Fantasia Premieres: Disney Redefines Animation

Walt Disney's Fantasia opened at the Broadway Theatre in New York City, and nothing in the history of animation had prepared audiences for what they saw. The film merged classical music with animated imagery in a feature-length experiment that was part concert film, part visual symphony, and entirely unlike anything Hollywood had ever produced. Disney was betting his studio's financial future on the idea that cartoons could be high art. The project grew from a short film. Disney had commissioned a new Mickey Mouse cartoon set to Paul Dukas's "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," hiring conductor Leopold Stokowski to record the score with the Philadelphia Orchestra. When production costs ballooned to $125,000, far too much for a single short, Disney decided to embed it within a larger film pairing other classical pieces with animation. The result was seven animated segments set to works by Bach, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Beethoven, Ponchielli, Mussorgsky, and Schubert, in addition to Dukas. The sequences ranged from abstract patterns dancing to Bach's Toccata and Fugue to the terrifying Night on Bald Mountain finale. Disney's animators created 500,000 frames of hand-painted art. The studio also developed Fantasound, a pioneering multi-channel audio system that required theaters to install custom speaker configurations, making Fantasia the first commercial film released in stereo sound. Critics were divided. Some hailed it as a masterpiece of visual imagination. Others found it pretentious. Audiences were confused. The film's initial roadshow release in thirteen cities earned respectable reviews but could not recoup its $2.28 million production cost, an enormous sum that pushed the studio toward financial crisis during a period when the European market was closed by World War II.