Movie Reviews from
By John Ruch
© 1999 John Ruch. All rights
reserved.
Fantasia 2000 (1999)
In 1940, Disney released “Fantasia” as a “bold experiment in sight and sound.” It linked eight animated sequences with pieces of classical music—both to show how visual art can synesthetically interpret music, and to link cartoons with high art.
It was such a bold experiment that the public hated it and it bombed, only developing into a cult favorite when hippies started using it as a freeway for nice long acid trips.
Disney is now an aesthetically conservative business that would never make “Fantasia” today.
What, then, is “Fantasia 2000”? A tame rehash, an extension of a brand name, an ironic reminder that what shocks the conservatives of one era will be the dull formula comforting the conservatives of the next.
And also, a poignantly doomed picture of the sort of talent lurking under Disney’s conventionalities, and the abundance of animation’s unrealized potentials.
This IMAX-only film again pairs eight animated bits (well, seven, really, since the old “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” is stuck in for greatest-hits nostalgia) with classical music (and one jazz number—Gershiwn’s “Rhapsody in Blue”).
The classical music now merely provides a patina of respectability; the film otherwise goes to great pains to distance itself from anything as evil as “high art.” To wit, awful introductory segments by the likes of Steve Martin and Bette Midler are used to pimp the film to the mainstream with a constant stream of anti-art joshing.
If this is the “voyage of discovery in sight, sound and motion” it claims to be, then it makes a long detour through the gift shop. Its major tactic is interpreting the high-class music in terms of middle-class kitsch. While the film could conceivably sensitize an audience to music’s emotive qualities, its main thrust is mawkish cute-ification.
Even the most successful and imaginative pieces bear the ligature marks of Disney bondage—most somehow involve good-vs.-evil dualism and/or lost animals. The problem is that Disney (not the mention the majority of American consumers) continue to conceive of artists as mere craftsmen, ignoring the equally essential moral/personal/spiritual wisdom.
What we have here is mostly glossy, meaningless diversion-on-stilts a la Broadway’s “Phantom of the Opera.” The couple of pretty high high points are still less than half as bold and experimental as any given reel of the recent Japanese cartoon “Princess Mononoke.”
Two
segments truly bear a unique stamp. The opener, based on Beethoven’s Fifth,
uses moving slashes of color to mirror (with varying success) the music, though having the color splinter into little butterflies is
perhaps unwise. And the final segment, narrating Stravinsky’s “Firebird Suite,”
is stunning “Heavy Metal”-style sturm und drang (if derivative of the original’s “Night on
Saint-Saens’s “Carnival of the Animals” is made a virtuoso stunt about a flamingo with a yo-yo—amusing gamesmanship with line and color.
The “Rhapsody in Blue” segment is intricately plotted and directed, and its retro-“New Yorker” freehand style is as appealing as its storyline is stereotyped.
Moving down the list: Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 2 becomes
“Toy Story 3” with an incredibly trite tale of a tin soldier’s adventures.
Resphigi’s “Pines of Rome” inexplicably exchanges its lumber for lumbering New
Age whales flying into space. Laughable. And
completely disposable is a Donald Duck cartoon (set to “Pomp and Circumstance”)
that combines the Noah’s
Tossing in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” a little more than half the segments are thus eminently watchable (and you could close your eyes and just listen to the others).
That, of
course, has nothing to do with Uncle Walt’s original daring vision, though it’s
paid much lip service even as it’s systematically dismantled. Sixty years after
the original controversy and box-office disaster, the “Fantasia” name now
simply stands for an animated film fest for fogeys.