Walt Disney "has achieved remarkable things" in his new film "Fantasia," says Daniel Todd. A happy union between the animated cartoon and symphonic music.
The movie critics all liked Fantasia, and in this they were right. Walt Disney, in transforming eight pieces of concert-hall music into animated cartoons, has achieved remarlcable things, most remarkable of which is an account of the beginning of the world to the music of Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. Stravinsky, who sensibly wants to get a job at the Disney studios, has told the press that this apocalyptic vision represents what be actually had in mind when he wrote the music, and after seeing Disney's impres- sion of the convulsions which seized the earth in its infancy, that does not seem unlikely. When the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra produces one of Stravinsky's dire sounds, formerly accompanied by a leap from a ballet dancer dressed as a faun, Disney gives you a shot of a volcano erupting, followed by an earthquake, a hurricane, and a tidal wave. They seem a lot more suitable.[…]
