First animated shot: abstracted violin bows and clouds midway through Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. More on that later.

This isn’t a movie. History says it is, but the presentation is of an “entirely new form of entertainment” and goes out of its way to say so. No credits, no studio logos, it opens with a curtain as the orchestra prepares. Deems Taylor starts his presentation by introducing the idea of a music visualizer, decades before Microsoft gave one to everybody. But this is way better. I want this to be projected on every wall of a room and no product of an algorithm would make me say that.

If we’re treating it as a feature film, it’s innovation is breaking beyond narrative. Toccata and Fugue is entirely plotless imagery and even the segments with stories aren’t driven by them. But I see Fantasia more as a stylistic progenitor. The seven segments each have their own identity and that experimentation reverberates down the years. Elements of Toccata and Fugue predict the UPA style, the opening of the Nutcracker Suite invents the trails of pixie dust later seen with Tinker Bell and the Fairy Godmother. Compositions in the marching brooms sequence are reused in The Lion King’s Be Prepared number. On the technical side, they invented transparent cel paints and stereo film presentation.

On the other hand, Dance of the Hours looks so 1930s. Every hallmark of the era given tribute in Cuphead is in that segment. And the plot is about how funny it is when fat people dance. That one blows.

Mickey having a dream of ultimate power that becomes ruinous is an image ripe for repurposing. I mean he tries to do a murder, and his minions go marching out of his control, there’s stuff here.

Taylor’s introductions are the only speech in the film, and sometimes they get away from him. “Science, not art, wrote the scenario you’re about to see” then gives a very normative account of evolution. “Ambition” had nothing to do with animal life coming to land.

Rite of Spring is tremendous. Love that lava. Viscous. Forceful. More cartoons set in the Precambrian! Please! I was thinking the dinosaurs are more accurate than expected for 1940, but that T. rex is just fucking Reptar

Intermission! Now the element most like an evening at a concert hall, but then very familiar in film. The title card finally appears, more than halfway through, and there’s a mini-segment as Taylor talks with the “soundtrack”

It’s an actual music visualizer this time, but I love visual representations of working with sound. The one in Eizuken is particularly good, if you haven’t seen it.

“And their girlfriends, the centaurettes” is a thing they made the “Dean of American Music” say with his human mouth. This is probably the only depiction of pegasises that have them swim like ducks.

Night on Bald Mountain is just so good. Every creature design, every gesture from Chernobog, the textures and effects. Just fantastic. Something about it reminds me of Soviet and Eastern European art and animation. Ending on Ave Maria, rather than credits or one last Taylor segment, is also striking. Trying so hard to not be a movie.

Best segments are the Nutcracker Suite, Rite of Spring, and Night on Bald Mountain. It’s easy to forget there was a time when Disney animation was a studio, not a style. There was variety and vibrancy even within a single piece. The anthology format makes that a positive, unlike Pinocchio’s lack of cohesion. I feel the same about stuff made for the Disneyland TV show. “Man in Space” has several shorts with very disparate styles (and some ex-Nazis from Operation Paperclip)

E: I just read that initial plans included 3D projection and releasing smells in the theater. There really was a sense that Fantasia was a new form of entertainment. And the only descendant is Fathom Events occasionally simulcasting an orchestra, which lacks all the ambition and also the dinosaurs. It needs dinosaurs.