Fantasia

Early history +D Minor & Nutcracker Suite

Fantasia is a 1940 American animated film produced by Walt Disney and released by Walt Disney Productions.

The film consists of eight animated segments set to pieces of classical music conducted by Leopold Stokowski; seven of which are performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra.

The soundtrack was recorded using multiple audio channels and reproduced with Fantasound, a pioneering sound reproduction system that made Fantasia the first commercial film shown in stereophonic sound. It was the first American film to use stereophonic sound.

Fantasia gave birth to the music entrainment world to generate the concept of music video. Which in turn, the media killed music television for rotting brain matter such as Jersey Shore.

Fantasia is the third full-length animated feature film in the Disney animated canon.

This is the longest Disney animated full-length feature film, with a runtime of 124 minutes.

The surrealist painter, Salvador Dalí, made some illustrations for the movie, but his ideas were later discarded.

Toccata and Fugue in D Minor – Johann Sebastian Bach

Live-action shots of the orchestra illuminated in blue and gold, backed by superimposed shadows, fade into abstract patterns. Animated lines, shapes and cloud formations reflect the sound and rhythms of the music

The first few parts of the piece are played in each of the three sound channels (first the right, then the left, then the middle, then all of them) as a demonstration of Fantasound.

Toccata and Fugue was inspired primarily by the work of German abstract animator Oskar Fischinger, who worked for a brief time on this segment.

The Nutcracker Suite – Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

The Nutcracker Suite, a selection of pieces from Tchaikovsky's now-classic ballet The Nutcracker, is a personified depiction of the changing of the seasons; first from summer to autumn, and then from autumn to winter.

Unlike the original Tchaikovsky ballet, this version of The Nutcracker has no plot. It features a variety of dances, just as in the original, but danced by animated fairies, fish, flowers, mushrooms, and leaves; no actual nutcracker is ever seen in this version.

Many elements are rendered carefully and painstakingly using techniques such as drybrush and airbrush. The musical segments are as follows:

As dawn breaks over a meadow, during the "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy", tiny fairies sprinkle drops of dew on every flower and stern.

A cluster of tiny mushrooms, dressed in long robes and coolie hats resembling Chinese (plus one little mushroom always out-of-step), perform the "Chinese Dance".

Multicolored blossoms shaped like ballerinas perform the "Dance of the Flutes".

A school of underwater goldfish perform a graceful "Arabian Dance".

High-kicking thistles, dressed like Cossacks, and orchids, dressed like lovely Russian peasant girls, join together for the wild "Russian Dance”

In the final musical segment, "Waltz of the Flowers", autumn fairies color everything they touch brown and gold with their wands. Then the frost fairies arrive and everything becomes part of an icy, jewel-like pattern among falling snow flakes.