Fantasia/Dumbo

Welcome back to the second entry in “Disney Month,” where we will look at the 1940 classic, “Fantasia.” Disney is popular for heart-warming children’s stories but one of its greatest accomplishments is a creative; condense creation played with classical music. “Fantasia” is a series of eight animated stories inspired by music conducted by Leopold Stokowski. The famous part is the third, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” (which later became a Nicolas Cage movie), where Mickey Mouse steals a wizard’s hat and uses a spell that makes a broom do his chores – until he falls asleep and it goes crazy. Sameer Rahim said in his review of this film, “As a child, I was terrified of the sorcerer's implacable eyebrows.” Seeing it as an adult you still feel scared as Mickey’s sweet kind words – his big eyes, drawn with expressive pupils for the first time here – do nothing to convince the wizard, and he is let go from his job.

However, “Fantasia” is much more than Mickey’s rise to being the famous Disney character. It begins with Bach’s Toccata and Fugue, the orchestra lit under polychromatic lights, and switches through Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky and Beethoven. Rahim confesses, “I hadn’t sat through the whole thing until I was asked to write this review, and I wonder how a child with a short attention span could cope with the lack of overarching story.”

Still, there is a handful to keep you entertained. Mushrooms and fairies dance to The Nutcracker; dinosaurs fight to The Rise of Spring; unicorns parading to the Pastoral Symphony, while female centaurs have their noses powdered by baby fauns. This might explain the flower-power time that was rediscovered in the Sixties. Everything is done with an expert synchronization of image and sound.

This is a great work that dedicates to educate its young audience about classical music. But it is also lighthearted and amazingly imaginative. Make sure you don’t miss the final part, “Night on Bald Mountain,” which is, in the words of the narrator Deems Taylor, “a struggle between the sacred and profane.” With Mussorgsky’s pulsing music in the background, Satan (called Chernabog in this movie) – looking like an evil orchestra conductor – calls spirits from their graves to his burning palace. Then a bell rings. Schubert’s Ave Maria weakens Satan and a group of pilgrims light the way home. This looks like a great film for the holidays.

Next up for today is “Dumbo,” released in 1941. This is a movie that I saw in the second grade and never saw again until rather recently. I had completely forgotten how sad of a movie this is. For those of you who don’t know the story, here’s the basic premise:

Dumbo, a circus elephant born with strangely large ears, rises from sad ugly ducklinghood to superstardom when he finds out that he can fly. For a while, he believes his abilities were given to him from a magic feather but eventually he learns that it’s down to his own innate ability.

According to Empire’s review of the film, this film was rushed through production “to compensate for the box-office failure of Fantasia.” Why was “Fantasia” a box-office failure? Was it because of its length that kids would not be able to pay attention to a movie that is two hours long? I can understand that, but “Fantasia” was still an awesome movie. Anyways, “Dumbo” is the most underrated of Walt Disney’s Renaissance animated films. Empire said in their review of the film, “Just over an hour long and refreshingly free of artistic pretension, it is (along with Pinocchio) the most timelessly perfect cartoon in the Disney backlist, embodying the typical fable of an orphan outsider (whose mother is humiliatingly penned in a madhouse for trying to protect him) who finds out that secretly special and is rewarded with a happier family life.”

 With a truly cute animal hero (Empire says to “compare the phoney cute of An American Tail or The Land Before Time”) and a touching storyline, the film is exactly right for younger children, with its humor and charm and satisfying finish, but it’s not too sappy for anyone over eight, and as always played as well to parents as kids.

Seeing how this is a “talking animal” film, it’s risking to have the main character not speak – most of the talking is done by Dumbo’s manager-sidekick Timothy Q. Mouse (Timothy Mouse is similar to Jiminy Cricket), voiced by Edward Brophy, but Dumbo himself is a completely expressive character (all in the eyes as the ears). The soundtrack includes: the “Pink Elephants on Parade” psychedelic intoxicated sequence, which is years before its time, “Baby Mine” is one of the sweetest but also saddest songs ever recorded, and “When I See an Elephant Fly,” a sharp batter number (“I’ve seen a needle that winked its eye”) sang by four crows, voiced by Cliff Edwards and The Hall Johnson Choir, who are the sharpest, most caringly created black characters in any 1941 movie.

Well, hopefully you have enjoyed today’s entry to “Disney Month.” Stay tuned for more tomorrow.