Cortney McInerney
MUSI 10103
Prof. Adams
June 1st, 2018
Disney’s Fantasia: Another Moment of Mixture in the History of Western Art Music
For modern audiences, the use of classical music in movies is a standard feature of the cinematic experience, with songs from Pirates of the Caribbean and Harry Potter immediately calling each film to mind, almost like heard souvenirs. However, this has not always been the case. When Disney began working on Fantasia with composer Leopold Stokowski in the 1930’s, he described its mixed media approach as unique and innovative, a means of expression “that would be impossible through any other form of motion picture [then] available.” A question posed to Disney artists as they began working on the segment The Sorcerer’s Apprentice demonstrates the newness of Fantasia’s approach, as well as its primary difficulty: “What routine adaptable to a musical pattern do you picture between Mickey and broom when he directs it through its paces the first time?” Therein lay the aesthetic and pragmatic challenge of mixed media approaches: how does one adapt one art form to another while maintaining its original function and meaning? This essay will describe the ways in which Fantasia attempts to do this, as well as the ways in which it purposely does not. At times, the genre of film and the cultural expectations of Americans control and refashion European music into something which is at once technologically new and culturally controversial. Nevertheless, I believe that this controversy is for the most part unwarranted, and that Fantasia participates in a spirit of cultural exchange and technical innovation which characterizes the evolution of Western Art Music.
Fantasia demonstrates a range of musically expressive movements throughout the film, including, but not limited to, traditional dance forms such as ballet. In The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the comfortingly familiar gestures of the orchestral conductor can be detected in Mickey Mouse’s waving arms which direct the visual elements in the film (waves, stars, a broom brought to life) in tandem with the sound of Paul Dukas’ L’apprenti sorcier. In Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, however, music is filtered through a series of abstract images, their movements, colors, and textures meant to visually represent what the audience hears. Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony rely largely on the movements and emotions of the animated characters as well as narrative themes in their visual representations of the music: the “primitive emotions” and violence attributed to The Rite of Spring at its premier is modeled in cataclysmic animation sequences featuring primeval earth, ruptured volcanoes, and the extinction of the dinosaurs; in the Pastoral Symphony, themes of nature embedded in the original work and the Romantic movement are represented by flowing rivers, large pastures, and mythical figures long associated with natural forces—centaurs, fauns, and Greek gods such as Apollo and Diana.
Unfortunately for animators, the musical community was largely critical of these visual interpretations, accusing Disney of imposing images upon the musical selections which “robbed them of their integrity and thus demonstrated a fundamental disrespect” for the classical tradition. Reactions ranged from deep dislike for Stokowski’s rearrangements of Beethoven to outright moral indignation. In an explosive piece for the Herald Tribune, music critic Dorothy Thompson writes about leaving the theater “in a condition bordering on nervous breakdown,” and variously describes the film as “a performance of Satanic defilement,” “a remarkable nightmare,” “brutal and brutalizing,” and a demoralizing depiction of the “Decline of the West.” She accuses Disney of degrading classical music as well as the human race generally in the various depictions of overpowering, destructive nature which characterize segments such as Rite of Spring which, with its bleak landscapes, violent earthquakes, and ever-struggling lifeforms; according to Thompson, such scenes express the melancholy, existentialist idea that “Nature is titanic; man is a moving lichen on the stone of time.” Her tone throughout the piece is infused with a sense of Fantasia as a sacrilegious and immoral object, rather than merely an aesthetically disappointing film, going so far as to compare it to Nazism:
All I could think to say of the ‘experience’ as I staggered out was that it was ‘Nazi.’ The word did not arise out of an obsession. Nazism is the abuse of power, the perverted betrayal of the best instincts, the genius of a race turned into black magical destruction, and so is ‘Fantasia.’
It is important to keep in mind that Thompson is describing an animated film marketed for children and families; what, exactly, is she reacting to when she calls Fantasia a form of Nazism, a “perverted betrayal of the best instincts”? To begin, although Walt Disney himself was not a Nazi, he has been accused of anti-Semitism. Biographer Neal Gabler defends Disney’s reputation, appealing to the fact that of the Jewish men and women who worked for him, few came forward with accusations of anti-Semitism. He attributes the anti-Semitism accusations to disgruntled employees attempting to degrade his reputation, as well as questionable associations with conservative Protestants during a time when “Protestantism…had tinges of anti-Semitism,” and with the Motion Picture Association which was described by FBI agents and reporters alike in the 1940s as an anti-Semitic group. Disney definitely knew of the MPA’s questionable character and rather than addressing it or distancing himself, he maintained friendly connections with the group, choosing to ignore their reputation. Whether or not Disney was an anti-Semite, he nevertheless tolerated anti-Semitic views in his professional working relations. This seems especially surprising considering the historical context of Fantasia: released in 1940, the film debuted in America a year after the onset of World War II, and its release was aborted in Europe due to the war’s devastation. Thompson’s accusations of Nazism and cultural degradation against Fantasia mirrored the American and European public’s reactions to the War which, at its heart, was motivated by a German nationalism gone rampant, Hitler deriding the cultures of France, Poland and Belgium as inferior to Germany as his armies marched across Western Europe.
Indeed, the Nazi project of refashioning all European nations in its own image is not so far removed from the project of Fantasia, which was characterized by two goals: the first, less political goal was to create something innovative and unique by combining the genres of music and film; the other, less innocent goal was to “wash over elitist cultural barriers and expand cultural opportunity for common people.” Film critics reacting to reviews such as Thompson’s relished this populist agenda, caricaturing “the howls of the music critics” as “the complaints of the little hierarchy of music men who try to make music a sacrosanct, mysterious, and obscure art.” Despite such derision, reviews like Thompson’s have put their finger on an important pulse in Fantasia: the rejection of the purist, elitist “best instincts” of an older European culture in favor of an American version, made for American audiences with the new American genre of film. Just as the project of adapting one media to another sometimes resulted in the privileging of one media’s functions and meanings over another’s, so too did the adaptation of European cultural forms occur within a blueprint which was domineeringly American. Fantasia is always a compilation of forms, but it is also at times a violent deconstruction: in being presented to different audiences, shaped by different preferences and expectations, and filtered through new aesthetic forms and cultural ideas, the music sampled by Fantasia is itself radically transfigured (or disfigured, depending on who you ask) into something different and, for critical musical audiences, something entirely alien.
Fantasia is rife with images of power and authority: natural forces destroying the dinosaurs in The Rite of Spring; Mickey virtually enslaving and murdering a newly-sentient broom in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice; Zeus, king of the heavens, subjecting the creatures below to his willful caprice as he hurls lightning bolts at Dionysus in the Pastoral Symphony. Even the abstraction of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue features light and dark colors at war, the dark eventually dominating as the sun fades into a bloody red; the silhouette of Stokowski snapping his hands down to his sides, almost strangling the music to a close. To what extent is this authority an expression or extension of Disney’s political aim in the making of Fantasia; his desire to storm music, that most obscure and impenetrable of battlements in the elite European cultural repertoire, and open its gates to the American masses? A more detailed analysis of the cultural and aesthetic changes occurring in Bach’s Toccata and Fugue and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring may help us determine the extent to which the necessity of making music and European culture more accessible to American audiences controls the artistic and aesthetic decisions made in Fantasia, and to what extent critics like Thompson are justified in their critique.
In Bach’s Toccata and Fugue, abstract images and colors portray a battle of light and dark, good and evil; the socio-historical tensions at work in other of Bach’s compositions, such as the theme of individual versus collective in Brandenburg Concerto No. 5, are translated here into collective competition. Regardless, the impulse identified by Adorno of treating Bach’s music as pure or universal seems to be at work both in the Disney rendition and in music critics’ reaction to it. The use of abstract images, a more metaphysical form of representation than the overt narratives seen in Pastoral Symphony and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice suggests that Disney and Stokowski ascribe to this view of Bach’s music as somehow detached from its cultural moment, elevated to a realm beyond literal meanings, whether audible or visual. The presenter even prefaces the selection by calling it “music which exists simply for its own sake;” and yet, whatever the abstracted and formalist elements of the music’s representation, one cannot deny that the music as it is portrayed in Fantasia does not seem to exist for its own sake inasmuch as it does not exist on its own. Rather, the music is rearranged by Stokowski, played on modern instruments which notably do not feature a single clavichord, and filtered through visual representations which music critics call distracting. A spirit of purity and metaphysical unreality often imbues popular conceptions of Bach’s music and abstract art; this, in turn, is perhaps part of the critical decision to combine these specific art forms in the opening of Fantasia. Regardless, in being combined, they are no longer pure; a fact which music critics were quick to notice and extend to a cultural critique, accusing Disney not only of perverting the music, but of owing an unpaid debt of recognition to European abstract artists such as Blac-Gatti. European critic Chevalier describes it almost as outright plagiarism: “the ideas, forms, and characters of Fantasia have been taken from…an exhibition of musical painters in Paris in 1932. Blanc-Gatti’s orchestra has been reconstructed…there is the same grouping of instruments…[of] colour.” Both European musical and visual arts are being plumbed by Disney and coagulated in a new form, derided for its degradation and disrespect to the original artists. To some extent, this may be a valid response insofar as the function and meaning of both the music and the art form have been changed: first, in their relation to each other; second, in their expression through American film, made for and marketed to American audiences. In Freud’s definition of the uncanny, this eerie and dreadful emotion occurs when something familiar returns as the unfamiliar. Musical critics used to the familiarity and sanctity of pedagogical composers like Bach could have understandably reacted with such an emotion to Fantasia’s unfamiliar representation. Turning European music and painting into a modern, American amalgamation which is neither wholly musical nor wholly visual, which is alien to either form in its purity, seems at play, and one can understand critics’ knee-jerk reaction to what they saw as a monstrous mixture.
Nevertheless, this is not to say that one must accept their criticism as wholly justified: the point of Fantasia is to make something new and accessible, to revive music in an unfamiliar way, but also to familiarize audiences to the meanings which their lack of musical expertise had thus far denied them. Stokowski, himself a European composer, considered Disney’s project of cultural adaptation and education both important and morally upright. He shares the American dream of “a good life for everybody in which…culture is no longer an esoteric religion guarded by a few high priests” and believes Fantasia is a vehicle for approaching this ideal. Indeed, this seemed to be the critical function and main benefit of Fantasia for some of its audiences: one viewer writes a letter of thanks to Stokowski, describing how they were “always afraid to go to a concert hall,” but when they went to Fantasia, they “heard the great masters’ music and realized it was not painful at all.” In this sense, Disney’s rendition of Toccata and Fugue was not only attempting to express the thematic content of Bach’s music, but also Bach’s place in the musical repertoire as a pedagogical tool, a means of educating the young in the techniques of and appreciation for Western Art Music. What better way to honor that tradition than to continue and expand it through film, for new audiences who would gain a new appreciation for music which they had once been afraid of? Fantasia may participate in forms and representations of domination and authority over European arts insofar as it subjects them to new cultural and artistic modes of interpretation, but in the rendition of Bach, at least, this is modulated by a respect for the importance and essence of his music as well as an acknowledgement that it ought to be shared.
Unlike Bach, Stravinsky was alive at the premier of Fantasia and so able to critique Disney’s interpretation of his music. Despite some initial interest in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, he is decidedly not a fan of Fantasia, and especially not its segment on The Rite of Spring. He found fault with Stokowski’s rearrangement of his score and instrumentation, and described the visual accompaniment of primeval earth and roaming dinosaurs as “unresisting imbecility.” This reception is rather ironic when one considers the parallels between the musical community’s reception of Fantasia and its reception of Stravinsky’s own music at the premier of The Rite of Spring. One reviewer describes the reaction of the audience, which had been “thrilled by what it considered a blasphemous attempt to destroy music as an art, and swept away with wrath, began very soon…to make cat-calls.” This description of an emotional and somewhat violent reaction to the perception of the “blasphemous” and immoral use of “music as an art” can just as easily be applied to the critical reaction to Fantasia, and is perhaps best represented by Thompson, whose reaction to the music was as emotionally intense and morally indignant as the rioters at the premier of The Rite of Spring. Could this similarity in reception be the product of an aesthetic or functional similarity shared by The Rite of Spring and Fantasia?
Stravinsky may vehemently deny that possibility, but it is hard to escape the similarities which his music shares with Disney’s interpretation of it, as well as the project of Fantasia overall. To begin, Stravinsky himself describes The Rite of Spring as an attempt to embody “the fear of nature before the arising of beauty, a sacred terror at the midday sun, a sort of pagan cry.” Cyclical nature, birth and death, the terror of being faced by nature’s power and inexplicability, all of these are evident in the interpretation of The Rite of Spring. It begins with a journey through empty space, arriving at a barren earth peppered by explosive volcanoes. Lava and water rush in tandem, eating up the earth in a terrifying demonstration of the violent potential of nature. Life forms slowly, dominated at each stage in the segment by food-chain logic as amoebas, primitive aquatic creatures, lizards, and then dinosaurs are eaten, often violently. The mood and color of the entire section is rather dark and dreary, exacerbating the sense of futility carried out by the narrative, which closes with the triumph of the murderous T-Rex over the peaceful brontosaurus and then the destruction of all life–first by drought, which starves and dehydrates the limping dinosaurs, and then by a cataclysmic sequence of earthquakes and floods which erase the dinosaurs’ skeletons from the surface of an again-barren earth. Scenes like these inspire Thompson’s terror, a moral rejection of Fantasia’s depictions of life and humanity as helpless to titanic Nature. Stravinsky describes the eerie, woodwind opening of The Rite of Spring as “the vague and profound uneasiness of a universal puberty.” If critics’ reception is anything to go by, Fantasia, too, embodies this unique and existential feeling of dread for the primeval past. As with Bach, the original expression of Stravinsky has been drastically changed, made subject to the authority of a different culture and aesthetic mode. And yet, the essence of The Rite of Spring is well and alive in Fantasia, both in its depiction of Stravinsky and in its innovative use of musical and cultural mixtures overall.
Like Disney, Stravinsky is guilty of drawing on a different culture and injecting it into a musical form studded with purists and elitist, and audiences react to both artists with a horror born more from the transformation of their precious objects into something unfamiliar than to anything morally or aesthetically wrong with the art object. The history of Classical music is studded with innovators drawing a tradition of cultural exchange and refashioning; Bach’s use of different European styles and Stravinsky’s introduction of Russian folklore into ballet immediately come to mind, as do their critics. However, just as in the case of Bach and Stravinsky, Disney’s Fantasia is, in the eyes of history, a turning point in its genre, characterized by technical brilliance and creativity. Today, it is recognized by the American Film Institute as one of the best American films of the 20th century. The remaking of European culture in American modes is not a desecration, but rather just another moment of mixture in the evolution of Western Art Music: a means of continually renewing the art form and thus protecting it from an undeserved death. Once classical music stops being listened to, appreciated and played, it ceases to exist; Fantasia guards against this possibility.
Works Cited
Allan, Robin. Walt Disney and Europe: European Influences on the Animated Feature Films of
Walt Disney. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.
“Fantasia.” Walt Disney Production : RKO Radio Pictures, 1940.
Gabler, Neal. Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination. New York: Random
House, 2006.
Smith, David. "The Sorcerer's Apprentice: Birthplace of Fantasia.” Millimeter Magazine. Feb
1976: 18-20, 22, 24.Web.
https://cinefiles.bampfa.berkeley.edu/cinefiles/DocDetail?docId=26439
Stravinsky, Igor.“What I Wished to Express in The Rite of Spring.” 1913.
Watts, Steven. The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1997.