The highpoint of Walt Disney's artistic aspirations - to render an idea of culture (a night at Symphony Hall) in animated form - remains stubbornly middlebrow. I can remember yawning my way through Fantasia as a child; returning to it, I found it more interesting than I recalled, but still a hotchpotch, and terribly proscriptive in places - a vision of corporate control, if ever there was. On walks Master of Ceremonies Deems Taylor to tell us what we're going to be watching, dividing up the repertoire into songs that tell stories and music that doesn't, and later introducing Beethoven's "Pastoral" with one of the dullest minutes anyone will ever have the misfortune to spend in a cinema.It picks a lousy opener, turning "The Nutcracker Suite" into a twee fairytale with the aid of what looks chiefly like the background animation for a much better cartoon. Even taken as a freehand (free-eared?) interpretation of the music, this approach would appear questionable: what the hell does the Nutcracker have to do with doe-eyed fish, or dancing thistles, or ickle-bitty mushrooms? "The Sorcerer's Apprentice", though clearly a Walt-approved parable of conformism (don't get ideas above your station), still works, in part because the music and images are matched in such a way they find their own rhythm, partly because it's Mickey Mouse, the kind of character these animators always did rather well.
The inclusion of "The Rite of Spring" at least ensured a once controversial work smoother passage into the canon, transforming with a penstroke the piece's popular perception from something dangerous and degenerate into something parents could happily put before their children: the elemental violence of the music meshes appreciably with images of the Big Bang that appear just crude enough to pass as primitive cave paintings. (You wonder whether Kubrick or Malick - both directorial sensibilities generally more classical than pop - saw the sequence growing up, and if it stuck with them going into 2001 and The Tree of Life respectively.)
The second half is unarguably weaker. That Disney couldn't resist rendering the "Pastoral" as candy-coloured kitsch illustrates how far Fantasia falls short of the art it was aiming for: the topless centaurs wouldn't have looked out of place in a coy 40s soap commercial. "Dance of the Hours" (the one with the ballet-dancing hippos) has funny moments, but suffers from bland, generically Disney design. The Mussorgsky ventures somewhat further from the company's comfort zone - with its decidedly angular renderings of skulls and demons, it's the kind of thing Tim Burton might have come up with had he been employed at Disney in the 40s - then cops out by turning to the "Ave Maria" to (in Taylor's words) illustrate "the triumph of life over the despair of death", which sounds like a memo that's been circulating around the Mouse House ever since.
Sixty years on, the company had another crack with Fantasia 2000, suggesting something about the concept still resonated with Disney executives, and allowing a whole new generation of under-10s to nod off in a cinema; ten years after that, the same studio felt compelled to greenlight a live-action version of The Sorcerer's Apprentice, which replicated the Mickey Mouse scenes on a Jerry Bruckheimer budget. Like an especially decorous selection box, you pick from the original what you want - I like the moment immediately after the interval, when the orchestra strike up a tune of their own choosing, which has a spontaneity and freshness the rest perhaps lacks - but I don't think we'd lose a huge amount if we traded in the bulk of its two hours for, say, Duck Amuck and one of the Norman McLaren shorts.
Fantasia is available on DVD from Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment.
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