THE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
THE SCREEN Walt Disney's most durable creations were a set of animal characters that always seemed at once both familiar and divine, a set of characters that followed from the 1927 appearance of a...
...Besides the six works forming the film's two movements, there are three pieces of music rendered impres-sionistically-the Bach "Toccata," an instrument test entitled "the Sound Track" and Schubert's "Ave Maria" -that divide and bracket the two movements...
...As the orchestra warms up at the beginning of the film, a commentator explains that although there will later be music intended to tell stories, commemorate history, etc., first we shall hear a piece of "pure" music, Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor...
...The exact date of Mickey's death is unknown, as befits a figure of legend...
...Mischance, disaster and catastrophe roll off the human condition like water off Donald Duck's back...
...Mickey does a guest spot in the role of the sorcerer's apprentice and somehow fits right in with the abstract construction of the film...
...The Nutcracker Suite" is a ballet of female dragonflies and flowers...
...But that is a bit too tony...
...These music-inspired films had been the source not only of technical experimentation-Flowers and Trees utilized technicolor in 1932, and Fantasia was made in stereophonic sound -but of the greatest stylistic liberties...
...They all abstracted human experience and rendered the world in such a way that we would know any adversity or grief was just a passing fancy...
...The first movement contains passages from "The Nutcracker Suite," Dukas' "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" and Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring...
...Mickey himself seems finally to have passed away sometime between 1955 and 1960, when Disney Productions admitted to an official policy of reissuing old Mickey Mouse cartoons without making new ones...
...The visual equivalents Disney's people concocted for this were based on compositions by artist Oscar Fischinger and looked unlike anything else Disney ever did...
...Yet Fantasia was not some way-out film for Disney, but a central one...
...The discontinuation of the Silly Symphonies and of their tendencies after Fantasia seems to have been a conscious decision by Disney to play down whatever was expressionistic or avant-garde in his work...
...The Rite of Spring" is an animated re-creation of the prehistory of volcanoes, behemoths and cataclysmic weather changes...
...The second movement contains Beethoven's "Pastorale," Ponchielli's "Dance of the Hours" and Moussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain...
...The focus of "The Rite of Spring" is the ever-diminishing water holes over which the primeval beasts fight...
...That was their charm...
...Yet in a sense this abstraction is an appropriate introduction to Fantasia, for Fantasia itself is a kind of abstraction, and therefore a revelation, of all Disney's work...
...The Sorcerer's Apprentice" is a parade of maniacal, water-carrying broomsticks...
...First Minnie was created from a part of the personality of Mickey, like Eve from Adam's rib, then they begat Pluto and Goofy and Donald Duck and Daisy, who begat Huey, Dewey and Louie, etc...
...In Fantasia this pattern is like a symphony in two movements, the second one of which repeats and develops the themes of the first...
...Before they went into their final eclipse, though, they produced a memorial of their own, a feature-length swan song that is perhaps Disney's greatest work: Fantasia...
...Yet the Mickey Mouse cartoons represented only one side of Disney's imagination, and for all Mickey's divinity, it was really the earthier side...
...THE SCREEN Walt Disney's most durable creations were a set of animal characters that always seemed at once both familiar and divine, a set of characters that followed from the 1927 appearance of a mouse named Mortimer...
...Disney was fascinated with water and went to great lengths to discover and render its behavior accurately...
...In the six pieces of music that followed the Bach "Toccata" there is a pattern which is described in all Disney's other feature films as well...
...But with a collaborative effort you can make a wide range of products-a Detroit automobile, for instance, or a Gothic cathedral...
...This series embodied a more abstract and free-form kind of Disney fancy that was keyed to the non-visual inspirations of music...
...Like all mythic heroes, however, Mickey prepared a sacred burial ground for himself-indeed, a veritable Valhalla-before he died...
...If you think my religious conceit a bit much, you obviously don't know that Mickey is now in the pantheon of a Hindu temple...
...Although it may have abstracted the sentiments and effects of other Disney films in a singular fashion, abstraction itself was of the essence in all those Disney films...
...But what the music is matters less than how Disney rendered it visually...
...Life in his cartoons is utterly virginal, utterly without consequences...
...After starring in two silent cartoons and the first synch-sound animation, Steamboat Willie, Mortimer of course became Mickey...
...The work that followed included Flowers and Trees (1932), Music Land (1935) and The Farmyard Symphony (1938...
...Mouse-keteers, Love Bugs, and other live productions may seem an ignominniemouse end for the disnasty, but at Disneyland and Disney World the memory lingers on...
...Fantasia was part of Disney's work that fell more on the side of the Gothic cathedral...
...What put an end to the series in 1939 was a purely financial consideration...
...From a good dousing to a near drowning like Mickey's in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," receding water always leaves clothes dry and unwrinkled, activities unabated and spirits undampened...
...His artists even drew upon scientific experiments in ultra-high speed photography of the splash and flow patterns of water...
...It is in the fact that water never makes anything wet in a Disney film...
...colin l. westerbeck, jr...
...That the formalist side of Disney's imagination apparent in Fantasia was not at odds with the popular side is shown by the presence of Mickey Mouse in the film...
...While the side that has continued to shine on us began with the Mickey Mouse cartoons of the early 1930s, the other side of Disney's imagination began with the Silly Symphonies cartoon series of the same period...
...Under Disney's shrewd eye and the hand of chief animator Ub Iwerks, the whole Disney menagerie followed like the cast of Genesis...
...In generic terms, I suppose the bases Disney was tagging here might be called the idyllic, the comic and the tragic...
...Something more like the sentimental, the funny and the scary would be closer to it, and in the second half of the film Disney repeated them in that order...
...No matter how overwhelming a cause, water never has any effect, and this seems emblematic of all human experiences in Disney's films...
...Besides "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" and the Tchaikovsky passage, Beethoven's "Pastorale" is given a water setting, first a lake on which winged horses alight and then a storm from which fauns and centaurs take shelter...
...I mean Disneyland, the only worthy memorial there could have been...
...Water is in fact the most prominent setting for the action of the film...
...The other side of Disney's imagination is only half remembered now because it went into eclipse back in the early 1940s...
...Mickey Mouse was enormously popular while the Silly Symphonies were not...
...If Disney cartoons have a single, stylistic touchstone, a point at which their artistic style and philosophical content meet, it is in the rendering of water...
...The series began with the 1929 production Skeleton Dance, whose title characters are set a-jangling to Saint-Saens' "Danse Macabre...
...For all the realism that the applications of water have in Fantasia, however, what strikes us is the unreality of its effects...
...Actually, how he does so can be seen from Disney's treatment of the one element that all the sequences in the film have in common: water...
...And even these seem to follow an approximate pattern from romantic sentiment to laughter to awe...
...Even "The Dance of the Hours" manages to put at center stage a fountain into which the improbable ballerinas continually fall...
...It could be argued that the Disney cartoon features were the quintessence of commercial moviemaking, for such moviemaking is by nature a collaborative effort and nowhere more so than in Disney's films...
Vol. 103 • June 1976 • No. 12
