Magazine
LESSONS FROM FANTASIA 2000
By Peter Adamakos
Now that FANTASIA 2000 has come and gone in IMAX, and come and gone on regular-sized movie screens, there are some lessons to be learned from the experience that reveals the state of the art and business of animation today as perhaps no other contemporary film does.
Most obvious is the choice of how to show the film. The original FANTASIA, once it was determined to be a feature film, was planned as a wide-screen stereophonic feature. This was a phenomenal undertaking since there had been only sporadic attempts at wide screen projection in the silent days utilizing differing approaches or techniques. In the end, costs being what they were, a wide screen format was abandoned, and Walt Disney would have to wait another 15 years to release what would become his first feature cartoon in wide screen, the Cinemascope production LADY AND THE TRAMP. He did get his second wish, however, and with the help of RCA, stereophonic sound was first heard in 1940’s FANTASIA. The world would have to wait another 15 years for someone to make a second stereophonic film. The new sound system, named Fantasound, was only available in a few theaters in the largest cities. The others got regular sound prints and did not have to rewire their theaters.
FANTASIA was a flop, and within a year the distributor, RKO, edited the film down in length and released it as the bottom half of a double feature with some long-forgotten western. Its publicity campaign, “Fantasia will Amazia” didn’t help. The complete feature was reissued in 1947 to no great business. When reissued in 1956 and 1964, it came back in “wide screen” as originally planned. Of course all they could do was in effect “letterbox” it by cutting off about one third of the top and bottom parts of the film, then stretching the rest so that the hippos looked like blimps (as one critic put it.) Not until 1970 did recent generations see the film as it was originally made.
So what did the marketing geniuses of FANTASIA 2000 do? Apparently they did not learn from the distorted showings of the first FANTASIA over the years and created a new mess for the new film, which was made in standard 35mm. They decided to release it in IMAX. It was not made in IMAX, the layouts were not planned for showing in IMAX, but hey, bigger is better, right? Wrong. If you saw the film in IMAX you saw what a disaster that decision was. The action at times was too fast to be seen, much less absorbed in the IMAX format. At most you could take in and process only a portion of what was happening onscreen, because you were not placed in a position to see the entire screen’s action in the number of frames each took to unfold. Even the slower sections were only glimpsed, as your eyes darted about to see every part of the screen then your brain tried to put the sections all together in a composite scene before it moved onto the next shot. There was no sense of perspective either as a humpback whale was now the same size as Donald Duck’s ass. It was like looking through a keyhole trying to take in the whole room inside while only able to see part of the room at any one time. It was the hippo blimps all over again. But today Bigger is Better and we were in effect being told that in IMAX, Fantasia will Amazia!
Of course not every city has an IMAX theater, so most people couldn’t or wouldn’t travel to see it. Then a couple of months ago the film was released to regular theaters, but only until July 13th we were told. My suspicion is that the theater chains, in the midst of the biggest movie summer ever, were not too pleased to take up screen time with what was now used goods. My guess is that Disney, using its clout dictated that they would have to take the film, but agreed it would only be for a short time. The film did not have the benefit of a huge new publicity campaign. That was done six months earlier. Critics were not going to review it all over again. There was even some confusion as to what this new release was. Our paper, in its weekend mini reviews of all the movies playing said “This is not to be confused with the recent IMAX version, demonstrating their own confusion, and that of the public. To the public that knew what it was, this was six-month-old news. It was an “old” picture that had no buzz left in it, and so it did dismal business. The take so far is about $60 million, great for the IMAX Company but a disaster for Disney? Even their animated clunkers usually earn about double that. Opening both the original and the new FANTASIA in only a few cities proved an original and repeated disaster. This should have been obvious; especially today when major films open on over 2,000 screens and the trailers blanket television morning, noon and night to achieve that all important first weekend gross. Good or bad as they are, is there anyone not aware of recent films like THE PATRIOT, CHICKEN RUN or THE PERFECT STORM? When it eventually comes to video it will likely be a poor seller, with little anticipation built in or reach beyond the market that buys every Disney animated video, whatever it is.
The saddest figure in all this is, of course, Roy Disney. This was his pet project for the last 15 years or so. The humpback whale sequence was the first completed, almost eight years ago. The film now becomes a footnote, an oddity, in Disney animation, just like the first FANTASIA did at the time of its release. Roy Disney is not the main loser, however. We are. We the audience, we the animation enthusiasts are. This film should have become a landmark film as revolutionary to animation as SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS or WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT and THE LITTLE MERMAID were. The first FANTASIA was truly state of the animation art, in many ways unequalled in the last 60 years. It showed what animation could be and hinted at what it could become. But its failure meant a different track for Disney, or rather a continuation of the past, and after the success of SNOW WHITE, to which FANTASIA was constantly (unfairly) compared, an eventual CINDERELLA, ALICE IN WONDERLAND, PETER PAN and SLEEPING BEAUTY became a no-brainer inevitability.
A successful FANTASIA 2000 might have meant a shift, even partial, from the standard Disney fare today of vapid animated musicals and predictable and easier 3D animation subjects like toys, dinosaurs and bugs. What, no robots? Above all, it could have made Disney the place to be as an animator, where you could hope to do animation projects worth their effort. Disney would have been on the cutting and leading edge of animation again, the undisputed leader instead of the copycat-catch up-me too studio it has become. JURASSIC PARK? We’ll do DINOSAUR. ROAD TO EL DORADO? We’ll do THE EMPEROR’S NEW GROOVE. ANTS? We’ll do A BUG”S LIFE. In the theme park business Disney used to be so far ahead of everyone else, the theme park business WAS Disney. But a day at a Disney theme park and a day at say, Universal, are not that different an experience—the same technology, the same kind of adventures, the same newest roller coaster. Disney used to define theme parks by being first with new technologies they owned, not bought, that no one else had. Their theme parks are done better than anyone else, yes, but they are no longer unique. And the same is true of their animation today. By not stretching the field, who looks to Disney today to do the unexpected, to decide the animation of the future, to (heaven forbid) take a risk?
Well, they did FANTASIA 2000 and that’s something comfortable Steven Spielberg would never even try to do. The biggest lesson of FANTASIA 2000, and its biggest failing point is not that the audiences stayed away solely because of poor marketing and screening, they stayed away because of poor word of mouth. The film, sad to say, just wasn’t very good. The creative people at Disney failed Roy Disney, us, and animation. The film was sabotaged from within. They had a chance to do the miraculous (as they did do with the original) and they failed. Here was their chance to do a pure animation film, state of the art, not dictated by the marketing department for a change. Roy Disney fought for this film, and for animation and in the end the best creative people in animation today let him down.. They were called upon to do battle for animation’s future and they failed.
FANTASIA 2000 has its strong points, but they are usually moments here and there. There isn’t one segment that will “amazia”. The overwhelming feeling watching FANTASIA 2000 is how under whelming it all is. Having one of the segments from the original film, THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE (and there were to be more old ones coming back originally) gave an opportunity to compare the two FANTASIAs. I have often argued that the animators at Disney today are in some ways better than those of the past. But the one thing this new film lacks is the stuff that made Disney animation great at its core—imagination and inventiveness. THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE is full of imagination and invention. Every shot, every action is so rich and full, yet flows seamlessly into the whole for an overall even greater tapestry. There is an excitement to seeing the animation. The animation of the new film is writ small because the ideas and their execution are so underdeveloped. The whole film gives the feeling that first impressions became final choices. You don’t create a Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a Night on Bald Mountain and so on with half efforts. These are meticulously crafted animation pieces, worked on and worked on until sculpted down to a masterpiece of invention, wit, taste and a passion you can witness in the final work. The new film looks like it was, by comparison, slapped together without breaking a sweat. Seeing the original FANTASIA in theaters always exhausted me by the end. There was so much visual and audible stimulation that I was drained. There was much to think about animation-wise for days. A few hours after seeing FANTASIA 2000 I was thinking of other mundane things. FANTASIA 2000 was a half-effort thrown together by today’s animation self-proclaimed geniuses. No doubt they will now continue to decry the kind of animation, the type of crass marketing-driven subjects they are “forced” to do in the industry. We have all lost, and this hope for the rebirth of animation was stillborn.
Peter Adamakos is an animation producer and director who founded his animation company 28 years ago.He also founded the Animation Museum which has sent traveling exhibitions to museums around the world for many years. He also teaches in animation. He now has a website at www.disada.com . Peter can be reached at peter@disada.com or at P.O. Box 37009, 3332 McCarthy Road, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, KlV 0W0.
