Fantasia began as a pricey Mickey Mouse short that Disney couldn't afford to release alone
Walt Disney wanted to revive Mickey Mouse, whose popularity was slipping behind Donald Duck and Goofy, with a lavish cartoon set to Paul Dukas's The Sorcerer's Apprentice. When its costs passed $125,000, several times a normal short, Disney decided to surround it with other classical pieces and release the lot as a concert feature.
A chance meeting at a Hollywood restaurant brought in Leopold Stokowski, conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, who liked the Dukas piece and offered to conduct for nothing. He ended up signing a contract in December 1937 for $5,000 and recorded the short with 85 Hollywood musicians in a session that began at midnight on 9 January 1938. Roy Disney, who ran the studio's money, warned that the experiment could never pay for itself, and his brother responded by turning it into what became Fantasia, with Stokowski paid $80,000 plus royalties and the critic Deems Taylor hired as the on-screen host.
Program meetings in September 1938 were recorded word for word by stenographers. Disney admitted his feel for music was instinctive rather than trained. When he asked for something to carry a prehistoric story with animals, Taylor suggested Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, and Disney was delighted at the thought of dinosaurs set to it. The final film strings together eight segments, from abstract shapes for Bach's Toccata and Fugue to hippos and alligators dancing to Ponchielli and the devil Chernabog on Bald Mountain.
To carry the music, Disney and RCA built Fantasound, making Fantasia the first commercial film released in stereo and an ancestor of surround sound. It premiered at New York's Broadway Theatre on 13 November 1940 as a roadshow, but critical praise did not translate into profit: the production itself, leasing theatres, installing the sound equipment and losing European audiences to the Second World War all ate the takings.
Reissues starting in 1942 eventually made it a moneymaker, and adjusted for inflation it ranks 23rd among the highest-grossing films in the United States. It entered the National Film Registry in 1990, and a sequel, Fantasia 2000, followed in 1999.
Source: Fantasia (1940 film)
