In defense of 'Fantasia 2000'

When Disney decided that the Star Wars prequels would be continue to be included in official saga canon — along with precious little else outside of the original film trilogy — maybe their decision was influenced by the fact that as George Lucas was controversially revisiting his fictional universe in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Disney released their own much-maligned follow-up to an acclaimed classic.

Fantasia 2000 (actually released in 1999, just to make it seem that much more futuristic) was a movie 60-plus years in the making — insofar as some of its ideas dated back to the original plans drawn up for Fantasia in the 1930s. The film was a labor of love for Roy E. Disney — nephew of Walt, son of Walt's brother and longtime business partner Roy O. Disney — who wanted to continue the Fantasia tradition using new animation technology.

While the resulting film seemed pointless to many, in fact there were a lot of good reasons for it to be made. Walt Disney's original concept for Fantasia had been for there to be a changing program, with new segments rotating in and older segments gradually retired. (One segment, an Everglades idyll set to Debussy's Clair de Lune, had been cut from the original Fantasia and was considered for Fantasia 2000, but was ultimately again rejected as being just too boring.)

Pushing the envelope with animation technology was also squarely in the Fantasia spirit. When we watch Fantasia today, it looks lovably hand-crafted — and it was, but the animators were also pushing special effects to the utmost. They used a newly-invented multiplane camera and other gadgets for manipulating animation cels; they incorporated live action (note the plumes of volcano smoke in the Rite of Spring sequence); and they even rotoscoped (drew over live action photography). If there were 1940s versions of the animation purists who criticized the CGI in Fantasia 2000, they would have had plenty to take exception to.

The entire Disney studio had also been effectively reborn in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with instant classics like The Little Mermaid and The Lion King returning the studio's animation branch to form after a long, slow slide into mediocrity. Beauty and the Beast (1991) became the first animated movie ever to be nominated for the Best Picture Oscar — a distinction that had evaded the original Fantasia, not to mention Snow White and Pinocchio.

It's understandable that the next-generation Disney would have sought to pick up the Fantasia torch, and in so doing demonstrate that it cared about more than just selling stuffed lions and bedazzled mermaid shirts. By the 1990s, the studio had the capital and cachet to take a risk on a new Fantasia, having been commercially burned the first time. (An early-1980s attempt at a sequel called Musicana was dropped so the studio could make Mickey's Christmas Carol.)

If Fantasia 2000 seemed disappointing to fans, maybe it's because they could only imagine Fantasia as — well, Fantasia. Certainly the music is glorious, mostly conducted by James Levine. (His job interview included a question about whether he'd be cool with a three-minute version of Beethoven's Fifth. He gave the right answer.)

The animation is often stunning — from the abstract flights of the opening Beethoven movement (the Fantasia franchise never being much for obscurities) to the sweeping transformations of the Firebird Suite to the underwater acrobatics of Pines of Rome. There was comedy (Carnival of the Animals) and there was pathos (Shostakovich's Piano Concerto No. 2).

Character animation got its due with an Ark segment featuring Donald Duck — ironically, the very character whose success inspired the reinvention of Mickey Mouse for the original Fantasia — and in another backflip, the Hirschfeld-esque Rhapsody in Blue was influenced by the work of the UPA studio, which counted some Fantasia veterans among its most distinguished animators.

Maybe, ultimately, the problem with Fantasia 2000 — like the problem with the Star Wars prequels, arguably — was that it too squarely emulated its predecessor. Fantasia was genuinely pathbreaking, but — for all its accomplishment — Fantasia 2000 was fundamentally a retread.

As, again, with the Star Wars prequels, Disney has angered trufans by lumping the two Fantasias together indiscriminately, blurring the lines between what some regard as Gospel and the Apocrypha, respectively. At Fantasia performances with live orchestral accompaniment, for example, segments from Fantasia and Fantasia 2000 are scrambled together. However true that may be to Disney's original vision, it's not what I was expecting and not — even as a Fantasia 2000 defender — what I wanted.

Still, a Fantasia 2000 defender I remain. When the film first came out, I brought as many kids to see it at a giant IMAX screen as I could, and watched it blow their minds. It speaks to just how pioneering Fantasia was that releasing an anthology of creative animation set to classical music still felt pathbreaking, 60 years later.

To celebrate the 75th anniversary of Fantasia, we've explored each of the film's segments in turn. Previously published:
• Disney's Fantasia at 75: Why there's still nothing like it
• Bach's Toccata and Fugue: The Fantasia opener that drove Disney to abstraction
• How Disney turned Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker into a ballet of the seasons
• The Sorcerer's Apprentice: The genesis of Fantasia
• Rite of Spring: A classic Fantasia segment, whether Stravinsky liked it or not
• Beethoven in Fantasia: Awesome or awkward?
• Dance of the Hours: Inside the tongue-in-cheek Fantasia ballet tribute
• From Bald Mountain to Ave Maria: The hell-to-heaven Fantasia climax

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