Fantasia

Fantasia, Disney’s flagship animated feature, is March’s Cinema Sunday presentation. (As counterpoint, Allegro Non Troppo, Italian animator Bruno Bozzetto’s wonderful parody of and tribute to Fantasia, will screen in April.) Released in 1940, Fantasia’s extravagant visualizations of eight pieces of Western classical music, in which bold exercises in animation were accompanied by cutting-edge stereophonic sound, was innovative and unprecedented in scale. The film received two special Oscars — for advancing the use of sound in motion pictures and for unique achievement in creating “a new form of visualized music” — but audiences of the day weren’t as enthusiastic: the film was a box-office flop, and it wasn’t until the psychedelic 1960s and 70s that its heady accomplishments were more widely appreciated. The Philadelphia Orchestra, under the direction of Leopold Stokowski, performs compositions by Stravinsky, Bach, Tchaikovsky and others; a team of Disney directors contributed the imaginative animated pieces that accompany and illustrate the music. The film includes the much-famed “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” sequence with Mickey Mouse. Fantasia is enduring classic that helped solidify both Disney and Mickey as icons of the 20th century. “There's no other animated film with its scope and ambition” (Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader). Colour, Blu-ray Disc. 125 mins.