Read on to discover the story behind Disney's Fantasia, an animated classic featuring a first-class soundtrack of classical music...
Why did Walt Disney make Fantasia? A starring vehicle for Mickey Mouse...
For seven glorious years from his first appearance in 1928, the cartoon character Mickey Mouse was the toast of movie-going America... A star of 70 comic shorts and spearhead of a lucrative merchandising business. By the mid-1930s, however, Mickey’s creator Walt Disney was growing anxious about his lovable rodent. Recent surveys had suggested Mickey was now less popular than his Disney stable-mates Donald Duck and Goofy the dog. Or even the spinach-eating sailor Popeye.
What to do about this lamentable situation? Disney quickly conceived an answer. He would showcase Mickey in a special episode of his long-running ‘Silly Symphonies’ series, where humorous animations were matched to pieces of music. Snatches of classical music had featured in the ‘Silly Symphonies’ before, but Disney had a bolder notion... Mickey’s episode would have a single work for its soundtrack: Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
The story behind Disney's Fantasia... ambition grows with a world-famous conductor
A chance encounter late in 1937 fuelled the project further. Dining at Chasen’s restaurant in Hollywood, Disney bumped into conductor Leopold Stokowski. They got talking, and by the end of the evening a deal was done. Stokowski would record Dukas’s piece for the soundtrack with his blue-riband Philadelphia Orchestra, waiving his own fee. Disney eagerly embraced the added value the charismatic conductor would bring. Their collaboration could, he felt, ‘lead to a new style of motion picture presentation’.
It did, eventually, but not without teething problems, mainly financial in nature. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice would never earn back what it cost to make, the Disney money men objected. Walt’s solution was extravagant: why not expand Sorcerer into a grand collage of similar short segments, creating a work of feature film duration? Snow White and Pinocchio had already shown the Disney studio could successfully handle full-length animations. Now, Walt reasoned, was the time to do it again.
The story behind Disney's Fantasia... a soundtrack by Bach, Beethoven, Stravinsky and more...
And so the movie we now know as Fantasia was born. Pieces by JS Bach, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Beethoven, Ponchielli, Mussorgsky and Schubert were added to the soundtrack, and recorded by Stokowski in a new multi-channel system known as Fantasound. Disney’s storyboarders created narratives for each piece, and his animators drew them. Over 1,000 studio employees worked on Fantasia, bringing its 500-plus characters to life.
The story behind Disney's Fantasia... dividing the critics
The finished product was two hours long, cost $2,280,000 (about $50m today) to complete, and was premiered in New York City on 13 November 1940. Not all of its initial viewers were wowed by the movie’s phantasmagorical cast of dinosaurs, dancing ostriches and malevolent broomsticks. Fuming that his ballet The Rite of Spring had been bowdlerised, Stravinsky found Stokowski’s conducting ‘execrable’ and the cartoon itself an ‘unresisting imbecility’. Other members of the classical music community were sniffy too, fearing that Disney’s startling visual imagery ‘distracted from or directly injured the scores’, as New York Times critic Olin Downes put it.
History has, though, been kinder, hailing Fantasia as a masterpiece of visual art and imagination. It was, for many, a gateway into classical music, and its innovations in multi-channel recording led eventually to the advanced surround-sound techniques used in audio and cinema today. Walt Disney himself knew it was a landmark achievement, but acknowledged that the extravagant scale of its ambition had stress-tested both himself and his studio to the limit. ‘We made it and I don’t regret it,’ he commented. ‘But if we had to do it all over again, I don’t think we’d do it.’