Fantasia (1940)

In this article, we will be looking at 2019’s book “1001 Movies to See Before You Die” and going through each film in a random order that I have chosen. We will be looking at what constitutes this film to be on the list and whether I think this film deserves to be here at all. I want to make perfectly clear that I won’t be revealing details from this book such as analyses by film reporters who have written about the film in question, so if you want the book itself you’ll have to buy it. But I will be covering the book’s suggestions on which films should be your top priority. I wouldn’t doubt for a second that everyone reading this article has probably watched many of these movies anyway. But we are just here to have a bit of fun. We’re going to not just look at whether it should be on this list but we’re also going to look at why the film has such a legacy at all. Remember, this is the 2019 version of the book and so, films like “Joker” will not be featured in this book and any film that came out in 2020 (and if we get there, in 2021). So strap in and if you have your own suggestions then don’t hesitate to email me using the address in my bio. Let’s get on with it then.

Fantasia (1940) dir. by Samuel Armstrong et al.

This is a film I watched before going to Disney Land Paris, so I must have been less than six years’ old, but I do not remember it in full. I do however, remember things such as “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”, “The Nutcracker Suite” and the dark and foreboding favourite of mine, “Night on Bald Mountain”. It was one of the great films of my childhood and honestly, it was one of the most amazing musical experiences I have ever heard and was partially responsible for why I went into orchestral music when I was slightly older. I played the flute in the orchestra and was the head pianist for the orchestra for some time.

So, here is the program for how it plays out:

• Toccata and Fugue by Bach
• The Nutcracker Suite by Tchaikovsky
• The Sorcerer’s Apprentice by Dukas
• Rite of Spring by Stravinsky
• The Pastoral Symphony by Beethoven
• Dance of the Hours by Ponchielli
• Night on Bald Mountain by Mussorgsky

The Carthay Circle Theatre held a premiere on the West Coast and gained an audience that included Shirley Temple, Cecil B. DeMille, James Cagney and even Robert Montgomery plus others.

The Los Angeles Times Music Critic, Isabel Morse Jones, stated about the film that it was:

"enormously varied concert of pictorial ideas, of abstract music by acknowledged composers, of performers Leopold Stokowski and orchestra players of Hollywood and Philadelphia, and, for the vast majority, new and wonderful sound effects”

One of our common favourites, Bosley Crowther, states that the film was amazing and that:

"motion-picture history was made last night ... Fantasia dumps conventional formulas overboard and reveals the scope of films for imaginative excursion ... Fantasia ... is simply terrific.”

TIME Magazine then weighed in on the experience being:

"...stranger and more wonderful than any of Hollywood's" and the experience of Fantasound "as if the hearer were in the midst of the music. As the music sweeps to a climax, it froths over the proscenium arch, boils into the rear of the theatre, all but prances up and down the aisles.”

Variety Magazine also wanted in and called the film:

"...a successful experiment to lift the relationship from the plane of popular, mass entertainment to the higher strata of appeal to lovers of classical music”.

With a massively favourable set of reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, this film holds a critics’ consensus of brilliance whilst it states that:

"A landmark in animation (and a huge influence on the medium of music video), Disney's Fantasia is a relentlessly inventive blend of the classics with phantasmagorical images.”

Honestly, ever since I watched the film, I have been absolutely in love with it. It is one of my favourite Disney films of all time and I hope you love it as much as all the critics did.