Fantasia

Fantasia (1940) turns eight pieces of classical music into animation with almost no dialogue. The segments are independent: abstract shapes, the seasons, the extinction of the dinosaurs, mythological figures, a night of witches. Only a presenter speaks between them. The best known is The Sorcerer's Apprentice, in which Mickey Mouse enchants a broom and cannot stop it. That segment was originally planned as a short on its own, and its cost rose so far that Disney decided to build a feature around it to recover the money. Fantasia came into being as the solution to a short film that got out of hand. The real technical innovation is the sound. Disney's engineers developed a system called Fantasound, the first multichannel stereo sound used commercially in cinemas and the ancestor of today's surround. The orchestra was recorded onto separate channels and played through multiple speakers in the auditorium. The problem was cost. Installing it in a single cinema ran to as much as eighty five thousand dollars, and the film could only be shown in fourteen; a special roadshow was arranged across thirteen cities. The result: it did not make a profit on first release. The war had closed the European market, the production costs were high, and leasing theatres and installing equipment added another burden. Stokowski conducted. It made its money back through reissues over the years and a sequel followed. It runs 125 minutes. Good for: the history of animation, classical music, and visual experiment. Less good for: there is no narrative, some segments run long, and one section was later removed for racist caricature belonging to its period.