National Board of Review Magazine (Jan 1939 - Jan 1942)

November, 1940 The New Disney Film WALT DISNEY'S new picture, Fantasia, will be specially shown during the Annual Conference of the National Board this year, because it is an important new step in the use of sound, which will perhaps be revolutionary in its effects on movie production. The film will be screened at the Broadway Theatre, one of the few theatres in the country equipped to exhibit it. You may want to know what kind of movie Fantasia is. Well, we have the word of Mr. Disney and his staff that "it's just impossible to describe in the light of any past entertainment." We can, however, get a vague idea from reports on its contents and on the new methods that have been created for its projection. The title, Fantasia, the final choice of thousands that had been suggested, was selected not only because it connoted fantasy but because as a musical term a "fantasia" means two things : a composition in which the composer strayed away from accepted form, and a potpourri of familiar airs ; in a sense, both of these definitions fit Fantasia. In it a new fashion has come into being in musical interpretation and in the expressiveness of the cinema ; in it also are presented a group of contrasting symphonic works which are fairly familiar to most people who listen to music. For Fantasia is an orchestra concert synchronized to a visual interpretation in color and form projected on a screen — a layman's interpretation, not that of a musicologist. Walt Disney is that interpreter. By listening to the music he sought to catch the ideas, figures and tonalities evoked in his imagination and to record them on film as animated color cartoons synchronized to the compositions. The whole idea began rather modestly. Originally Disney planned to make a movie of Dukas' tonepoem, "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," with Mickey Mouse as the hero. Leopold Stokowski was delighted with the notion and, with an orchestra of nearly a hundred musicians, he assumed the business of conducting the score. Soon, however, it was felt that so interesting a venture was somewhat slighted by being launched as a short hardly ten minutes long. From all sides came suggestions urging a more ambitious production, and finally it was decided to animate for the screen an entire symphonic concert. Stokowski and Disney took the plunge with enthusiasm and called in Deems Taylor to help select a program. The problem they faced was to choose musical works that would appeal to the huge movie going public, works keyed to a wide range of tastes and to various emotional planes. Deems Taylor's vast experience with the musical partialities of the American public proved valuable here. The program selected runs a gamut of moods, classical, whimsical, humorous, modern, pastoral, romantic and religious. It contains J. S. Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in B Minor," Tchaikowsky's "Nutcracker Suite," Dukas' "Sorcerer's Apprentice," Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring," Beethoven's "Sixth Symphony," Ponchielli's ballet music "The Dance of the Hours," Moussorgsky's "A Night on Bald Mountain," and Schubert's "Ave Maria" — in all a fairly husky concert. Between March seventeenth and May fifth, 1938, Stokowski and the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra recorded over 420,000 feet of music. In Hollywood the music editors, selecting the best "takes," reduced this to 18,000 feet, in which, thanks to a marvellous job of cutting, appears as perfect a recording of the eight compositions as any orchestra could possibly make. Meanwhile Disney and his artists, with a rough track of the recording for reference purposes, went to work on the visual interpretations. The demands made on Disney by so diverse a program of "pure" and program music evoked a new and rich array of designs from his fertile imagination. The film synchronized to the Bach "Toccata and Fugue" was described by Thornton Delehanty of the Herald-Tribune, who saw the studio preview in Hollywood, as "a series of abstract patterns and forms, rising and falling, deepening, widening, narrowing and splashing out in a fusillade of colors according to the volume and configurations of the music." To the other pieces tangible figures are synchro