100 Movies Every Catholic Should See #3: Fantasia (1940)

Produced by Walt Disney Pictures. Music conducted by Leopold Stokowski.

In 1940, Walt Disney Studios would produce the two greatest films of its nearly 100-year existence: Pinocchio, their best children’s morality tale (and perhaps a future pick for this list), and Fantasia. Fantasia was an experiment, an imaginative gamble, an attempt to merge the visual creativity of animation with the very best classical music to create a new high art form for the movie-going public. It contains some of Walt Disney and his animators’ finest creative efforts and was meant to be a symphony for the eyes as well as the ears, introducing the classical masters to a wider audience and providing those already familiar with these pieces a visual feast to inspire new appreciation for them.

Fantasia succeeds in this goal. It is certainly one of the most beautiful pieces of Western animation ever conceived. A series of seven animated vignettes with no dialogue or interconnecting story, Fantasia washes over its audience with wave after wave of intoxicating beauty, relying on the power of the music and visual imagery to hold the viewer’s attention. It is a mesmerizing display of the power of art to captivate us, to cause us to sit back and contemplate rather than comprehend, to ravish our senses while also inspiring us to look beyond the sensible world and meditate upon the mystery of our place in the universe.

The English philosopher Roger Scruton in his documentary “Why Beauty Matters” asserts that “the sacred and the beautiful stand side by side, two doors that open onto a single space. And in that space, we find our home.” Most of the segments of Fantasia point to both these realities, the beautiful and the sacred, pulling us through an exhilarating series of emotions from delightful peace through terror and horror until we reach the quiet catharsis of its finale which points to our ultimate home.

We open with an abstract series of images paired with a highly structured piece of music from one of the masters of Baroque formalism: Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. We begin by seeing the orchestra, each instrumental section paired with color, before floating off into clouds of color with animated hints at the instruments floating on the breeze. As the piece reaches its finale, we climb higher and higher into the heavens with the music, seeing pointed Gothic arches ascend into the clouds, before tumbling down, down, down into the depths of the earth and seemingly into Hell itself as the music descends into the lower registers. Suddenly rays of light burst through, illuminating our cave; Hell has been harrowed and the piece reaches its majestic conclusion.

The next piece is Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite, accompanied by images of natural beauty. Having ascended to the heights of heaven and fallen through the depths of the earth with Bach, we now explore a forest on the surface, delighting in the beauty of leaves and flowers in the morning dew, the earthy grandeur of the mushrooms on the forest floor, the gentle grace of falling petals, the mysterious and foreign beauty of the sea floor, the aging majesty of autumn, and the crystalline delicacy of frosty winter. This vignette portrays what good men have known since the dawn of time: the natural world must be enchanted, for what other possible reason could there be for its extraordinary beauty?

Following the Nutcracker, we see the story of…hey, how did a Mickey Mouse cartoon get mixed into my high art film? It turns out that without The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the rest of Fantasia would never had been made. Mickey had been declining in popularity, and Walt Disney was hoping to give him a grand reintroduction to the movie-going public by making his next short an adaptation of Goethe’s short story about an enterprising apprentice attempting to usurp his master’s mystical power, accompanied by Paul Dukas’s music which had been inspired by the story. However, the short went so spectacularly over budget that there was no way a short film would ever make enough money to cover its costs, so Disney decided to expand the concept to feature length by adding other classical masterpieces accompanied by animated visuals. The story is well-told and the animation is beautiful, especially as the Apprentice dreams of mastering the mystical arts only to be awoken and quickly defeated by a simple kitchen broom. However, the use of Mickey Mouse lends a bit of a kids cartoon feel to The Sorcerer’s Apprentice that feels out of place among the rest of the vignettes.

The transition from Mickey Mouse to Stravinsky in the next section is especially jarring. From the very introduction of the piece we get a taste of the discordant notes of the Rite of Spring, as a musician knocks over a percussion instrument. We are told that the scene depicted is exactly how science describes the development of life on earth, from tiny protozoa to the dinosaurs. Walt Disney wanted to carry this scene all the way through the dawn of humanity and the discovery of fire but was forced to cut it short after the extinction of the dinos due to pressure from creationist Christians. For my part, I am glad it ended where it did, because we get a majestic portrait of what sola Darwin scientistic materialists believe about the world. The world portrayed in this segment is murky and cruel, fittingly paired with the wildly pagan discordant notes of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Everything is chaos, and no order forms in it except what the Tyrannosaurus Rex, a strong Nietzschean superman, forces upon it by his will and domination. But even he is conquered by the planet itself, a cruel mistress who takes away the water and plants necessary for life and leaves the dinos powerless, weak, and ultimately extinct. At the end there is no note of hope, no signal towards the mammalian life which would spring forth upon this planet; only the dead bones of the dinosaurs engulfed in earthquakes and floods of Noahic ferocity. In the world of Rite of Spring, there is no God to guide the world towards order, goodness, and beauty; there is only nihilistic, discordant chaos which ends in Mother Nature destroying what she brought forth.

On that note, we go to intermission. Here there is a charming jazz riff session, reminding us that this is a work of human creativity and there are real artists and musicians behind it, and then an abstract, geometric look at “the soundtrack”, which mimics the patterns of soundwaves visually as well as continuing the pairing of instruments and colors from the Bach section at the beginning.

From there we move to Beethoven’s 6^th Symphony, the Pastoral Symphony. The serene, stately music is paired with images of a pagan paradise: unicorns, Pegasus, fauns, cupids, centaurs, and centaurettes all frolic in the springtime. They indulge in the sensual pleasures of the earth, including various fruits, flowers, running through fields, bathing in shaded pools, drinking copious amounts of wine, flirtation, companionship, and sex. We observe the centaurs’ mating rituals, as each seeks out a companion to whisk away to a secluded corner of the meadow. However, the fickle pagan gods seek sport and Zeus smites the group with his thunderbolts, Vulcan merrily forging him new darts to hurl at the scurrying mortals. Zeus eventually tires of his game and the last few thunderbolts slip unheeded from under his arm or his cushions as he drifts off to sleep, and Morpheus and Diana bring the tumultuous day to a close with the cover of darkness and a shower of stars.

The next short is, quite frankly, the most frivolous and inessential part of Fantasia: Ponchielli’s Dance of the Hours, as interpreted by ballet-dancing jungle creatures. It would be a fine addition to Disney’s Silly Symphonies line-up, but it feels cartoonish next to Rite of Spring, Pastoral, and Night on Bald Mountain. It relies heavily on its animals-doing-ballet premise, but seems to miss the fact that what makes ballet impressive and beautiful is the grace, beauty, and athleticism of the human dancers. Watching a live human ballerina leap and pirouette is awe-inspiring; watching a cartoon hippo do so is at best amusing and at worst boring. Dance of the Hours is a pleasant enough short, bringing a little levity before the next and final entry in this film, but like The Sorcerer’s Apprentice feels childish and out of place.

Finally, we come to the best of all the vignettes, the grand finale of Fantasia: the pairing of Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain with Schubert’s Ave Maria. We have seen the nihilistic chaos of the scientistic universe and the fickle grandeur of paganism; now we discover the hope and peace of the Christian world. We begin with the demon Chernabog summoning his followers on Walpurgisnacht. The souls of the damned arise through gallows, through sewers, through unholy graves not marked with crosses. They dance before Chernabog, but not the coordinated, beautiful dances we have seen so far in Fantasia. Their dance is janky, uncoordinated, each doing his own individual movements out of sync with his neighbor or the music. Chernabog plays with his minions, casting them into the fires of Hell and seemingly ready to cast hellfire on the earth and claim his final triumph, when a simple church bell rings out: the eucatastrophe.  This one clear note dispels the demons, returns the damned to their graves, and signals the coming of peace and hope. We end the film watching a torchlit procession climbing at dawn to a mountaintop shrine while Schubert’s Ave Maria is sung. These are the words of the Incarnation; Christ has come to dispel the cruel nihilism, the fickle paganism, the angry and powerful Satanism. Christ and His mother are here; fear, despair, and cruelty are banished and hope, peace, and joy have arrived. The sacred and the beautiful, standing side by side, have led us to our eternal home.

“Ave Maria! Heaven's bride!

The bells ring out in solemn praise

For you, the anguish and the pride,

The living glory of our nights —

Of our nights and days.

The Prince of Peace your arms embrace,

While hosts of darkness fade and cower.

Oh, save us, Mother full of grace,

In life and in our dying hour!

Ave Maria!”