# Fantasia/2000 (1999)

### reviewed by
Scott Renshaw

FANTASIA/2000 (Disney) Featuring: James Earl Jones, Quincy Jones, Angela Lansbury, James Levine, Steve Martin, Bette Midler, Penn & Teller. Screenplay (Host Segments): Don Hahn, Irene Mecchi and David Reynolds. Producer: Donald W. Ernst. Supervising Director: Hendel Butoy. Segment Directors: Don Hahn, Pixote Hunt, Hendel Butoy, Eric Goldberg, James Algar, Francis Glebas, Gaetan Brizzi and Paul Brizzi. MPAA Rating: G Running Time: 74 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.

Even today, 20 years after I first saw the original FANTASIA and 60 years after its premiere, I'm still not sure whether the entire concept is audaciously praiseworthy or pretentiously misguided. Walt Disney's grand plan to bring classical music to the masses-accompanied by animated visual interpretation-ranks as one of the strangest cultural literacy experiments in mass media history. On the one hand, it could be seen as a sincere effort to bring kids to the castor oil of the classics, with a little eye candy as sweetener. More cynically, it could be seen as an attempt to persuade parents to take kids to a cartoon because it's really "good for them"-sort of like extolling pizza as nutritionally sound because it includes all four food groups.

Yet another possibility is that it's an intriguing case study in individual interpretation of an artistic work -- with all the peaks and valleys that concept entails. FANTASIA/2000 introduces seven new visual renderings of great compositions, wrapped around the return of Mickey Mouse in Dukas' "The Sorcerer's Apprentice." Beethoven's "Symphony No. 5" becomes a tale of good and evil involving abstract shapes. Respighi's "Pines of Rome" accompanies the adventures of a pod of humpback whales. Scenes of Depression-era New York life, sketched in the style of caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, are set to Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue." Hans Christian Andersen's "The Steadfast Tin Soldier" becomes the libretto for Shostakovich's "Piano Concerto No. 2." Flamingos with yo-yos cavort to Saint-Saens' "Carnival of the Animals." Donald Duck helps Noah with some animal roundup to the march of Elgar's "Pomp and Circumstance." And Stravinsky's "Firebird Suite" turns into a mythological tale of birth, destruction and rebirth.

It's quite an eclectic program Roy Disney and supervising animator Hendel Butoy have put together, and the results are predictably hit and miss. There's the sense that FANTASIA/2000's creative team felt obliged to maintain a balance between the experimental and the whimsical, when the experimental pieces are the ones that leave the strongest impression. Most dazzling of all is Butoy's computer-animated "Pines of Rome," in which the image of whales soaring into the sky almost returns the literal meaning to the word "breathtaking;" that moment alone made me wish I'd had the chance to experience the film in its IMAX incarnation from earlier this year. It's a wondrous piece of work that creates its own world, a feat the "Firebird Suite" segment comes close to matching (though there's more than a little PRINCESS MONONOKE to the imagery). There is also an undeniable energy to the "Rhapsody in Blue" segment, directed by Eric Goldberg (ALADDIN) with a clockwork story sense and an obvious affection for the artists who inspired both the look and the sound. When FANTASIA/2000 really lets its creative talent loose to explore the unfamiliar, the results are impressive.

Familiarity, however, doesn't help several of the segments. After his appealing "Rhapsody in Blue," Goldberg gets anthropomorphized-critter mundane with the cavorting flamingos of "Carnival of the Animals;" the Noah story of "Pomp and Circumstance" also suffers from a case of the cutes. With "Pomp," there's the greater problem of the music's undeniable connection to a specific context: graduation ceremonies. In fact, there's something just a bit off about all of the segments connected to instantly recognizable music-the grandiose abstractions of Beethoven's Fifth, the Duck Tales-goes-Genesis "Pomp," even the generally satisfying "Rhapsody in Blue." It may have been part of the FANTASIA plan to say, "Look, here's another way to look at a piece of music you may have pigeonholed previously," but it doesn't always work. A magical Mickey defined "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" in the first FANTASIA; an antediluvian Donald just makes you wonder why all these animals are graduating from the ark.

A new twist to FANTASIA/2000 finds actors and musicians in brief "host segments" introducing each work. Admittedly, a couple of them are good for laughs (Steve Martin and Penn & Teller, to be specific). The rest are an overly reverential bore. It's a curious decision, because if there's one thing the rest of FANTASIA/200 is not, it's reverential. Even when it flounders, it usually flounders because an experiment fails, not because someone was unwilling to experiment. And that's the faint damnation with which I ultimately praise the film: It doesn't always work, but even when it doesn't work, it's in ways that make it obvious someone was still trying. This FANTASIA inclines me to the perspective that it should be seen as a showcase for pure inspiration, a way to see how fine art can in turn inspire more fine art. This version is an uneven realization of that vision. I'll still be looking forward to FANTASIA/2060.

         On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 orchestral maneuvers in the dark:  6.

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