In this part of the series on the human-animal bond in speculative fiction, I’ll review three animated films, one from the ’40s, one from the ’80s, one recently released. Notice I didn’t label this post “the human-animal bond.” In one of these movies, there isn’t one IN the movie, just in what the movie accomplishes for us. In one, there’s a bond, but it is very subtle. In another, the movie is all about the human-animal bond.
And I know. . .I KNOW. . .I always say I’m not going to post about Disney. In this one, I am, okay?
FANTASIA, Walt Disney Studios, 1940
Click to view the original trailer (accessed through Wikimedia Commons).
Fantasia is an amazing film. I’d call it inspired kitsch, except that it really broke new ground in animation, sound, and cinematography. At one point, it was on The American Film Institute’s 100 Greatest American Films of All Time list. It is still listed on the AFI’s 10 Top 10 list in the Animation category. Number five–not too shabby.
It’s an anthology piece, a mashup of different animation styles, different musical episodes, and different tones. We’ve got Mickey Mouse–the feature-length Fantasia began life as a Mickey Mouse short. Walt Disney famously stated he wanted a new focus on his iconic mouse, whose popularity had eroded. But the short proved too expensive for its payout, so a revitalized Mickey formed the germ of the idea that became Fantasia. Disney also wanted a prestige vehicle, and to that end, he brought in the most innovative animators, conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra Leopold Stokowski, and the prominent music critic Deems Taylor as MC.
For Fantasia, Mickey got a redesign. Have you ever noticed that before Fantasia, Mickey’s eyes have no pupils? Post-Fantasia, they do (see Disney historian John Culhane’s useful book, Walt Disney’s Fantasia, 1983, p. 81). The Sorcerer’s Apprentice episode, based on a Goethe poem set to music by Paul Dukas, strikes me as the most conventional part of the film, pure Disney cartoon-making with all the rough edges smoothed away for the complete commercially successful experience. I find that pretty jarring, in fact. But it’s the segment everyone remembers most vividly.
Then the film Disney-fies musical works such as Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Tschaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite, Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, and more, with a bit of jazz thrown in as a palate cleanser. Meanwhile, it carefully avoids a number of religious, sexual, and racist landmines to ensure the animated sequences never afflict a popular audience out for a bit of “culture” with any sort of discomfort. (In retrospect, it doesn’t avoid every pitfall, but hey, it’s a creature of its times.)
Do I sound cynical about this film? Yes, I do. But consider this: an entire new groundbreaking sound system had to be designed to accommodate this film, a precursor to SurroundSound. Culhane’s Walt Disney’s Fantasia explains how an entire new way of animating very subtle effects had to be designed for the wonderful last sequence of the film (pp. 200-204). And those are just two of the technological advances needed to bring this film to audiences. Impressive.
The saddest story coming out of the making of Fantasia, though–at least for me–is the situation of the great German-American animator Oskar Fischinger, who made an immense contribution to Fantasia‘s Bach Toccata and Fugue in D Minor sequence but left without credit when the Disney people insisted on simplifying his work (Culhane pp. 42, 43).
Here’s An Optical Poem (1938, MGM), one of Fischinger’s most well-known works, setting abstract designs to the music of Franz Liszt and drawing the attention of Disney. So there.
Now. . .about those animals. This movie is stuffed with animated animals: crocodiles, ostriches, hippos, and mythical animals as well (the centaur segment). The “Rite of Spring” segment featuring prehistoric animals–dinosaurs–is interesting because, unlike the rest of the animals in the film, Disney decreed that they shouldn’t be anthropomorphic animals. “Don’t make them cute animal personalities. They’ve got small brains, y’know; make them real!” (Culhane p. 123). But then the Disney organization backed off connecting the Age of Dinosaurs, as they had planned, to ever more recent eras culminating in humans. Can’t offend those creationists, now, can we?
Animated–and COMFORTING–fantasy animals had been a staple of the Disney organization from the beginning, with Steamboat Willie (1928), and as with other commercial animated movie-making. Fantasia seems to me the epitome, the very pinnacle, of this way of imagining animals and bringing them into fantasy. (Not always comforting, I guess–the sequence “A Night on Bald Mountain” haunted my childhood nightmares for years.)
But for the most part–dinosaurs excepted–these Disney animals do more than connect the audience with music. As in every Disney cartoon, anthropomorphic cartoon animals connect animals with us. Why? What’s in it for Disney, or for anyone creating a fantasy world? Here’s a possible answer: We can “willingly suspend our disbelief,” projecting ourselves onto the animals, if they seem like us. And so we are better able to leave our own gray world of reality behind to enter the highly-colored world of fantasy and play around in there. Disneyland and Walt Disney World are right on brand. Nothing wrong with escapist fun.
But Culhane quotes Disney: “To captivate our varied and worldwide audience of all ages. . .the nature and treatment of the fairytale, the legend, the myth, have to be elementally simple. Good and evil. . .must be believably personalized. The moral ideas common to all humanity must be upheld.” Sounds good. I don’t believe it for an instant. If you lie to people, they are going to figure that out eventually. Even if the lies you tell are comfortable lies. Life is more complicated than that, and the best speculative fiction, in my view, reflects it and reflects upon it.
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