![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Pursuant to an email conversation mein bruder and I have been having re the upcoming Movie Marathon, I thought I'd post a decidedly dissenting opinion about the film Fantasia (1940):
I fully recognize Fantasia's importance in the histories of both animation and what eventually became known as 'music videos'. Fantasia is gorgeous to look at (in parts) and whimsically entertaining (in parts); but, finally, it is nothing more or less than a monumental betrayal of art. The bluntest example thereof is its treatment of the music is supposedly revers. It pays weird tribute to Stokowski's 'genius' as a conductor (Warner Brothers' Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies frequently did the same, and I really can't figure out why) but at the same time utterly disrespects the composers whose works it represents. Let's put this the only way it can be put:
ONE MUST NOT ABRIDGE BEETHOVEN, EVER, PERIOD.
Hunter Thompson is said to have once referred to Warren Zevon as a 'gaudy, mendacious suckfish' (though perhaps he just used the phrase in passing). I find Fantasia an entire school thereof. In general, I'm in the Richard Schickel camp with respect to Uncle Walt's pop-culture empire:
I fully recognize Fantasia's importance in the histories of both animation and what eventually became known as 'music videos'. Fantasia is gorgeous to look at (in parts) and whimsically entertaining (in parts); but, finally, it is nothing more or less than a monumental betrayal of art. The bluntest example thereof is its treatment of the music is supposedly revers. It pays weird tribute to Stokowski's 'genius' as a conductor (Warner Brothers' Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies frequently did the same, and I really can't figure out why) but at the same time utterly disrespects the composers whose works it represents. Let's put this the only way it can be put:
ONE MUST NOT ABRIDGE BEETHOVEN, EVER, PERIOD.
Hunter Thompson is said to have once referred to Warren Zevon as a 'gaudy, mendacious suckfish' (though perhaps he just used the phrase in passing). I find Fantasia an entire school thereof. In general, I'm in the Richard Schickel camp with respect to Uncle Walt's pop-culture empire:
Disney’s machine was designed to shatter the two most valuable things about childhood – its secrets and its silences – thus forcing everyone to share the same formative dreams. It has placed a Mickey Mouse hat on every little developing personality in America. As capitalism, it is a work of genius; as culture, it is mostly a horror.' —The Disney Version (1968).That doesn't mean that some Disney efforts aren't wondrous works of art in their own right; but such individual works are irrespective of the least-common-denominator entertainment-corporatism that Walt's biological and ideological progeny still thrive on. Fantasia was created on the cusp of the ascendancy of this ideal, and it's clear the medium and Disney's participation in it were in flux. The film had promise, certainly, and the virtues of its visual art cannot be denied; but it is sunk, finally, by the fatal flaw that has recurred through seven decades of Disney features: the dead-certainty of its makers that their notions about childhood—what sparks and soars in a child's imagination—are universal and salutary. They are most certainly neither.
