Disneyology

The Era of Confusion

Three installments ago I looked at Disney during the period between 1977 and 1988, which has dubbed the “Disney Dark Age” which set the studio up for its famous Renaissance during the 1990s. In retrospect that was far from being Disney’s low point given the bad place they would find themselves in during the 2000s. During this era Disney had seemingly no idea what they wanted to be after the Disney Renaissance, and unlike in the 80s when their only competitor in the world of theatrical animation was Don Bluth and the occasional movie based on a Saturday morning cartoon, there were major players in the 2000s that were more than willing to fill the void that Disney was leaving. Pixar was obviously in ascendance in the late 90s and began out grossing their older cousins at Disney pretty much out of the gate and by the 2000s they were pretty indisputably the more relevant and profitable studio. At least in the case of Pixar the broader Disney Corporation profited from that competitor’s success, but the rise of Dreamworks and other offshoots like Fox Animation and Sony Animation were much more existential threats. In part, Disney was becoming a victim of their own success. Movies like The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast had proven that there was major money to be made from animated features and the pie had become big enough that other studios had realized that they could get a piece of it and made investments accordingly that were beginning to come to fruition. Still, Disney being the cultural institution that it was made it a bit too big to fail and they continued to churn out movies at a pretty steady pace as they struggled to find a new identity. In fact they were actually putting out more product than ever. In nine years I have left to cover they put out no fewer than twelve different movies under the Disney Animation Studios umbrella and for this installment I’ll be looking at the first six, three of which actually came out during their jam packed year 2000.

Fantasia 2000 (2000)



In the year 2000 Disney put out three movies; one was meant as a continuation of what they were doing in the 90s, one was a wacky experiment, and one was a labor of love harkening back to the studio’s earliest days which probably wasn’t really meant to be an overly commercial project. The first of these films to be released was that third one: a follow-up to Disney’s 1940 classic Fantasia. Fantasia 2000 is generally believed to be the pet project of Walt Disney nephew and Disney board member Roy Disney. The idea was rooted in the fact that Walt Disney had always envisioned Fantasia as a sort of living document, one that would be re-released frequently with some segments dropped and new ones added and would be a sort of platform for an endless supply of classical music themed animated shorts. When the original film underperformed in its original release that plan was scuttled and some of the follow-up shorts were re-purposed for other short-compilation films. In the 80s Roy Disney got the idea to pick up on Walt’s original plan and make a follow-up Fantasia but as you may recall the Disney company was mired in turmoil during that decade and was in no position to throw millions at a project that would have major commercial hurdles and probably wouldn’t sell too many toys. But by the 90s when the Disney Renaissance was in full swing they finally had some leeway to take some risk and Roy Disney’s dream of bringing Fantasia back to the big screen could finally be realized.

If I were to describe my feelings about Fantasia 2000 briefly it would probably be “It’s cool that they made this and the best parts make it worth it, but they definitely made some pretty big mistakes along the way.” Let’s start with the positive. The best segment in the film is actually the one that least closely resembles the style of the original: a love letter to New York in the style of famous caricaturist Al Hirschfeld set to Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” It doesn’t look like classic Disney at all but it was an inspired style to use to bring Gershwin’s jazz-classic fusion classic to life and the various narratives they string through the short were enjoyable to follow. The other highlight is probably the final segment: a war between an earth spirit and a giant phoenix set to Stravinsky’s “Firebird suite.” The narrative through line in that short seems a little random and go goes contrary to what phoenixes are generally supposed to represent but the general epicness of the visuals makes up for this and it serves decently enough as a companion to the “Night on Bald Mountain scene” from the original that this is almost certainly trying to evoke. The Donald Duck/Noah’s Ark/”Pomp and Circumstance” segment also mostly works and it was cool that they got the idea to pull a “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” with another one of the characters from the Mickey Mouse universe, although Pomp and Circumstance seems like kind of an odd music choice given that it’s so heavily associated with graduation ceremonies.

Speaking of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”… it’s also in the movie, unaltered from its original form and in its entirety. I guess if I were seeing this thing in a theater in 2000 this might have been a nice little added treat but given that this is a 75 minute movie it’s hard not to view it as just being a time filler they through in. The “Carnival of Animals” sequence also kind of has the whiff of padding. It’s well animated and cute but it’s really short and doesn’t really leave much of an impression and almost feels unfinished in some ways. Another segment that doesn’t work so well, at least to my eyes today, is the “Pines of Rome” sequence in which a pack of whales starts flying out of the water and into space or something. I can kind of see why it might have looked cool in the 2000s but it’s weird and the CGI used to animate it has not aged all that well. Frankly it kind of looked like it could have been a companion to those coca cola commercials with the polar bears. Questionable CGI also mars the "Steadfast Tin Soldier" segment in which a toy soldier faces off against an evil Jack-In-The-Box, although that one did have other elements that redeemed it pretty well, particularly a brief portion in the sewers with these cool looking rats.

Something kind of odd about the movie as a whole is that a lot of the classical music pieces they chose are a little less famous than the ones chosen for the first film. That original movie feels almost like a greatest hits of legendary orchestral pieces. There are some famous pieces here too like “Rhapsody in Blue” and “Pomp and Circumstance” but a lot of them use deeper cuts from composers like Dmitri Shostakovich and Ottorino Respighi which I (in my relative ignorance of classical music) was not terribly familiar with. That might not have been as much of a problem with some good introductions to give context… which brings me to my biggest gripe: the live action intros in this thing are dogshit. The original Fantasia had this really classy presentation where you were invited to imagine yourself as an attendee at a high class orchestral show with a world famous conductor and a well-known classical music expert giving you introductions. Here they’ve replaced that with a series of hacky intros by various celebrities like Steve Martin and Penn & Teller that completely kill the mood. I realize that seems like a goofy thing to dock points for, the shorts are the real meat of the project after all, but they have the effect of cheapening things and kind of put into perspective how important the framing was to the original movie.

So overall Fantasia 2000 is a bit of a mixed bag but for whatever faults it has I just can’t be too mad at it if only because it just feels like such neat thing for a major studio to be throwing money at and it just feels like a pretty noble attempt. Michael Eisner is reported to have called it “Roy’s folly” and the company in general seems to have known going in that it was going to be more of a goodwill project than a potential blockbuster, the equivalent of a normal studio funding some auteur’s pet project in hopes of winning an Oscar. To their credit the marketers did come up with a fairly clever use for the film: rather than giving it a wide release they instead toured it to IMAX theaters, which at this time were still at that stage where they were almost entirely being used to show science and nature documentaries rather than “real movies.” This was a good way to make the film look like an investment in future distribution models rather than an indulgent money pit and was also kind of in keeping with Walt Disney’s original vision of Fantasia as a film that would tour the country and show off new theatrical technology. Between the IMAX release and an eventual wide release the film was able to eke out a $90 million gross worldwide, which would seem to cover its $80 million dollar budget, which is a low profit by Disney standards but was probably a better outcome than Eisner originally envisioned. There hasn’t been another Fantasia since the release of Fantasia 2000 (unless you want to count that weird Xbox Kinect game) but I do think there’s room for one. Disney is on another upswing and golden ages at that company do usually come packaged with Fantasia movies and it would be interesting to see what one would look like done entirely with the computer animation of today.

***1/2 out of Five