Fantasia

 Well towards the top of any “Top 1 Movie of All Time” list, must figure Fantasia (1940).  I saw it wide-eyed as a child;  saw it stoned as a teen;  and watched it,  with ache and apprehension, with my own child by my side.  You don’t outgrow it.  It does not fade.

It was, in retrospect, the first outstanding music video, though they didn’t call it that back then.

Sort of by accident (my mind on other things -- politics, mostly), I recently rewatched it.  And reflected:  Probably too racy to be made that way today.  As, the undraped nymphets that open the Nutcracker section, complete with breasts and delta.  The dancing mushrooms that follow would be denounced as racial stereotyping.

The Stravinsky section first alludes to evolution,  then shows dinosaurs in a landscape without humans, and later depicts Global Warning;  might want to steer clear of that.

The centaur maidens in the Pastoral Symphony have no deltas, being horses down below; but their human halves would make the heart of any lad beat faster.    The pile of naked butt-up babies might also raise eyebrows in our day.  And then we see a grape-guzzling Baucus.

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Most historical what-ifs are unresolvable.  What if Napoleon hadn’t been so Corsican and short?  What if young Hitler had managed to make a living selling his paintings  -- thanks to the patronage of a kindly Jewish art-dealer, perhaps… ?   But it suddenly struck me:  here we can actually address the question, because Fantasia did have a sequal -- “Fantasia 2000”.

I stayed away from it when it came out, possibly fearing a disappointment like “Godfather Part III”.  After all, the new offering has an absolutely impossible act to follow, even after over half a century.  And the audience now is jaded by all sorts of special effects.  What to do?  Go over-the-top?  3-D?  Self-satire?  What?

Yet what they did this time  is what they did the first time:  Invoke the Muse, and let her shower forth her bounty.

Most of it is frigging brilliant.  And brilliant, not by mere dazzling, or digital derring-do.  Brilliant by depth of human vision and artistic execution.  I actually cared what happened to the schematic little butterfly-triangles; to the humpback whales; to the Ark;  and to everybody trying to get by during hard times in the big city.   Never have I appreciated -- understood -- “Rhapsody in Blue”, so well as by the light of this splendidly inventive visual and narrative re-imagination.

Oh, and, that PC angle?  Not an issue.  That buttocks-fetishism in early Disney, while tolerable, was not  after all  what was best about it, and is not missed here.   In this new creation, you never have the sense that the censor is looming and shriveling the imagination.   It is just splendid, and fully itself.  Kudos all round.

[Footnote:  For an uplifting fantasy  in the spirit of "Fantasia", check this out:

Murphy Makes a Mitzvah
Solly's sister is dying. But he can't just close up his pawn shop. Too many people depend on him. For one, there's Murphy, who
has put his toaster in and out of hock a dozen times this year alone.

Who could possibly handle the business in his absence?

Murphy takes on the job in a surprising and quirky story of love and redemption.