Fantasia (1940)

"Mr. Stokowski! Mr. Stokowski!"

‘Leopold Stokowski: a temple to surrealist kitsch…’

I'm a fan of Walt Disney's animation— with some reservations. It's the stylish, earlier stuff for me. There's the weirdly disturbing Pinocchio (1940), with its hints of the Child Catcher; Dumbo (1941), which still makes me blub, oh, big softy that I am! Especially the bit when Dumbo's imprisoned mother rocks her baby elephant to sleep through bars; The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr Toad (1949), featuring Washington Irving's headless horseman and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, the fabulous Sleeping Beauty (1959), based on late 15th century illuminated manuscripts, with a dead sexy Hollywood vamp of an Evil Queen, actually not unlike the Wicked Queen in the earlier Snow White (1937) modelled, supposedly, on Joan Crawford, and One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961), based on Dodie Smith's delightful children’s novels, which makes Regent's Park look like a Ronald Searle interpretation of Montmartre. And before I forget, we must add to the list Old Yeller (1957), in which (Oh God!) a little boy is forced to gun down his beloved, if rabid, dog— a brilliant live-action film which traumatised several generations of Americans. British readers of a certain vintage may also remember Disney Time, introduced by the late Roy Castle from his Mock Tudor house in the bourgeois bliss which is Gerrard's Cross— really just an excuse for the BBC to play the same old Disney clips over and over again, year in year out. But fun.

‘Luminous, saturated, shadowy, glorious Technicolor…’

And then there was The Wonderful World of Disney, shown on Saturday morning television in the early 70s, with the Disney castle (based on Mad King Ludwig’s Neuschwanstein), dry against a purple sky. With that luminous, saturated, shadowy, glorious Technicolor, bringing a tingle to the spine, reminding me strangely, of the illustrations found in the old Ladybird books on science and astronomy, townscapes silhouetted against the night sky, a sort of purple-blueish-greeny yellow. It must have had something to do with the colour printing of the time.

I went to Disneyland (Orlando, Los Angeles) about twenty years ago and loathed it— never have I seen anything more depressing: the brain-dead madness of crowds, the queue to end all queues, with a surcharge waiting for you at the end, when, two hours later you finally made it to the front. And as you queue, the gormless, horizontally-challenged punters sprayed with water, from tin piping overhead— like cattle in a Texan cow shed. On the other hand, Taschen's Walt Disney's Disneyland (on sale for a bargain fifteen quid from the Taschen website) is a fabulous coffee-table-trip-back-in-time to the 1950s, the height of American prosperity, influence and power, when slim, healthy, good-looking, wholesome, relatively well-dressed people (sunglasses, crew cuts and checked shirts in Madras cotton) drove ginormous cars with fins— a spacious land of chrome, ice-cream sundaes and the futuristic Disney monorail. There's a 1974 Disneyland documentary on YouTube which comes with my recommendation.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: a masterpiece…

All this makes me want to hum When You Wish Upon a Star (1940)— as crooned by the tragic 'Ukulele Ike' aka Cliff Edwards. A bankrupt, alcoholic, gambler and cocaine addict, Edwards had a sad life, dying as a pauper at the Virgil Convalescent Home in Hollywood. His body remained unclaimed for three days, as nobody wanted to pay for a funeral. Disney (who had quietly been paying Edwards' medical bills) and the Actors' Fund of America, both to their everlasting credit, stepped in, bought the body and gave Ukulele Ike a decent funeral and headstone. 

Which takes us to the fabulous Fantasia (1940), Disney's early innovative and experimental film, an animated montage set against well-known extracts of classical music. A film made by over 1,000 animators and technicians: a temple to surrealist kitsch. A Master of Ceremonies holds the film together: the dapper Mr. Deems Taylor (the music critic and composer): earnest, intense and uptight, as smooth as a salesman flogging Buicks or Packhards on a used car lot, nervous laugh and false bonhomie.

‘Smooth as a salesman flogging Buicks or Packards on a used car lot…’

Leopold Stokowski is Fantasia’s conductor, described by Norman Lebrecht in his fascinating and sometimes subversive work, The Maestro Myth (1991) as:

…part showman, part shaman, part sham. Everything about him was fake: his age, his accent, his sexuality— everything, that is except his musicianship, which was so assured that few understood why he needed to raise a smokescreen of lies that obscured his genuinely momentus deeds.