Fantasia 2000 was the first major Hollywood feature released in IMAX, and still flopped
Six decades after the original Fantasia, Disney finally delivered a sequel after many false starts, with flying humpback whales, Gershwin's New York and Donald Duck on Noah's Ark. It premiered at Carnegie Hall and became the first major Hollywood film, and the first animated feature, released in IMAX. It still lost money.
Numerous attempts at a follow-up to the 1940 film had stalled. Michael Eisner revived the idea after becoming chief executive in 1984, but it only gained momentum when the 1991 home video release of Fantasia sold well enough to prove the audience existed. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra under James Levine recorded most of the score.
Like the original, it is an anthology of animated pieces set to classical music, now combining hand-drawn animation with computer graphics. Celebrities including Steve Martin, Quincy Jones, Bette Midler and Angela Lansbury introduce the segments in live-action scenes. Highlights include Respighi's Pines of Rome, in which a family of humpback whales takes to the air and a calf trapped in an iceberg escapes with his mother's help, and a Rhapsody in Blue drawn in the style of Al Hirschfeld's caricatures, following four New Yorkers in the 1930s whose wishes quietly intersect. A Shostakovich piano concerto retells The Steadfast Tin Soldier but gives it a happy ending.
Only one piece crosses over from 1940: The Sorcerer's Apprentice, with Mickey as Yen Sid's overreaching apprentice, now introduced by Penn and Teller and with Mickey voiced by Wayne Allwine rather than Walt Disney. It leads straight into Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance, where Donald Duck herds animals onto the Ark and keeps losing Daisy. The film ends with Stravinsky's Firebird Suite, a forest sprite reviving a landscape after a volcanic spirit destroys it.
The premiere on December 17, 1999, launched a concert tour through London, Paris, Tokyo and Pasadena. The film ran in 75 IMAX theatres from January 1, 2000, before a regular release in June. Critics liked much of it but found it uneven next to its predecessor, and on a budget of about $80 to $85 million it earned only $90.9 million worldwide.
Source: Fantasia 2000
