What Walt Taught Me: Fantasia

Last updated on: August 2, 2015 at 11:29 am by John Mark N. Reynolds

What Walt Taught Me: Fantasia 2015-08-02T11:29:21-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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Hope was frustrated: “Music is music.” She looked at me and realized that her new husband saw pictures instead of hearing music. My auditory sense was dominated by my visual sense to the point that I was deprived of an excellent musical experience. “You think of it all as a story . . . like you must write Fantasia for every piece.” She was right. Whenever I listened to music, my mind would drift and I would begin to think of what the sounds were like: pink elephants? dancing mushrooms? dancing color slashes?

Hope reminded me that music could stand alone and did not need a concrete story.

Thanks a lot, Walt.

And yet Walt took this story driven young man and made it possible for him, musically ignorant as I was, to approach greater music. Teachers knew it. They would play clips of Fantasia and ask us to draw what we saw in our mind’s eye. Just the idea of my mind having an eye intrigued seventh grade me. I may have drawn badly, but I began sketching recollections of Barterra listening to Tchaikovsky.

Thanks a lot, Walt.

Walt Disney could have kept making fairy tales but he was an artist, a dreamer, an innovator. Fantasia was a movie that nobody wanted to see until they saw it. His idea of a movie that would be eternal by exchanging parts to keep it fresh was also used in Disneyland decades later by swapping out one attraction or ride for another. His use of special sound to make the concert-film work was resisted by those who picked short term profit over his prophetic sense of where creative arts could go.

Walt and his geniuses were so far ahead of their time they may have invented the 1960s with their trippy movie. Walt reminds me to push outside my past success and create something new.

Thanks a lot, Walt.

Only Disney would dare to tell an evolutionary story of the Earth in the same move as the Ave Maria. Like the nostalgia of Mainstreet USA in the same park with the scientist of Tomorrowland, the complexity of Walt’s loves made me consider the clash of my own ideas. Darwin could be made to fit with the Mother of God, Walt did it, but should I? Walt started me thinking and I have not stopped since.

Fantasia made me grow in the forms of animation I would consider during my “cartoon.”‘He pushed against the limits his fans anticipated and experimented with sound and color. As a kid I did not like the “arty” bits, but I kept watching them to get to the cartoons. As a result, Walt hooked me. I grew up and soon the arty bits made sense and I liked them best. Then I saw the art in the “cartoons” and loved them even more. Walt Disney created an entire educational program in a movie. If he had been allowed to keep tinkering, I cannot imagine what would have happened.

Sadly, War came and ended such innovation. By the time Walt got his studio back from the government at the end of the War, much had been lost, art had been forgotten, and skills had to be relearned.

Of course, the music was the star and Walt made me listen to music I generally avoided as a kid. As the sound track to very scary horse riding skeletons, classical music was wonderful. Hope would eventually teach me to listen to music without turning music into a story, but Walt and his artists got me started. When opera came around through best friends, Fantasia had prepared me for the mix of storytelling and singing I experienced.

In this period, Disney was subtle. He loved dreamers, see the award winning music in Pinocchio, but he also knew the limits of dreaming. The best known short in the film has Mickey, Walt’s cartoon ego, serving as apprentice to a sorcerer. Mickey dares to dream of work without effort and enchants a broom to carry water for him with disastrous results. The Mouse used a short cut with powers he did not understand. Both laziness and meddling were bad ideas and Mickey learned his lesson. Sadly, the globe did not. The 1940’s saw us meddling with ideas that were toxic and using powers that were dreadful in their consequences. Fortunately, grownups like Eisenhower won their war and tried to moderate the passions of the time that chaos had unleashed. If they were not wholly successful, they still recognized that man’s power had finally grown too great to allow fools and apprentices access to the magic of science.

Fantasia was a short term failure but long term genius. Dreamers like Walt spend money on excellence for the sake of the sheer artistry and wonder and the market often rewards them. Fools of our age sack the dreamers and hire those who loot ideas from dreamers to make dreadful, imitative dreck they call motion pictures. Walt had a different idea . . . and though he was highly imperfect, he loved ideas enough to make a movie we did not know we needed: Fantasia.

The movie that lets you dream of the parts that might have been, a movie with no real ending, a movie for dreamers.

Thanks a lot, Walt.

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