I always had the impression that I saw the original Fantasia in its first release, but since that happened in 1940 — at the time I was, I presume, a fairly bright gleam in my parents’ eyes, but nothing more — it must have been the second release that my parents took me to Portland’s “Guild” theater to see. Anyway, I was impressed, particularly by the passages “A Night on Bald Mountain,” “The Rite of Spring” and “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”

The follow-up, seen today at the Shattuck Cinemas in Berkeley, is both a delight and a disappointment — something one should learn to expect from “episode” films. To start with, it is only a few minutes more than an hour long. Naturally, the individual passages are fairly short — there is nothing to match, in length, the Beethoven or Tchaikovsky segments in the original. One bit, Saint-Saëns’ “The Carnival of the Animals (Finale)” — the flamingos and the yo-yo — came and went so fast that I, who had bent over to make a notation in a notebook in the dark, missed the whole thing.

As to the quality of the episodes, well, they varied. I did not much care for Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” — a series of interrelated vignettes of life in depression-era New York, whose animation quality was, IMHO, not much different from what you see in “Dexter’s Laboratory” or “The Powerpuff Girls.” The initial Beethoven Symphony #5 animation was perhaps more interesting than its original “Toccata and Fugue” counterpart, but too short for its content. The “Donald and the Ark” passage, to the music of Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance,” ⁽¹⁾ is essentially a 1950s cartoon, which can also be said for the semi-restored Mickey Mouse “Sorceror’s Apprentice,” ⁽²⁾ though the latter has in fact demonstrated that it can survive the test of time (it is this film’s only retention from the original).

Three of the episodes are based on real stories — Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Steadfast Tin Soldier,” “Noah’s Ark” from the Bible, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s “The Sorceror’s Apprentice” (neither the Bible nor Goethe are credited, however), though only for the last of the three was the music originally composed with the associated story in mind (“Soldier” is accompanied by Shostakovitch’s Piano Concerto #2). Yet in my opinion the two best “stories” were especially created for episodes in which they bear little relationship to what was probably going through the composer’s mind when he wrote the music.

The show starts with the “flying whales,” a sequence drawn to Ottorino Respighi’s “The Pines of Rome.” Except for an occasional fit of cartoon overcuteness on the part of the baby whale (particularly around the eyes), this is an extremely successful paean to the beauties of undulant motion, and the joy of flight. The climax is particularly moving.

And in the final piece, accompanied by Igor Stravinsky’s “The Firebird,” we see the triumph of creation and life, as embodied in a giant stag and his beautiful companion nature sprite, over destruction, as represented by what must be Stravinsky’s Firebird, the spirit of a huge volcano. This is the current film’s “Night on Bald Mountain” and its immediate successor, the “Ave Maria,” combined into a single episode and given a slightly different religious slant. This piece was, to me, simply fantastically good. I will buy the DVD (when and if it appears) for this episode alone.

Missing: the Wagner “Ride of the Valkyries” episode, which got chopped (along with a number of other projected pieces). I heard rumors that there was to be another Modest Moussorgsky bit, from “Pictures at an Exhibition” (“The Great Gate of Kiev”?), but there was no sign of this, even in the description of chopped segments; what a disappointment! For Fantasia 3 (which I don’t expect to live to see), include two or three of the later short movements from Ravel’s “Ma Mere l’Oye” (“Empress of the Pagodas” and “The Fairy Garden”). Oh, and drop the special guest hosts — Steve Martin, James Earl Jones, Penn & Teller, Beth Middler and Angela Lansbury added little to the ambience, and wasted far too much of the very little time in the film.

Catch it sometime during the next four weeks, if you can. Otherwise, who knows when it will be available again?

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⁽¹⁾ Without going back to my Elgar 33-1/3 vinyl disk, I suspect that they actually mixed two pieces together here — “Enter the Queen” followed by “Pomp and Circumstance.”

⁽²⁾ The fact that this is an older, restored episode is fairly obvious from the graininess and flickering.

Don Harlow, June 18, 2000 03:40 PM

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