Please Give Disney's Greatest Masterpiece, Fantasia, Another Look

The Story Told In this Classic Collection of Short Films Takes a Few Viewings to Recognize, But It's There and Amazing

Dear Daniel,

I quite enjoyed reading your post this morning at your Substack, as I always find your pop culture musings informed and intriguing. This one I found especially engaging as you’re exploring territory which I too traversed about a decade ago, the world of classic Disney cinema from the 1930s and 1940s.

Looking Back at Disney's Oldest Movies

I wanted to give you a few tips should you consider digging deeper into this foundation of American popular culture, and also urge you to give another look at what was previously my favorite film, 1940’s Fantasia. (It’s still one of my major favorites, but now dethroned from my top spot by The Last Temptation of Christ, due to that film’s inspiring the name of God of the Desert Books and moving me so deeply during my struggles with PTSD.)

So, first of all, my love for this period of Disney’s output derives from the time I spent studying all this stuff circa 2012-2015 while I was an editor at PJ Media, building the PJ Lifestyle vertical with cultural musings, spiritual reflections, parenting tips, and entertainment writings. I decided to use my job growing the page views of the section to try and understand just what was so special about Disney the man and the company he and his brother built. What could I learn from them growing a media company in the first half of the 20th century as I now sought to do the same at the start of the 21st?

I decided to begin my study doing three things: reading a bunch of Disney history books from the library, watching every one of the theatrical animated films, and perhaps most importantly, hunting down and viewing each of the 75 “Silly Symphony” shorts. At the time, they weren’t difficult to find on YouTube. Now many are still floating around there but some of the most notable shorts can be found on Disney+.

What’s so special about the Silly Symphonies? Unlike the Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck cartoons of the time, it’s here where Disney did its experimenting. Here they tried out their new photographic technologies and animation techniques. For example, see “The Goddess of Spring” for their first efforts to do human-like figures rather than animals and cartoony creations:

What the animators first started figuring out here they eventually perfected in doing Snow White. You may even notice parallels between Persephone and Snow White as characters. See all the animals who love her and the little dwarf-like creatures defending her?

What the Silly Symphonies most laid the ground work for, though, was Fantasia. Once one familiarizes themselves with some of the themes and styles in the series, it becomes clear that Fantasia is sort of the ultimate, final result of what began in 1929 with “The Skeleton Dance”:

Now, where else does one see a bunch of undead dancing around in Disney animation? Oh yeah, the infamous, still-terrifying “Night on Bald Mountain” sequence in Fantasia featuring Chernobog:

Now, Daniel, I understand that you’re especially a story and plot-oriented guy. After all, you’re a novelist, now hard at work on your next book. So I understood your critique:

Fantasia (1940): The perfect movie to have on in the background as you’re doing something else. Though it’s an interesting experiment, it’s no wonder the format never caught on, and it’s no surprise that the best segment is the one with the strongest narrative. “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” is excellent. The rest varies.

I very much agree with you that Fantasia is great to have on in the background. Over the years I got into that habit, often throwing it on while I was editing one publication or another. I especially got into the habit later of putting it on when I was doing writing where I needed creative energy and focus. I’ve probably done that over a hundred times. So Fantasia’s ethos gradually really got into my head. And here’s the secret I discovered: the trick to understanding the film’s genius is not in looking at each short individually, but perceiving the bigger connections between them and seeing how the themes evolve as the film progresses.

To perceive this I utilized another interpretive lens I was pretty deeply obsessed with at the time. As I was studying Disney’s work I was also diving into the books of Camille Paglia, especially Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson and Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars. One of Paglia’s central theses is that to really grasp popular culture, art, and literature today we need to go way back into history, as in, thousands of years. Paglia argues that today’s pop culture, especially Hollywood’s output, bears a whole lot of resemblances and echos from ancient Pagan culture and religion. The more one grasps how ancient peoples from Egypt to India to Greece and beyond saw the world and created art, the more some of the mysteries and weirdness of today’s culture will make sense. And what was the biggest difference between the Pagan worldview and the Judeo-Christian approach which more dominates today? Pagans then and now worshipped the forces of nature - weather, power, animals, violence, and especially sexual fertility.

Now what does this have to do with Fantasia? Look at the various sequences and animations in Fantasia as a progression in complexity and our broader human cultural development. Here are the sequences in order so we can see them all at once:

• Toccata and Fugue in D Minor

• The Nutcracker Suite

• The Sorcerer's Apprentice

• Rite of Spring

• The Pastoral Symphony

• Dance of the Hours

• Night on Bald Mountain

• Ave Maria

So we start with “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” which is almost a primordial expression of the universe in space - it’s just the chaos of sounds and colors. Then with “The Nutcracker Suite” we see nature coming alive as plants and animals dance about. (Dances then and now are expressions of sexuality, a form of foreplay.) The pagan elements of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” are obvious enough - a wizard-in-training seeks to take control of the natural world, make it his servant, only to experience disastrous results until his Moses-like master Yensid (Disney spelled backwards) returns to part the waters of the flood. (Yensid was modeled on Walt Disney himself.)

Then the Rite of Spring shows the creation of the world, development of life, and the inherent cruelty and violence within it as dinosaurs attack one another and finally die off as the climate changes. “The Pastoral Symphony” with its Greek mythology themes is perhaps the most overt in its depiction of Paganism. After all, there’s literally a Bacchanal that takes place, and before that more than enough hints at sexuality among the centaurs and their “girlfriends.” This was even more obvious before the Hays Code forced Disney’s animators to cover up the female centaurs’ breasts! This sequence also originally contained something else to be found in the Silly Symphonies: the overt racism of the period. When Fantasia was first released in 1940 this sequence included “Sunflower,” a black centaur whose job was to shine the hooves of the others. You’ll find similar racist caricatures in plenty of the Silly Symphonies, hence why Disney only released them all one time in an expensive collector’s set 20 years ago. I’ve written a fair amount in the last decade about how I regard racism as a form of Paganism. Those who idolize skin color as something so important they base their lives and ideology around it are worshipping nature, not God.

Following “The Pastoral Symphony” we have another expression of Paganism, albeit one less obvious in how. “Dance of the Hours” features hippos and alligators dancing together in a somewhat menacing way. The alligators are pursuing the plump, fertility-goddess-like hippos, not unlike the dance a man engages in as he seeks to seduce a woman. See the hippos and alligators not in the cute children’s cartoon context, but in the adult, male and female forces of nature context.

The film then concludes in its final, overtly juxtaposed sequences with Walt Disney’s most powerful, inherently Christian statement. A pagan demonic force invokes the dead to rise and to engage in their own Bacchanal-style dance, replete with sexual and violent elements. (Note the transformations from beautiful women to animals to destruction in fire.) Only with the rise of the sun - the son - do the demons and the dead retreat. Then the pilgrims begin their march at dawn as one of the most famous Christian songs plays before the sun rises.

See the progression here? From the chaotic nature representation of “Toccata,” “Nutcracker,” “Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” and “Rite of Spring” to the primitive paganism of “Pastoral Symphony,” “Dance of the Hours,” and “Night on Bald Mountain” to concluding with the present day, our Christian Era of “Ave Maria.” There’s your story. Only it’s not just any story, it is THE story. It’s the story of humanity rising from the primordial violence of nature and learning how to love one another.

So give it another few viewings and definitely put it on in the background as you’re working on your next novel or drafting a new entry in your delightful Substack.

Best wishes in your writing,

David Swindle

P.S. Regarding the many biographies available of Walt Disney, the Neal Gabler one is not my favorite. A number of Gabler’s claims are disputed and his overall analysis of Disney is more his own, certainly not embraced by all. I encourage you to check out the one I like best, William Barrier’s The Animated Man, which is written by a historian of animation and more reliable in its facts. Avoid Leonard Mosley’s biography Disney’s World too - it is also unreliable. Though, Bob Thomas’s Walt Disney: An American Original is more trustworthy.