MotW: Fantasia

Never seen it but always wanted to. the trailer was in almost every Disney VHS tape in the 80's and 90's but I never got to see it for some reason.

As a kid, the shorts, where sound was translated as animation, was pretty surreal. The dinosaur segments were cool! And Night on Bald Mountain is still scary. Along with the Sorceror's Apprentice, those were the most memorable parts for me.

I think for the time it was released it was at the very least a 4/5 film, if not 5/5. But by today's standards it's a 3/5 because the character designs definitely show their age. It's not like this artwork was a deliberate stylized throwback like the Rapsody in Blue segment of Fantasia 2000, it's just outdated cartooning for the most part. A product of its era, kinda like Richie Rich:



The reason nobody draws cartoons like that anymore is because it was merely an early phase for the cartooning/comic book medium. That style is too crude for it to be a widespread fad anymore. The simplistic, round look of early Disney and comic series like Richie Rich absolutely reeks of primitive 20th century cartooning. It's just outright bad by this point, and, though certainly not the worst of its kind within the cartooning medium, objectively dated. EDIT: I guess the point I was trying to make here is that this isn't and wasn't a creator driven style of cartooning, even back in 1940, so for that reason it lacks the timeless appeal of the more creator driven cartoons from that era, like Al Hirschfeld's work, for example, which also has an elegant simplicity to it but with a creator driven styling that made it both innovative and unmistakable. Crap like Mickey Mouse and Richie Rich is just assembly line junk by comparison. Freddie Moore might have been an innovator within the field of animation, but even his talent is nothing next to Hirschfeld and the other giants of the cartooning scene of that era. In actuality, Freddie Moore's style was probably just derivative of Hirschfeld's or other big cartoonists from that time (there is a noticeable resemblance).

However, I agree with Centipede that there are at least two truly timeless segments in the film: The Rite of Spring segment and the Night on Bald Mountain segment. Those two are still a must-watch to this day. Fantasia is worth watching just for those two segments alone.

I also don't agree with the quality of the artwork when compared to the accompanying music. The classical music used in Fanstasia is timeless and truly the best of its kind (hence "classical") whereas most of the artwork is NOT timeless and is painfully average by today's standards. For that reason, I see Fanstaisa as a very pretentious film nowadays, because Walt Disney was basically saying "Our artwork here at Disney studios is the best of its kind!" by pairing it with classical music that is quite literally the best of its kind. Walt Disney was always an arrogant bastard and Disney as a company has always been overrated slop for the mainstream pigs, with varying degrees of quality.

There's something else I want to add.

It's important to note that cartooning is a medium that has only been around since the late 1800s; the first official comic strips literally didn't exist before then, so you'd have to be just plain stupid or ignorant to not think that these early Dinsey films haven't aged well. I personally lump 30s & 40s animation together along with cheap 50s cartoon strips like Richie Rich as "art deco" cartooning. I'm not sure if this style of cartooning between the mid 20s to the mid-late 50s has an actual name, but I'm just going to label it "art deco" cartooning, since it seemingly got its start in the 1920s, the "art deco" era, and somehow managed to persist well into the 50s before being phased out by much better cartooning like early anime in the form of Tatsuo Yoshida's projects like Speed Racer- which itself hasn't aged that well and is a total hodgepodge of stylistic quality- and some western comic book stuff by top-cartoonists like Michael Golden and Alex Toth.

Even Disney themselves mostly moved away from this round "art deco" look by the early 50s and seemed to evolve with films like Cinderella and Alice in Wonderland, which had some of the nicest looking human character designs ever seen in animation by that point. Although by the time Jeffrey Katzenburg came along, Disney had regressed back to that whole "round 30s" looking human characters for the most part. He was an asshole.

I personally think the quality of Dinsey animation peaked in the 50s and never really seemed to evolve beyond that point, flatlining in quality until the Great Mouse Detective, where it dipped back down, and it only started to recover once Katzenburg was replaced by Michael Eisner, who was a much better CEO. Of course, this is just my personal opinion, and other scholars might disagree.