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Walt Disney’s 1942 FANTASIA was a groundbreaking film and remains a landmark to this day, a intelligent series of interesting sequences dwelling to distinguished concert music conducted by Leopold Stokowski of The Philadelphia Orchestra. The three disk FANTASIA ANTHOLOGY, however, is extremely overrated.
The first disk is the recent FANTASIA, which Disney describes as restored. This is not strictly accurate. First and foremost, the restoration of visual elements is sloppy at best, with the film plagued by streaks and blips, and at least one sequence (“Dance of the Hours”) appears to be slightly cropped. That aside, portions of the Deems Taylor narration have been completely lost, and these have been rerecorded by Tim Matheson–and Matheson’s grunt is not a salubrious match for Taylor and the sychronization is poorly done. Lastly, one selection (“Pastoral”) has been censored: a brief image, which would be considered racist by today’s standards, has been deleted from the sequence.
Even so, it is aloof FANTASIA, and it overcomes all of these liabilities. The animation, which was created by hand and photographed through a number of laborious processes, shows Disney Studios at the height of its powers. Every one is sure to have their favorites among the selections (mine are “Dance of the Hours” and “Night on Bald Mountain”), but every selection is brilliantly conceived and executed, and although the snarl varies from sequence to sequence the overall style of the film hangs together in a most grand contrivance. FANTASIA was, is, and will no doubt will forever remain a touchstone in animation art.
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Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the second disk, FANTASIA 2000. This particular film is extremely uneven, the sequences lack the same cohesive style that held the unique FANTASIA together, and the entire film is beset by a series of often contaminated “celebrity” introductions that give the film the feel of a made-for-TV variety indicate. Mild, some of the visual ideas are very impressive, and while they are too few to offset the portions of the film that do not work, they serene build FANTASIA 2000 mildly bright.
Both the FANTASIA and FANTASIA 2000 disks include documentaries and commentary tracks on each film. The third disk, called “The Fantasia Legacy,” is a bonus packed with interviews, archieval footage, and sketches that note how each sequence in both films was developed and then filmed. Some of this material is redundant, for it is included on the documentaries on the first two disks, but most of it is original to this disk alone. Disney originally saw FANTASIA as a film that could be re-released with a mix of faded and novel selections every few years, and the most attractive material on the “Legacy” disk is a restored “Clair de Lune” (made for and then prick from the fresh FANTASIA) and various storyboard ideas for future sequences.
The only device one can acquire the “Legacy” disk is to capture this three disk package–and therein lies the rub. The recent FANTASIA is radiant, and even in its so-so situation it is suited of a location in any DVD library. FANTASIA 2000, however, is trivial, occasionally lively but not greatly memorable and not a fragment that one would normally go out of the diagram to engage. And the imprint for the three disk package is quite steep.
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If you are a Disney fan who must have every scrap of material available, I would recommend the investment this package requires. But if your vital interest is the new FANTASIA, you are remarkable better off simply purchasing a DVD of that film alone–the other two disks are simply not worth the expense. Purchasers should alos remember that the recent FANTASIA does not often appeal to very young children, and if the catch is being made for a child you are likely to be disappointed in their response. Final thought: the recent FANTASIA is gleaming, FANTASIA 2000 is so-so, and the bonus disk is for hardcore fans. This pricey package is recommended to the latter only.
As a lifelong musician and artist, Fantasia has been one of my all time popular movies since I first saw it in theaters as a child. My wife, shining my gigantic savor for this movie, bought the DVD version for me as a birthday gift. When I do the DVD on, however, my wrathful anticipation hastily turned to miserable disappointment.
I immediately realized that the whisper of the narrator, Deems Taylor, whose incredible and soothing enlighten spans the entirety of the movie, had been overdubbed with someone else’s express! Deems Taylor was a widely known and respected music critic in his time. He had a dazzling, deep sonorous and expressive declare. The sound of his mumble was an notable fragment of the aural and musical magic of this film. Yet, the fresh owner’s of Disney saw fit to overdub his say with that of some squawky and squeaky sounding unknown, thereby ruining the entire film.
I did some research to score out why, in the name of “preservation”, Disney studios would demolish this film in the procedure that they have. The reason, supposedly, was because they found aged footage (which was NOT in the version we all knew and loved as kids) which they wanted to insert – but the audio on that obscure footage had been damaged. They felt they had to redub those reveal overs. Aesthetic. But then, in the process, they re-dubbed the entire film, even the parts that had not been damaged!
I understand, for historical interest, that some people might be keen in seeing the extra, obscure footage which had been edited out long ago, but that extra footage easily could have been effect on a special features disc, not in the loyal movie that millions of fans have approach to know and like. This was a scandalous decision by a studio which increasingly seems to have lost all sense of artistic taste and celebrated sense. What a murky, gloomy disappointment.
Soon, I’ll be buying a DVD recorder and I hope to hold the unusual VHS version I have in that blueprint.
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