Fantasia

Fantasia (1940)

a film by Samuel Armstrong, James Lgar and Bill Roberts

Walt Disney got the essence of the music video era 40 years before MTV. Fantasia features breakthrough 2D animation as visual companion to the music of great masters.

Fantasia features pieces like the Dance of the Hours, Ave Maria and accompanies them with animation shorts that do not necessarily follow the original story suggested by the music but use its rhythm and dramatical emphasis to construct new settings and images.

The animations of this movie tackle really hard problems of animation and the result is visually beautiful. Particles falling, bubbles, water, this movie has them all as no other work of 2D animation before and that itself is enough to make it a milestone. It is the beauty of those images what gives Fantasia the status of a brilliant work of art in motion and yet it is quite entertaining.

As a visual work of art Fantasia can be watched again and again and new elements are found. I'm fascinated by the timing of the animation with the music and the aesthetic beauty of the images but this movie is so rich in contents that it gives ground to analyze the political situation in Europe in the segment of Night on Bald Mountain or the great care with which ideas of evolution and origin of life are recreated in The Rite of Spring. With this film, Walt Disney took animation to a whole new level and made a wonderful film that can defy the barriers of time, today as back in its time Fantasia is an enormous piece of art.