WALT DISNEY HAS DONE IT AGAIN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 81, 10 January 1941, Page 8

WALT DISNEY HAS

DONE IT AGAIN

The New CINESYMPHONY Stars Mickey Mouse And Stokowshi |

ALT DISNEY, the greatest innovator in twentieth century entertainment, has made history once again. His new film, "Fantasia," is described in this article, which is based on facts secured from Time, the American magazine, and published in The Listener by arrangement with the editors of Time. In his technicoloured cartoons, from the infantile "Mickey Mouse" to the adult "Snow White" and "Pinocchio," Disney has already combined old methods to make a new world of entertainment. He joined the fairytale to the screen. In "Fantasia" it seems that he has created an ever braver and brighter new world. He has combined the film and the fairytale, the cartoon, and great music. The result is what Time calls the "cinesymphony." It has just been previewed in America. There is as yet no word about the possibility of its coming to New Zealand. Even Disney’s distributors (RKO) do not know whether it will appear here or go with the wind like one other famous picture, iy ~s

6 ANTASIA" comes from a bigger conception than anything Disney has used previously. It is a symphony concert on the screen, starring Mickey Mouse, Leopold Stokowski, Bach, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Dukas, Tchaikovski, Moussorgsky, Schubert; the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, and a_ revolutionary technique of sound recording. The cine cartoon is already an old form of entertainment, but it still appeals to the popular mind, and all the great audience it carries with it will be diverted, willy-nilly, to the symphony as an entertainment form when the impact of Disney’s cinesymphony is felt. "Fantasia" is a new treatment of great music, a new use for the film cartoon, and a completely new dimension in entertain‘ment. For several years Disney has had the idea. Even before "Snow White" he vaguely thought about doing a serious opera in the same method. In 1929 he

turned Saint-Saens’s "Danse Macabre" into a silly symphony. In 1938 he was making Paul Dukas’s "Sorcerer's Apprentice" into a Mickey Mouse short when Stokowski, visiting Hollywood, asked to be allowed to conduct the music. Too Good for a Short When the recordings were done, and most of the animation completed by Disney’s atmy of artists, the film began to look too good for a short and too expensive for anything but a feature. And Stokowski had been calling up so many fresh ideas that Disney began to be really interested. They decided between them to build up a whole programme of cinesymphonies. "Fantasia" was begun there and then in Disney’s big new studio. They chose highbrow music. The small orchestra with which they had worked was replaced with Stokowski’s own magnificent Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, which made all the recordings in the acoustically perfect Academy of Music, in Philadelphia. Technicians. dispensed with eyen the best of ‘ordinary sound equipment and developed new methods, Each section of the big orchestra was caught on to a separate sound track,» and the whole blended into a master track on which every faint breath of the least of all the instruments could: be caught as accurately as the conductor demanded. Working with Bill Garrity, expert sound engineer, Stokowski cut 430,000 feet of goon track into a near-perfect 11,953 eet. When the recordings were played back engineers were astonished to find that the sound followed characters across the screen, chased ideas: up to the ceiling of the studio,-rolled around the walls, whispered. into the ears of the wondering listeners. Music. Everywhere At the preview the music came not simply from the screen but from everywhere in ‘the Manhattan theatre. It seemed as if the hearer were in the very midst of the music. It frothed over the proscenium arch, boiled into the rear

of the theatre, waltzed up and down the aisles. The new sound equipment was the pride of its creators, who claimed that it would revolutionise cinema production like nothing since technicolour. Meanwhile, the artists were busy. While the Disney lot sounded with classical music, while engineers who had never heard of Beethoven began whistling concertos in the bath, the idea men

were picturing the music for the screen. The film opens with the sounds of a big orchestra tuning. It appears on the screen huge, hazy. A musical commentator introduces Stokowski, and the show is on, And what a show! With Tchaikovski’s "Nutcracker Suite" the ballet on the screen turns into flowers, fairies, fish, falling leaves, mushrooms. Mickey Mouse appears in the title role of "The Sorcerer’s Apprentica*

A primeval world "Rite of Spring" illustrates Stravinsky’s "Rite of Spring." This has the same effect on highbrow audiences as swing on jitterbugs. It has made them shout and pound each other in their ecstasy. The men working on it had to be quarantined from their fellows in the Disney lot because Beethoven’s dulcet Sixth. Symphony just would not mix with the hectic Stravinsky. Everything from brontosaurs to the archaeopteryxes peoples the planet drawn for Stravinsky’s cosmic hullabaloo, By startling his audience with such stuff as this, Disney gets over his initial difficulty: that neither himself nor any of his artists is a Gustave Doré to do justice to the giant strides of the composers whose shadows they have worked with. "Fantasia" as a whole leaves its audiences gasping, because Disney, hasbeen bold, and his audiences will be frightened as often as they are delighted. He has even risked being flippant. For Beethoven’s "Pastoral Symphony" he created centaurs and centaurettes, with Pegasus Mrs. Pegasus, and several little Pegasi gambolling around. Bacchus and his crew are well drenched when the storm comes up. "Fantasia" fills a long succession of very large orders, from the Pierian-well- water of Johann Sebastian Bach to the violet-bordered stream of Schubert’s "Ave Maria." Many of the orders are so beautifully filled that they have left critics no longer callous but whispering incredulously among themselves.

Eerie Fantasy The eerie fantasy of Moussorgsky’s "Night on a Bare Mountain" was covered from outside the Disney studio by the fairy-tale illustrator, Kay Neilson, who designed graveyards complete with ghosts, and a Walpurgis nightmare calculated to turn white the hair of little children. Neilson’s jagged scenery, developed in a new high level of animation technique, made this quite the best act in the whole "Fantasia."

A New Zealander Had The Same Idea

EW ZEALANDERS have already seen something of the attempts of movie makers to put the sense of music on the screen. Five years ago Len Lye, New Zealand born, turned out some "shorts" in which music was visualised impressionistically. Some of these have shown here during the past year, and most theatregoers must have come across them somewhere. Staccato music he represented by dots and dashes in a sort of syncopated technicolour. Largo movements were graceful, wavy lines. Flashes like lightning, cutting through thunder clouds, represented tempestuoso, and maestoso would be pictured with drums turning one in upon the other and grandly out again. Disney uses some of this technique in "Fantasia," although most of his musical picturisation is carried out in the simpler terms of object-drawing. But for Bach’s "Fugue" there is a ‘strangely beautiful wave and cloud sequence, and there is true artistic meo-impressionism in a queer series of explosive music visualisations performed by a worried and disembodied sound track, posing diffidently on the screen like a reluctant wire. In the opening feet of the film both music and picture are abstract. Stokowski appears silhouetted against the hazy outline of the huge Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra. There are sounds of instruments being tuned. Then the music flushes out from the picture, the hazy orchestra begins to dissolve, and weird ripples and filaments begin an unearthly ballet in technicolour. Most impressionistic painters concern themselves mainly with their own ideas, but occasionally one has attempted to interpret the ideas of others in poetry or music. The Spanish painter Segrelles, for example, has painted his conception of Beethoven symphonies. By a coincidence, this artist has also done a great deal of work illustrating fairytales.

New characters appear under the Disney hand. Hop Low is a little mushroom who tries to do the Chinese. Dance from "The Nutcracker Suite," and can’t quite keep up with the big mushrooms. Ben. Ali Gator is premier danseur of an ostrich ballet set to the music of Ponchielli’s "Dance of the MHours." Susan is a hippopotamus ballerina who cavorts like a blimp through a pas de deux with Ben. Bacchus and his donkey

Jacchus trip through Beethoven’s "Pastoral. Symphony." Atmosphere The artists were as keen to perfect "Fantasia" as the technicians who worked such wonders with Stokowski’s sound. One of them, found studying lightning flashes by reclining on a Los Angeles kerbstone in pouring rain, was arrested. Famous paleontologists were called in to advise about the monsters for Strav-

insky’s piece of musical distortion. Stravinsky himself had a look at the illustrations for "Rite of Spring" and vowed they were exactly what he had had in mind when the work was composed. More than that, he was so impressed he signed a contract to do more work expressly for Disney. The New York Academy of Sciences asked for special showings because the directors believed many of the animal

pictures were better science than trainloads of fossils and taxidermy. Musicians and sound engineers claimed that the recording had never before been approached. Professers of music vowed that "Fantasia" would save more ears for great music than a century of lectures. Disney, looking back on a production bill of two and a-quarter million. dollars, crossed his fingers and said: "What we strive for is entertainment."

It is clear, however, that Disney has not himself been "highbrow," although he has taken the most highbrow theme he could find. Where he has felt himself unable to do full artistic justice to the matter in hand he has been content to make fun. Critics may deplore what seems to be lack of taste, but Disney will be given this much praise; that he has advanced boldly into an art form that immortals from Aeschylus to Wagner, have dreamed of.