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

12 National Board of Revie%L< Magazine horrified at the liberties Disney has taken it can be said that they should view with equal indignation the Ballet Russe which for years has used Brahms, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and a host of other great and lesser masters to provide the musical bases of its inventions. Disney has done no more and has created as delightful a product. The faults in Fantasia, considering the music used, are remarkably few, and these are inherent in the Unequal excellence of his designs and the compositions, several of which are of overpowering greatness. For one man with unvar}-ing success to match in his concepts the works of eight accepted masters is beyond expectation. The marvel is that he succeeds as well as he does. In the Bach and Schubert pieces the film falls pretty low. The "Toccata and Fugue" is a mighty aftair musically ; the integrated cartoon is decidedly less than mighty. Beginning with naturalistic shots of parts of the orchestra (not forgetting i\Ir. Stokowski) as they are heard playing, it passes into surrealistic impressions of such things as the tops of fiddle bows darting about like fish and finally into abstract patterns and formalized natural forms skittering about the screen as one or another part of the orchestra takes up the voices of the fugue. Some of these are impressive enough at the moment you see them with their own loveliness of movement, color and form, but others, like the formalized snow crystals sweeping down a dark blue field are unfortunate in recalling the design on a package of Jack Frost sugar,, or a sky-writing airplane. Altogether the Bach number is a trivial jumble of styles. The style of the "Ave IMaria" is satisfactory enough, but it suffers from the misuse of the music, the triteness and lack of clarity of the designs and the hopelessness of Hollywood in dealing with a religious theme. Its implied preachment for our time, similar in intent to the finale of The Great Dictator, without the apparent reason that Qiaplin had, led Disney into intolerable artistic blunders. To begin with, the Schubert piece is a solo song, not a chorale, and it was set to the poem of Scott, which for reasons best known to Hollywood was forsaken for a potpourri of bible-like phrases about the "Prince of Peace" etc,, that were not even justified by clarity. The cartoon to this thingamajig depicted a procession carrying lights, presumably of nuns or monks with lighted candles, that might as well have been Chinese lanterns. This was bad enough, but the crowning blow was linking up the Schubert song with IMoussorgsky's "Xight on Bald Mountain" by a succession of chords. Not even Deems Taylor, commenting on the forces of evil as contrasted with ultimate good, could justify that. It wasn't contrast, it was a collision, and the cleverness of the sound, swinging the voices of the choir to different parts of the house, could not save it from being an artistic calamity. Now the worst things have been said, and I can concentrate on the really pleasant parts of Fantasia. The charm of the pictures synchronised with the "Pastoral Symphony" quite cancels out their inadequacy for the music. You are not very conscious of the music ; most of your attention is concentrated on the' wonderful creatures that Disney takes from classic legend and sets gamboling to the Beethoven score. There are tiny unicorns that prance like puppies ; the majestic Pegasus and his exquisite wife, happily proA^ded with children ; Bacchus on a little bucktoothed donkey as tipsy as his master ; fauns a-piping(one a colored creature with a "hairdo" like Topsy's ) ; and clouds of pink cupids working very hard to further romance. There is Zeus amusing himself with a twilight blitz-krieg on poor rain-drenched Bacchus ; there is Evening bringing darkness and sleep to the world, and a lovely Diana shooting stars into the sky from the bow of a sickle moon. In its humor and beauty this cartoon justifies the use of a Beethoven score. The centaurs are the single unfortunate element. Disnev has not yet mastered the problem of drawing young men. The power of "The Rite of Spring" grows for the most part from the music. Here is evolved in terrifying sequences life from its first throbbing to the death of the dinosaurs. A great many of the pictures are rather like postal cards, but synchronized to the crash and rhythms of Stravinsky's score, they have terrifying effect. Interest becomes vivid when the monsters appear. There are beautiful compositions of the astounding creatures feeding