Disney's Fantasia - [DVD] [1940]

We first saw this in London 50ish years ago when there was a Disney Cinema. Excellent.

Came quickly, in great condition very happy thank you

There was nothing to dislike about this D.V.D.

I remember being taken to see this when I was 7 years old, the end section was a bit scary at that age.

Disney is so much part of popular culture now that it's easy to forget how strange his world is (e.g., having little kitsch pink centaurs to represent the music of Beethoven's pastoral symphony, or weirdly eyelashed ostriches and 'Hyacinth Hippo' dancing to Ponchielli's Dance of the Hours - reminders of the extraordinary bathos of Disney sometimes). And his anthropomorphism is particularly potent: what is distinctive about his 'humanised' nature is that it always tends to be from a child's perspective - mischievous, cute, frustrated. In fact it's not really anthropomorphic but pedamorphic - in the form of a child. And a specific sort of child at that - both an idealised or stylised 1940s American kid, full of wants and "blind frustrated rages" (as Noël Coward memorably summed up Donald Duck's appeal), but also one growing up in a very maternalised world, one both curiously sexualised and sexless (coy). There's also a notable absence of fathers in Disney films: from Bambi and Dumbo to The Lion King and Toy Story, dads are either absent or killed off - here we have foals being brought up and going to sleep in largely single-unicorned families. I imagine that this may have something to do with Walt's own childhood (perhaps reflecting the "deep feelings of distance and distrust that he had for his father" according to biographer Marc Eliot), but it seems inadvertently to have had a profound influence on twentieth century children's culture, through the Disney ethos. Or perhaps his animations simply reflected these wider social dynamics and dissociated family dimensions.Where Fantasia excels is in its ambition, forging a new status for animation in the early decades of the twentieth century. Whilst it received mixed critical reaction and failed to make a profit on its release, it established animation (and Disney animation in particular) as something of an art form: the vision of the demonic god Chernabog summoning the souls of the dead from their graves, to the music of Mussorgsky, is both terrifying and electrifying (and largely the work of the astonishing Danish illustrator Kay Nielsen), but there are touches of extraordinary technical and aesthetic brilliance throughout the film. Steamboat Willie seems a lifetime a way - or would do, were it not for the reappearance of MM here as the 'Sorcerer's Apprentice', showing Disney's occasional deftness at mixing high art (Goethe, Paul Dukas) with popular and comic lightness (and giving plenty of fodder for later critics on the look out for 'illuminati' symbolism in Disney's work). Disney was a fascinating and influential figure: for someone whose vision has extensively permeated the last eight or nine decades of culture, his work remains strangely unstudied and unexplored. That he aspired to having an enormous impact on culture, and in particular on the imagination of children, is evident - not only in the ground-breaking, hugely influential animations but also in the plethora of other extensions into popular culture that the Disney studios have reached out into - everything from films such as Mary Poppins and Pirates of the Caribbean to The Mickey Mouse Club (launching the careers of Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears), Disneyland and EPCOT. Fantasia is a useful glimpse into some of the big ideas that formed a major part of the early Disney ethos and 'world': the animation revolves around the core idea of "order and harmony being brought out of chaos", as the useful audio commentary by Brian Sibley (on this DVD) observes. "Order" is a crucial concern for Walt (hence his collaboration with the FBI, his distasteful involvement in the 'anti-communism' trials of the 1940s and so on), and it is everywhere here linked with his worship of "light", from the bathos of the Dance of the Hours sequence (where "the hours of darkness are overcome by the hours of light") to the the rays of the rising Sun which conclude the animation, and which will be an obvious symbolism in Disney's "illuminati" context. This easy 'light defeating darkness' ideology is pathological (an inability to engage with the complex contraries of life, and one that has had a baleful effect on children's culture in the twentieth-century, excepting Philip Pullman's wonderful and challenging confrontation of this religion), as is the narcissistic and infantile world of Walt Disney generally, but it is also part of his appeal: much of the charm and effect of cinema, and Disney animation in particular, resides simply in its use of light and colour in motion, and Fantasia is a wonderful playground for Disney and his animators to mesmerise and enthral us with their craftsmanship. If only Disney had gone down this track more - daringly and brilliantly bringing Stravinsky, Bach and Mussorgsky into mainstream cinemas and children's imaginations - instead of its subsequent series of rather lame Tinkerbells and charmless CGIs. Fantasia remains a beguiling testament to the potential of cinema, a breathtaking synaesthetic experience, and a landmark in animation and what was later to become music video.

good film good seller

A must have for the collection…a Disney classic with the Sorcerer’s apprentice, the dancing hippos and flamingoes…!

Its a Classic.Just one of THE great works of its type. From the days of 'manual' animation done by superb artists working it would seem, to a standard of excellence free of budgets!The music provided by musicians, ie the musical content has real gravitas and not just chosen for its ease of illustration, the animators worked to the musical diversity over a wide range of genres.Watchable by young or old and all deriving pleasure, enlightenment or admiration, or all combined at many levels.