included those from effects animator Cy Young, who produced drawings influenced by the patterns on the edge of a piece of sound film. In late 1938 Disney hired Oskar Fischinger, a German artist who had produced numerous abstract animated films, including some with classical music, to work with Young. Upon review of three leica reels produced by the two, Disney rejected all three. According to Huemer all Fishinger "did was little triangles and designs...it didn't come off at all. Too dinky, Walt said. " Fischinger, like Disney, was used to having full control over his work and was not used to working in a group. Feeling his designs were too abstract for a mass audience, Fishinger left the studio in frustration, before the segment was completed, in October 1939. Disney had plans to make the Toccata and Fugue an experimental three-dimensional film, with audiences being given cardboard stereoscopic frames with their souvenir programs, but this idea was abandoned. In The Nutcracker Suite, animator Art Babbitt is said to have credited The Three Stooges as a guide for animating the dancing mushrooms in the Chinese Dance routine. He drew with a music score pinned to his desk to work out the choreography so he could relate the action to the melody and the counterpoint, "those nasty little notes underneath...so something has to be related to that". The studio filmed professional dancers Joyce Coles and Marjorie Belcher wearing ballet skirts that resembled shapes of blossoms that were to sit above water for Dance of the Flutes. An Arabian dancer was also brought in to study the movements for the goldfish in Arab Dance. An early concept for The Rite of Spring was to extend the story to the age of mammals and the first humans and the discovery of fire and man's triumph. John Hubley, the segment's art director, explained that it was later curtailed by Disney to avoid controversy from creationists, who promised to make trouble should he connect evolution with humans. To better understand the history of the planet, the studio received guidance from Roy Chapman Andrews, the director of the American Museum of Natural History, English biologist Julian Huxley, paleontologist Barnum Brown, and astronomer Edwin Hubble. Animators studied comets and nebulae at the Mount Wilson Observatory and observed a herd of iguanas and a baby alligator brought into the studio. The camera was kept at a low position throughout the segment to heighten the immensity of the dinosaurs. For inspiration on the routines in Dance of the Hours, animators studied real life ballet performers including Marge Champion and Irina Baronova. Animator John Hench was assigned to work on the segment but resisted as he knew little about ballet. Disney then gave Hench season tickets to the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo with backstage access so he could learn more about it. Béla Lugosi, best known for his role in Dracula, was brought in to provide reference poses for Chernabog. As animator Bill Tytla disliked the results, he used his colleague Wilfred Jackson to pose shirtless which gave him the images he needed. There were ideas of releasing scents throughout the theater during Fantasia, including the smell of incense during Ave Maria. Over one thousand artists and technicians were used in the making of Fantasia, which features over 500 characters. Segments were color-keyed scene by scene, so the colors in a single shot would harmonize between proceeding and following ones. Before a segment's narrative pattern was complete, an overall color scheme was designed to the general mood of the music and patterned to correspond with the development of the subject matter. The studio's character model department would also sculpt three-dimensional clay models so the animators could view their subjects from all angles.
Critical response
Among those at the film's premiere was film critic Bosley Crowther of The New York Times, who noted that "motion-picture history was made last night... Fantasia dumps conventional formulas overboard and reveals the scope of films for imaginative excursion... Fantasia ...is simply terrific. " Peyton Boswell, an editor at Art Digest, called it "an aesthetic experience never to be forgotten." Time magazine described the premiere as "stranger and more wonderful than any of Hollywood's" and the experience of Fantasound "as if the hearer were in the midst of the music. As the music sweeps to a climax, it froths over the proscenium arch, boils into the rear of the theater, all but prances up and down the aisles." Dance Magazine devoted its lead story to the film, saying that "the most extraordinary thing about Fantasia is, to a dancer or balletomane, not the miraculous musical recording, the range of color, or the fountainous integrity of the Disney collaborators, but quite simply the perfection of its dancing." Variety also hailed Fantasia, calling it "a successful experiment to lift the relationship from the plane of popular, mass entertainment to the higher strata of appeal to lovers of classical music." The Chicago Tribune assigned three writers to cover the film's Chicago premiere: society columnist Harriet Pribble; film critic Mae Tinee; and music critic Edward Barry. Pribble left amazed at the "brilliantly-attired audience", while Tinee felt the film was "beautiful...but it is also bewildering. It is stupendous. It is colossal. It is an overwhelmingly ambitious orgy of color, sound, and imagination." Barry was pleased with the "program of good music well performed...and beautifully recorded" and felt "pleasantly distracted" from the music to what was shown on the screen. In a breakdown of reviews from both film and music critics, Disney author Paul Anderson found 33% to be "very positive", 22% both "positive" and "positive and negative", and 11% negative. Those who adopted a more negative view were mostly music critics who resisted the idea of presenting classical music with visual images, arguing that doing so would rob the musical pieces of their integrity. As Stokowski feared, some critics were particularly turned off by the film's depiction of The Pastoral Symphony. Composer and music critic Virgil Thomson praised Fantasound, which he thought offered "good transmission of music", but disliked the "musical taste" of Stokowski, except for The Sorcerer's Apprentice and The Rite of Spring. Olin Downes of The New York Times too hailed the sound quality that Fantasound presented but felt that "much of Fantasia distracted from or directly injured the scores." Film critic Pauline Kael dismissed parts of Fantasia as "grotesquely kitschy". Music critic Benjamin DeCasseres, writing in The New York Journal and American, denounced the film entirely for "bringing great music down to the level of jazz" and perpetuating "a travesty on great art." Some parents resisted paying the higher roadshow prices for their children, and several complained that the Night on Bald Mountain segment had frightened them. There were also a few negative reactions that were more political in nature, especially since the film's release happened when Nazi Germany reigned supreme in Europe. One review of the film written in this manner, by Dorothy Thompson for The New York Herald Tribune on November 25, 1940, was especially harsh. Thompson claimed that she "left the theater in a condition bordering on nervous breakdown", because the film was a "remarkable nightmare." Thompson compared the film to rampant Nazism; both, according to her, depicted "the abuse of power" and "the perverted betrayal of the best instincts." Thompson also claimed that the film depicted nature as being "titanic" while man was nothing more than "a moving lichen on the stone of time." Thus, she concluded that the film was "cruel", "brutal and brutalizing", and a negative "caricature of the Decline of the West." In fact, Thompson claimed that she was so distraught by the film that she even walked out of it before seeing the two last segments, Night on Bald Mountain and Ave Maria because she was not about to be subject to any more of the film's "brutalization". holds a "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes, a website which aggregates film reviews. Its consensus—"A landmark in animation and a huge influence on the medium of the music video, Disney's Fantasia is a relentlessly inventive blend of the classics with phantasmagorical images." 96% of critics gave the film a positive review based on a sample of 50 reviews, with an average score of 8.6 out of 10. Among the website's "top critics" it holds a positive rating of 86% from seven reviews. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times rated the film four stars out of four, and noted that throughout Fantasia, "Disney pushes the edges of the envelope". Remarks have also been made about Fantasia not being a children's film. Reporting on the popular culture site Inside Pulse and in The Eagle newspaper, Robert Saucedo remembered to be "not the only one...having to sit through the movie as a kid fidgeting in your seat as the film delivers abstract image after abstract image", concluding that Fantasia is "for adults and very nerdy kids", while news and gossip website PopSugar included Fantasia in its "10 Movies That Scared Buzz Readers as Kids" list.
Awards and honors
ranked fifth at the 1940 National Board of Review Awards in the Top Ten Films category. In addition, Disney and Stokowski won a Special Award for the film at the 1940 New York Film Critics Circle Awards. Fantasia was the subject of two Academy Honorary Awards on February 26, 1942 — one for Disney, William Garity, John N. A. Hawkins, and the RCA Manufacturing Company for their "outstanding contribution to the advancement of the use of sound in motion pictures through the production of Fantasia", and the other to Stokowski "and his associates for their unique achievement in the creation of a new form of visualized music in Walt Disney's production Fantasia, thereby widening the scope of the motion picture as entertainment and as an art form". In 1990, Fantasia was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". On the 100th anniversary of cinema in 1995, the Vatican included Fantasia in its list of 45 "great films" made under the Art category; the others being Religion and Values. is featured in three lists that rank the greatest American films as determined by the American Film Institute. The film ranked number 58 in 100 Years... 100 Movies in 1998 before it was dropped from its 10th Anniversary revision in 2007, though it was nominated for inclusion. The 10 Top 10 list formed in 2008 placed Fantasia fifth under Animation.
Controversies
In the late 1960s, four shots from The Pastoral Symphony were removed that depicted two characters in a racially-stereotyped manner. A black centaurette called Sunflower was depicted polishing the hooves of a white centaurette, and a second name Otika appeared briefly during the procession scenes with Bacchus and his followers. According to Disney archivist David Smith, the sequence was aired uncut on television in 1963 before the edits were made for the film's 1969 theatrical reissue. John Carnochan, the editor responsible for the change in the 1991 video release, said, "It's sort of appalling to me that these stereotypes were ever put in." Film critic Roger Ebert commented on the edit: "While the original film should, of course, be preserved for historical purposes, there is no need for the general release version to perpetrate racist stereotypes in a film designed primarily for children." The edits have been in place in all subsequent theatrical and home video reissues. In May 1992, the Philadelphia Orchestra Association filed a lawsuit against The Walt Disney Company and Buena Vista Home Video. As a co-creator of Fantasia, the orchestra maintained that the group was entitled to half of the estimated $120 million in profits from video and laserdisc sales. The orchestra dropped its case in 1994 when the two parties reached an undisclosed settlement out of court. British music publisher Boosey & Hawkes filed a further lawsuit in 1993, contending that Disney did not have the rights to distribute The Rite of Spring in the 1991 video releases because the permission granted to Disney by Stravinsky in 1940 was only in the context of a film to be shown in theaters. The United States district court backed Boosey & Hawkes's case in 1996, but the Second Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the ruling in 1998, stating that Disney's original "license for motion picture rights extends to video format distribution."
Disney had wanted Fantasia to be an ongoing project, with a new edition being released every few years. His plan was to substitute one of the original segments with a new one as it was complete, so the viewer would always see a new version of the film. From January to August 1941, story material was developed based on additional pieces, including Ride of the Valkyries by Richard Wagner, The Swan of Tuonela by Jean Sibelius, Invitation to the Dance by Carl Maria von Weber, Flight of the Bumblebee by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, which was later adapted into the Bumble Boogie segment in Melody Time (1948), and there was even consideration for a segment inspired by the Polka and Fugue from Schwanda the Bagpiper by Jaromír Weinberger. The film's disappointing initial box office performance and the advent of World War II brought an end to these plans. Taylor had prepared introductions for The Firebird by Stravinsky, La Mer by Claude Debussy, Adventures in a Perambulator by John Alden Carpenter, Don Quixote by Richard Strauss, and Pictures at an Exhibition by Mussorgsky "to have them for the future in case we decided to make any one of them".
was another segment that was part of the film's original program. After being completely animated, it was cut out of the final film to shorten its already long running time. The segment featured two egrets flying through the Everglades on a moonlit night. The sequence was later edited and re-scored for the Blue Bayou segment in Make Mine Music (1946). A workprint of the original was discovered and Clair de Lune was restored in 1992, complete with the original soundtrack of Stokowski with the Philadelphia Orchestra. It was included as a bonus feature in The Fantasia Anthology DVD in 2000.
Sequel
In 1980, the Los Angeles Times reported that animators Wolfgang Reitherman and Mel Shaw had begun work on Musicana, "an ambitious concept mixing jazz, classical music, myths, modern art, and more, following the old Fantasia format." Animation historian Charles Solomon wrote that development took place between 1982 and 1983, which combined "ethnic tales from around the world with the music of the various countries." Proposed segments for the film included a battle between an ice god and a sun goddess set to Finlandia by Sibelius, one set in the Andes to the songs of Yma Sumac, and other featuring caricatures of Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. However, the project was shelved in favor of Mickey's Christmas Carol. Roy E. Disney, the nephew of Walt, co-produced Fantasia 2000 which entered production in 1990 and features seven new segments performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with conductor James Levine. The Sorcerer's Apprentice is the only segment retained from the original film. Fantasia 2000 premiered at Carnegie Hall on December 17, 1999, as part of a five-city live concert tour, followed by a four-month engagement in IMAX cinemas and a wide release in regular theaters, in 2000.
Parodies and spin-offs
is parodied in A Corny Concerto, a Warner Bros. cartoon from 1943 of the Merrie Melodies series. The short features Elmer Fudd in the role of Taylor, wearing his style eyeglasses, who introduces two segments set to pieces by Johann Strauss (Tales from the Vienna Woods and the Blue Danube Waltz, both featuring Porky and Bugs and Daffy respectively). In 1976, Italian animator Bruno Bozzetto produced Allegro Non Troppo, a feature-length parody of Fantasia. Jerry Bruckheimer used the story of The Sorcerer's Apprentice as a basis for his eponymous fantasy-adventure film in 2010. Disney are developing the Night on Bald Mountain sequence from the film, with Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless writing and executive producing the live-action film. In February 2016, it was announced Disney is developing a live-action version of Nutcracker Suite, which was last depicted as a segment of the 1940 film. The feature film is titled, The Nutcracker and the Four Realms. Shotaro Ishinomori, creator of the Godzilla, Kamen Rider, and Cyborg 009 franchises, is believed to have been inspired by Fantasia when developing the Mythos Cyborgs, a group of villains based on Greek mythological figures appearing in Cyborg 009. This is mostly seen as being speculation on the grounds that two of the Mythos Cyborgs, namely the Hippo Man and Pan, resemble the ballerina hippos and the satyrs, respectively. The animated television series The Simpsons references Fantasia in a few episodes. Matt Groening, the creator of the franchise, expressed a wish to make a parody film named Simpstasia; it was never produced, partly because it would have been too difficult to write a feature-length script. In "Treehouse of Horror IV", director David Silverman had admired the animation in Night on Bald Mountain and made the first appearance of Devil Flanders resemble Chernabog. The episode "Itchy & Scratchy Land" references The Sorcerer's Apprentice in a snippet titled "Scratchtasia" that features the music and several shots parodying it exactly. is also referenced in the animated series South Park in the episode "Chef's Chocolate Salty Balls", where Mr. Hankey dons a wizard outfit and drives out an independent film festival by summoning a wave of sewage, similar to Mickey's dream of summoning a storm in The Sorcerer's Apprentice.
Theme parks
The Sorcerer's Hat was once the icon of Disney's Hollywood Studios, one of the four theme parks located at Walt Disney World. The structure was of the magic hat from The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Still located at the resort is Fantasia Gardens, a miniature golf course that integrates characters and objects from the film in each hole. The fireworks and water show Fantasmic! features scenes from The Sorcerer's Apprentice and other Fantasia segments on water projection screens, and involves the plot of Mickey as the apprentice doing battle with the Disney Villains. For the 20th anniversary of Disneyland Paris, Mickey was depicted in a special version of his Sorcerer's Apprentice outfit. His friends donned similar outfits, as well.
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The Sorcerer's Apprentice by Paul Dukas. Based on Goethe's 1797 poem "Der Zauberlehrling". Mickey Mouse, the young apprentice of the sorcerer Yen Sid, attempts some of his master's magic tricks but does not know how to control them. "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" with Mickey Mouse as the title character brings a broom to life to carry water for him.
A landmark in animation (and a huge influence on the medium of music video), Disney's Fantasia is a relentlessly inventive blend of the classics with phantasmagorical images. Released in 1940 ...
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- James Algar
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- Walt Disney Productions
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A lobby card featuring a scene from the “The Sorcerer's Apprentice” segment in Fantasia (1940). Fantasia, American animated film, released in 1940, that was produced by Walt Disney and features seven unrelated segments set to classical music under the direction of famed conductor Leopold Stokowski. Viewers and critics have deemed the film ...
G. Release Date: July 21, 1941. Genre: Animation, Classics, Family, Musical. Walt Disney's timeless masterpiece is an extravaganza of sight and sound! See the music come to life, hear the pictures burst into song and experience the excitement that is Fantasia over and over again. No family's Disney collection is complete without Fantasia!
