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THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICES:

AUTHORSHIP AND SOUND AESTHETICS IN ’S

by

Daniel Fernandez

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the

Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Masters of Arts

Florida Atlantic University

Boca Raton, FL

May 2017

Copyright by Daniel Fernandez 2017

ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my committee members for all of their guidance and

support, especially to my advisor Anthony Guneratne for his helpful suggestions during

the writing of this manuscript. I am also grateful to a number of archival collections,

particularly those of for providing me with some of the primary sources used for this manuscript. Likewise, I would like to acknowledge Stephanie Flint for her contribution to the translation of German source material, as well as Richard P. Huemer,

Didier Ghez, Jennifer Castrup, the Broward County Library, the University of Maryland, the Fales Library at , and Zoran Sinobad of the , for the advice, material assistance, and historical information that helped shape this project.

iv ABSTRACT

Author: Daniel Fernandez

Title: The Sorcerer’s Apprentices: Authorship and Sound Aesthetics in Walt Disney’s Fantasia

Institution: Florida Atlantic University

Thesis Advisor: Dr. Anthony Guneratne

Degree: Masters of Arts in Communications

Year: 2017

This thesis makes three claims new to the critical literature on Walt Disney’s

1940 Fantasia. Setting the scene by placing a spotlight on the long-serving

Philadelphia conductor , it contextualizes his pervasive influence, as well as contributions by others that shaped Fantasia and defined the film’s stylistic elements. Inspired by recent critical debates on post-silent era filmmaking and theories of authorship, it makes a case for Fantasia being the culmination of a “” and notes that its displays of individual artistic talent makes it a noteworthy example of distributed authorship. Fantasia remains a unique experiment in Disney’s filmmaking in that it acquired its eventual form only because of decisions taken during production since no absolute “blue-print” for the finished film existed at the time it went into production, when a large selection of musical numbers were assigned to teams of animators.

v THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICES:

AUTHORSHIP AND SOUND AESTHETICS IN WALT DISNEY’S FANTASIA

Introduction …………………………………………………………………………… 1

Chapter 1: The Origins of Fantasia ……………………………………………………12

Chapter 2: Issues of Influence and Avant-Garde Authorship …………………………26

Chapter 3: The Genius of the : Distributed Authorship in Fantasia ...... 41

Chapter 4: Fantasia as Sound Film ………………………………………………..…..62

Conclusion …………………………………………………………………………….80

Works Cited …………………………………………………………………………...83

vi INTRODUCTION

There is such an abundance of critical commentary concerning Walt Disney’s

1940 film Fantasia that it seems as if nothing remains to be said. But while Fantasia is often treated as a singular moment in the studio’s production, and widely discussed as such, it has received surprisingly little in-depth historical and theoretical scrutiny. Critical writing focuses on Fantasia as a typical Disney product or as a predecessor of the contemporary “,” in which images are set to music. The occasional probing analysis of Fantasia tends to focus on the film's formal properties, or speculates on whether or not the film is successful in its interpretations of . Even some

of the key recent texts in studies such as Pervasive Animation by Richard

Schickel and Cartoons by Michael Barrier give the film short shrift with regard to elements other than its formal characteristics. As a consequence, when analyzing Fantasia writers often overlook the film’s relationship to two issues that are central to theoretical debates concerning the , namely the questions revolving around synchronized sound’s potential role in the cinema (one that inspired contentious debates during the and , and that have continued intermittently thereafter), and ongoing debates about the question of authorship in film, debates that originated in the and . To my knowledge, little work has been done to bridge the terrains that separate these two “islands” of film theory.

1 In many ways, it is surprising that these questions have generally been neglected

in studies of Fantasia. The film’s unique place in film history appears to demand such

approaches because of its self-evident reliance on musfic. Furthermore, the way in which

Walt Disney produced his – by distributing creative work among his studio’s personnel – seems to offer a case study of the Hollywood studio system in operation

during its heyday. It is for this reason that examining Fantasia’s relationship to auteur

theory can contribute to pervasive concerns in the field of film studies.

The chapters introduce and then focus on and address the more salient issues that

pertain to these omissions in the critical literature. Chapter 1 examines the origins of the film and the ideas behind its conception, seeking to elucidate the motivations behind many of the aesthetic choices. Even in the context of the Walt Disney Studio’s output at the time, Fantasia seems anomalous. While the earlier, no-less experimental shorts called

Silly Symphonies attempted to merge animation with music, they were usually under ten minutes in duration. Moreover, they tended to follow cartoon conventions of the time, with designs rooted in caricature and a comical approach to the narrative and accompanying music. Fantasia was a feature-length anthology of loosely integrated animated segments set to classical music intended from the outset to be a “Concert

Feature,” and while some segments follow commonplace cartoon representational conventions, other segments are notably unlike most cartoons of the time period. Its textual form raises questions about the circumstances that led to such a film being made at all. Was it entirely motivated by Walt Disney hoping to extend the reach of animation, or were there other factors that influenced him?

2 The task of pinpointing where ideas originated is challenging, one further

complicated by differing accounts supplied by both historians and personnel involved in the project. Furthermore, most accounts related to the origins of the film offer inadequate reasons as to why The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and other pieces were chosen for inclusion in Fantasia. Few articles on the history of Fantasia delve into the background of each

individual musical extract before it was considered for use in the film; nor do they offer

explanations as to how Walt Disney became aware of the musical numbers that inspired

the . These are crucial questions: to answer them would elucidate the film’s

formal structure and Disney’s overall conception. If the musical pieces were popular at

the time of the film’s production, it would be evidence that Disney was attempting to

create something that could be considered “high art” while simultaneously trying to

appeal to a broad spectrum of the movie going public. If, on the other hand, they were

relatively unknown prior to their use in Fantasia, then it could be possible that the Disney

Studio hoped to popularize music that they felt deserved more recognition.

In this context, the contribution by Leopold Stokowski, the long-serving

conductor of the Orchestra, is central to the project. His inspirational

importance in shaping the project has already received some attention; film historians

often mention in passing that it was Stokowski who suggested that Disney expand “The

Sorcerer’s Apprentice” into a feature-length project. He was also given a great deal of

creative freedom in the studio, and is reported to have been involved in the post-

production sound mixing process.1 While his overall contribution might be a subject of

1 Sources vary on Stokowski’s involvement in the sound mixing process. John Culhane quotes a claim by – who worked in the Story Development at the time Fantasia was being produced – stating that Stokowski mixed the music in Fantasia: “Stokowski was fascinated by the mixing board – the sound control panel. For Fantasia he recorded each section separately – strings, winds, horns etc. – and he mixed 3 debate, his demonstrable role in shaping Fantasia is central to the elucidation of the

origins of the key ideas behind such an extensive project. When examining the history of

each piece considered for Fantasia, paying due attention to Stokowski’s relation to each

musical number – and his familiarity with their composers prior to his involvement in

Fantasia – remains an issue one has to bear in mind in terms of the degree to which he

influenced and helped shape Disney’s audio-visual perspective.

Chapter 2 delves into Fantasia’s aesthetic history in the context of the influence avant-garde animation had on the genesis of Disney’s bold decision to create an episodic feature-length animation film set to classical music. Even if one considers Fantasia to be an intensely personal work it must be noted that the question of Disney’s “authorship” has not been resolved with any finality: indeed, it was placed in dispute by incidents dating from the earliest days of production. The first of these is the case of Oskar

Fischinger’s involvement in the project. Fischinger was a well-known abstract artist who was forced to flee his home country of during the ascendency of the Nazi regime.2 During his time in the , he attempted to find work in Hollywood.

After several unsuccessful stints working for MGM and Paramount, he obtained a position at the Disney Studio. After a screening of his films, Fischinger was immediately assigned to work on the “Toccata and Fugue” sequence in Fantasia.3 Unfortunately, he found it difficult to work in a studio setting and found himself clashing with several

Disney employees, particularly animator . Fischinger eventually quit in

them all himself” (20). Chasins tells a different story and claims that Disney did not allow Stokowski to mix the sound: “At Disney’s, [Stokowski] often wanted to handle the controls, mixing, balancing, adjusting, and coordinating sounds. He could only be kept from fiddling with the dials and blasting the ears off the sound track by being told by Disney that the union forbade his touching them” (173). 2 Leslie, 89-90. 3 Canemaker, Paper Dreams, 190-191. 4 frustration, and later dismissed the finished version of the “Toccata and Fugue” sequence

as “the most inartistic product of a factory.”4

Fischinger’s debacle at Disney is often treated as an anecdote or is used as an example of Walt Disney’s incompatibility with avant-garde filmmaking and his distaste for abstraction.5 However, the entire incident raises interesting questions. What exactly caused Fischinger’s work to be incompatible with the general practices of the Disney

Studio? Are there other factors that played in besides artistic disagreement? What does the Fischinger incident at Disney say about Walt Disney’s role as author? Was

Fischinger’s the only avant-garde influence that can be discerned in Fantasia? The answer that I suggest in the chapter (building on the previous one) is that avant-garde musical and cinematic influences were far more pervasive in this film than the existing literature on the film indicates. It is as close as Disney came to making a commercially- viable avant-garde feature. Indeed, despite the reticence of many of Disney’s personnel about avant-garde animation, the film forged a link between the latter and the studio’s concentration on narrative filmmaking.

Chapter 3 examines Fantasia’s place in ongoing debates about film authorship.

The dispute that erupted over the question of film authorship in the 1950s and that continues to provoke controversy attracts intense critical attention. Some of the earliest key articles dealing with the concept of films having authors are François Truffaut’s

“Une Certaine Tendance du Cinéma Français” and André Bazin’s “De la Politique des

Auteurs.” Truffaut’s article criticized the ascendancy of literary adaptations in French

Cinema – what the government funding agencies designated as a “Tradition of Quality” –

4 Moritz, "Fischinger at Disney,” 65. 5 Allan, 112-113. 5 and argued for a cinema more based around the vision of the individual filmmaker.

Bazin’s article was partially written as a response to Truffaut’s and expanded on the idea

of the cinema of the auteur, noting that one must also consider societal influence when

evaluating a film. In addition, he discusses the American studio system and how it must

be taken into account when assessing the merits of American films.6

The auteur theory reemerged as a subject of controversy during the sixties.

Perhaps the best examples of the auteur theory’s contentiousness are two conflicting texts written by and Pauline Kael. Sarris’ essay, ‘Notes on the Auteur Theory in

1962’ brings up three premises of the titular auteur theory: “the technical competence of a

director as a criterion of value,” “the distinguishable personality of the director as a

criterion of value,” and “interior meaning, the ultimate glory of the cinema as an art.”7

Shortly after Sarris’ article was published, Kael responded with ‘Circles and Squares,’

denouncing auteur theory. In addition to noting how filmmaking is a collaborative

process, Kael reproved film theorists for director-worship instead of practicing actual film criticism. One of her examples focused on the resultant logical failures, noting the positions taken by Sarris and his followers in treating the filmographies of John Huston and : “How is it that Huston’s early good – almost great – work, must be rejected along with his mediocre recent work, but Fritz Lang, being sanctified as an auteur, has his bad recent work praised along with his good?”8 The debate on film authorship has continued unabated since then, and there have been many texts discussing the idea of film authorship. Essential texts include John Caughie’s anthology Theories of

6 Bazin, 22, 27. 7 Sarris, 43. Semenza, 354. 8 Kael, 16. Semenza, 354. 6 Authorship and Peter Wollen’s 1969 article ‘The Auteur Theory.’ Many books on film,

such as Pam Cook’s Cinema Book, have extensive sections on the auteur theory.9 Yet despite this long critical history, there is little discussion of where the output of the

Disney studio fits into the subject of film authorship, which is particularly strange when one considers that the Disney studio’s production methods are an important example of the American studio system in action, a system that earned even Bazin’s guarded admiration.

So, too, there is a significant body of work pertaining to the artists and animators who created Fantasia, both by the Disney employees involved and by later film historians, but it is scattered and inconsistent. A few book-length studies address the influences that shaped Fantasia. Noteworthy, in this regard, is Robin Allan’s book Walt

Disney and , an extensive investigation into the influences of European folklore and contemporary art on the Disney Studio, which devotes three chapters to Fantasia.

Even this seemingly comprehensive text, however, fails to address the specificities of image-music synchronization and the degree to which such a profoundly collaborative film as Fantasia contributes to the ongoing debates about film authorship.

My approach to film authorship for this chapter is in part inspired by ideas advanced in two recent articles which discuss film adaptations of Shakespeare in terms of authorship. The first of these was written by Garrett Sullivan and deals with the idea of

“distributed auteurism,” where a film contains a singular vision but the creative labor is divided between equal contributors.10 The second delves further into questions of authorship and introduces a further term, dispersed authorship, where authorship of a film

9 Cook, 478. Semenza, 364. 10 Sullivan Jr, 386. 7 is so multi-faceted as to make it unattributable to either a single entity or a synoptic

collaboration.11 Upon closer examination of Fantasia and its production process, I have

come to the conclusion that the films of the Disney studio are examples of distributed

authorship, with Disney’s overview having determinative consequences on all aspects of

the final film. Fantasia, however, complicates the idea of unique authorship more than

the studios’ other features of the period.

Walt Disney’s practice of determining all phases of a production at the outset is

well documented. While others could suggest ideas to him or influence them, all the

concepts in Fantasia and other Disney productions had to have his approval and meet his

standards to make it into the final product.12 Since he also monitored production frequently, his personality was more clearly stamped on the films emerging from his studio than, for instance, a present-day executive producer in a television franchise.13

Disney would carefully distribute the work among artists that he felt were most

appropriate for the task, determining how such an ensemble of talents could best work

together to realize his story ideas. While each contributor was encouraged to express an

individual vision, Disney’s presence and interests can be seen throughout the film, and

the inspiration and techniques of his collaborators are all filtered through his lens. In no

film is the aspect of artistic collaboration more evident than in Fantasia. Therefore, it

serves as an extremely pertinent case study when considering auteur criticism and the

idea of “good films” having a governing aesthetic principle. Moreover, following an

argument first advanced by film director and theorist, , I will examine

11 Guneratne, 396-399. 12 John Culhane, 108. 13 The role of an executive producer is summarized in Kellison, Morrow, and Morrow, 10. 8 “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” sequence in terms of whether the character of Mickey is, in

fact, a representation of Disney himself.

Fantasia’s innovations go beyond the question of synoptic, collaborative visions

alone. Chapter 4 will address several questions related to Fantasia’s place in the history

of the “sound film,” a form of cinema that arose as the result of synchronized sound

tracks that became an industry standard after the success of the first talkie, The Jazz

Singer (1927). During the twenties and thirties, there were myriad debates on whether or

not sound film should be tied to dialogue and whether synchronized sound should

harmonize with the images. One of the key texts related to this debate is a 1928 statement

signed by Russian filmmakers Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Grigori

Aleksandrov, which argued that an irresponsible use of synchronized sound could lead to

cinema losing its “culture of montage” and becoming an imitation of theater. In order to

prevent this, the three filmmakers argue that synchronized sound should be used in a

“contrapunctal” manner, or as a montage element.14 Eventually, the dialogue-oriented sound film won out, although Fantasia is still very much a sound film that is not tied to dialogue but, as were many films of the early twenties, to a musical accompaniment. In this concluding chapter, I will attempt to investigate whether Fantasia could be considered the last great “sound film.” That is to say, is Fantasia a final attempt at presenting film as primarily a visual medium as opposed to one tied to dialogue, given that more than a decade of studio filmmaking separates it from ?

In order to determine Fantasia’s place in the debate on sound, one must also look at the film’s predecessors, including early sound cartoons. In Film, A Sound Art, Michel

14 Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Aleksandrov, 257-260 . 9 Chion notes that early sound cartoons often celebrated synchronized sound by featuring characters singing, dancing, and playing instruments to musical scores.15 Several segments in Fantasia, particularly “ Suite,” have their origins as Silly

Symphonies, which were the short films that the Disney studio was producing during the late twenties and thirties.16 Other sequences in Fantasia resemble the early sound cartoon’s tendency to celebrate the advent of synchronized sound by combining music

and sound effects in the manner described by Chion, and feature characters dancing and

playing instruments. Fantasia also contains elements of pantomime, an art form that

often made use of actors whose movements were meticulously synchronized to orchestral

scores. Gillian Anderson argues that pantomime was similar to and inspired early cinematic attempts at synchronizing music and image, and her findings are particularly apt to the movements of characters in the film.17

In sum, I would suggest that Fantasia presents challenges to critical orthodoxies

which may explain the paucity of theoretical readings of its various episodes. The film

remains an extremely important text in the debate on auteur theory, precisely because the production methods of the Walt Disney studio are an excellent example of what André

Bazin described as “the genius of the system,” in contrast to the individual creativity he valued in advocating the politique des auteurs.18 So, too, the film’s unprecedented mixture of far-sighted innovation and apparent regression appears to have perplexed film historians since it harkens back to the advent of talkies and the situation of the “sound film” in the post-Jazz Singer era. It is a film that could not have been made in the silent

15 Chion, 38. 16 Culhane, 54. 17 Anderson, 10, 18. 18 Bazin, 22, 27 10 era, but with the exception of spoken introductions to each segment, it explores the frontiers open to “a silent film, with musical accompaniment,” as noted in passing by historian Michael Barrier. 19

19 Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons, 279. 11 CHAPTER 1: THE ORIGINS OF FANTASIA

The story of the origin of Walt Disney’s Fantasia is complex, with divergent accounts that seem mutually incompatible. To further complicate matters, each account seems to have historical evidence to back it up. Significantly, many versions of the origins of the project tend to overlook or take for granted certain aspects of the film’s beginnings, such as the motivations behind the selection of each musical piece used in the film. It is unfortunate that some of these issues are glossed over in existing criticism, as examining them reveals that Fantasia arose from several unprecedented circumstances and would most likely have been a very different film – had it been made at all – had it been undertaken by different personnel.

Following the commercial and artistic success of and the Seven

Dwarfs, which he would periodically re-release in the coming years,20 Walt Disney began to consider several decidedly more challenging projects: , , and Fantasia.

Even in the context of Snow White and the ’s use of sophisticated techniques, these projects seem highly unusual and ambitious for a studio such as Disney to undertake. It is true that Snow White was ambitious work for a relatively minor studio; at the time the idea of a feature length animated film seemed a risky venture and the film made several innovations to the craft of animation. In spite of this, Snow White was still

20 Umland and Umland, 119. 12 very conventional in terms of its storytelling, and the source material is a familiar which Disney embroidered with more detailed characterization and with songs that transformed it into a musical. In contrast, Pinocchio and Bambi were far more difficult to adapt due to the episodic nature of the source material and the sometimes grim subject matter:

“There were no characters at the center of either story who could engage an audience’s sympathies in the way that the dwarfs had, unless the stories were drastically rebuilt. Moreover, Collodi’s Pinocchio was a picaresque tale, and such stories are inherently difficult to film. Episodes must be pared away if the resulting movie is not to be intolerably long; but editing can so compromise the episode character of the story that organizing the remaining pieces into some kind of plot becomes unavoidable.” 21

Fantasia may be the most experimental of the three new projects Disney considered, because there is no overarching plot or dialogue, and because classical music during this period was widely perceived to belong to the realm of “high-brow” culture.22

While Disney’s Silly Symphonies had utilized classical music, many of them did so for comical purposes. Even the more dramatic and ambitious Silly Symphonies were brief and rarely exceeded ten minutes.23 With few exceptions – the “ of the Hours” sequence and the one making use of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony being the most notable – Fantasia approaches classical music in a more serious manner, and the shorts are organized to resemble a concert program (the film’s working title was The Concert

Feature).24 While some sequences are as brief as a short, others, such as the “Pastoral Symphony” and “” segments, are much longer and

21 Barrier, The Animated Man, 138. 22 Allan, 91. 23 The sole exception, The Golden Touch (1935), only exceeds 10 minutes by a few seconds. 24 David R. Smith, 66. 13 exceed twenty minutes; when combined, the segments of Fantasia comprise a feature- length film running over two hours.

The reasoning behind the film’s more experimental nature is explained in part by the December 8, 1938 story meeting where Disney responded to an employee who questioned whether or not Fantasia is suitable for “the cartoon medium”: “This is not

‘the cartoon medium.’ It should not be limited to cartoons. We have worlds to conquer here.”25 Still, like the film itself, Fantasia’s origins are more complex than Walt Disney’s

ambition to expand the medium of animation.

In a promotional pamphlet for Fantasia, claims that the film started

off as “a search for a starring vehicle for .” Although many historians and

authors perpetuate this claim, there is no actual evidence to support it other than Taylor’s

assertion. As John Culhane points out, Disney never mentioned anything to lend weight

to it, and , Fantasia’s production supervisor, denies that “The Sorcerer’s

Apprentice” originated as an attempt to revive Mickey’s popularity. Culhane argues that

the inspiration for Fantasia

“sprang from [Walt] Disney’s desire to go beyond the usual animated cartoon with its combination of graphics and . And the most important combination in Fantasia was the wedding of film graphics to classical music. Indeed, the most important factor carrying the animated film beyond its roots in comic strips and shorts was music.” 26

That is to say, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” was a natural culmination of the Silly

Symphonies series that the Disney Studio was producing during the 1930s.

There is evidence that supports Culhane’s claim. During the late 1930s, Walt

Disney stated that his studio was attempting to create Silly Symphonies “in which sheer

25 John Culhane, 198. 26 Ibid, 13. 14 fantasy unfolds to a musical pattern.” 27 ’ interpretation of “The Sorcerer’s

Apprentice,” which was adapted from a story by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, was probably chosen due to its suitability for just this kind of adaptation.28 After purchasing

the performance rights to the Dukas composition, Walt Disney contemplated hiring a

famous conductor in order to give the project additional prestige. 29 He found his conductor in Leopold Stokowski.

Throughout his life, Stokowski claimed that his collaboration with Disney began when the two were dining in a restaurant:

“I first met Walt Disney in a restaurant. I was alone having dinner at a table near him and he called across to me, ‘Why don’t we sit together?’ Then he began to tell me that he was interested in Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice as a possible short, and did I like the music. I said I liked it very much and would be happy to cooperate with him.” 30

No exact date is known for the meeting at the restaurant, but Michael Barrier notes that it

probably happened shortly before October 1937, as it is then that the correspondence

between Disney and Stokowski begins according to the Walt Disney Archives. 31

It is unsurprising that Disney was aware of Stokowski. At the time “The

Sorcerer’s Apprentice” was being produced, Stokowski had participated in two major

Hollywood pictures: The Big Broadcast of 1937 and 100 Men and a Girl. Both films were box office successes and helped make Stokowski familiar to moviegoers. The Big

Broadcast of 1937 is particularly significant due to its similarity to the Bach “Toccata and

Fugue” sequence in Fantasia; the film features Stokowski performing several Bach

27 Disney, 270. 28 Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons, 243. 29 David R. Smith, 19. 30 Ibid. 31 Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons, 599. 15 pieces and the bright monochrome lighting during the musical sequences bears a

resemblance to how the live action sequences in Fantasia are staged.32

According to historical sources, Disney’s collaboration with Stokowski did not

begin immediately after their restaurant encounter. When Stokowski moved back to the

East coast in 1937, Walt Disney’s New York representative had an extensive

conversation with him discussing “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” The representative told

Disney how enthusiastic Stokowski was: “he is really serious in his offer to do the music

for nothing. He has some very interesting ideas on instrumental coloring, which would be

perfect for an animation medium.”33

Upon hearing of Stokowski’s willingness to collaborate with him, Disney was, in

his own words, “all steamed up over the idea… I feel that the possibilities of such a

combination are so great that we could stretch a point and use his hundred men, as well as

work out an to compensate him, personally, for his time – and we could well afford to record the music in any manner Stokowski would want us to.” 34 Disney began work on the project immediately with as musical director, and with Carl

Fallberg and in charge of story development. The creation of the visual material began very soon thereafter. Before Stokowski recorded the piece for Disney, a recording of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice by was used for timing.35

Stokowski’s contributions to Fantasia would prove to be essential to the final product. Had Disney chosen Toscanini over Stokowski, for instance, Fantasia might have

turned out to be a very different film. Both conductors were famously dictatorial, but they

32 Allan, 94-95. 33 David R. Smith, 19. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 16 had entirely different perspectives; Toscanini had a more literal, “transparent” approach to music than Stokowski, and he focused primarily on the “distinctness of musical statement, with sounding each section in the orchestra at a given moment so that it could be clearly heard.” 36 Stokowski, on the other hand, was less literal in his interpretation of composer’s musical scores and placed more emphasis on the storytelling element of music.37 With this in mind, it seems natural that Stokowski was an ideal match for a project like Fantasia.

Perhaps for these reasons Disney granted Stokowski a surprising amount of creative control over aspects of the project. The conductor was even involved in the actual recording process, and together with Disney he came up with the idea of creating a specialized sound system for Fantasia (later dubbed “”).38 He attended many of Fantasia’s story meetings, and was responsible for selecting the film’s musical pieces along with Disney, Deems Taylor, , and . During these story meetings he would also give suggestions for potential ideas to use in the adaptations of the chosen sequences. 39

Stokowski’s prominence in the entire production process is most clearly revealed by his participation in the story meetings for the “Toccata and Fugue” sequence, in which

he attempted to teach the Disney animators about form in music and to explain such

musical terms as counterpoint. Stokowski also attempted to explain to Disney himself

what the “Toccata and Fugue” represents in symbolic terms. In Leopold Stokowski: A

Profile, David Raksin explains the significance of Stokowski’s influence on the Disney

36 William Ander Smith, 61-62. 37 Ibid. 38 John Culhane, 11, 18-19. 39 Allan, 95-96. 17 staff, and how Stokowski’s explication of music terms in a simple, accessible manner was instrumental in helping the Disney crew feel comfortable in handling the sometimes complex, avant-garde classical works used in Fantasia:

“‘Perhaps you don’t realize that with one or two exceptions, Stoki [nickname for Stokowski] was talking to men who knew nothing about music. Walt was scared to death by the very name of Bach, so that Stoki was in the double role of teacher and salesman. He was not talking to musicians – he had to explain the work to people who couldn’t really understand… Stoki was trying to convince Disney and his staff that they could use Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue” and that if it were compelling and colorful enough it would be acceptable even to those who would ordinarily reject it. He was right – he was supremely right, and he did a tremendous service to music.’”40

A further measure of the authority Stokowski enjoyed was revealed by the extent

to which he participated in the recording process, and Disney would ignore suggestions

made by his own engineers in favor of Stokowski’s feedback. Recording for “The

Sorcerer’s Apprentice” was planned for the Selznick Studio in Hollywood, as the Disney

recording studio was too small for a successful recording with a full orchestra. The sessions began on January 9 at midnight and continued into the early morning hours. Bill

Garity, recording supervisor, expressed a dissatisfaction with the results, his primary complaint being a “disagreeable mechanical noise emanating from the string sections.” In spite of Garity’s complaints and his insistence that the piece be rerecorded, Stokowski was satisfied with the results, and he told Disney that they were acceptable.41

As production for “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” continued, the budget increased to an alarming degree. Ben Sharpsteen notes that it was costing “three or four times as much as a Silly Symphony should cost.” Some historical sources claim that it was at this point that Stokowski suggested expanding “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” into a feature-length

40 Chasins, 174-175. 41 David R. Smith, 22-23. 18 project, asserts that Stokowski had conceived the idea since the beginning: “[Stokowski] persistently wondered, moreover, why Disney would stop there.

Why didn’t he make a full-length film, using several other musical works?”42

While Stokowski’s input was central, and it is possible that he consulted with

Disney about it, the idea of turning “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” into a feature film can be

documented in the discussions between Disney and his animators. When first told that the budget increases to “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” were getting too high for a to recoup its outlay, Disney initially encouraged merchandising the film. Shortly thereafter he and his employees began planning the expansion of the project into a feature film using “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” as an episode. On August 18, 1939, Disney sent a telegram requesting that Stokowski come to California to discuss selecting potential material to use for a feature film. Stokowski was immediately enthusiastic and agreed to expand “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” to a “Concert Feature” highlighting a wide variety of short classical pieces and excerpts of celebrated ones.43

The initial group of musical selections occurred during a story meeting where

Disney, Stokowski, Deems Taylor, Dick Huemer and Joe Grant listened to hundreds of

recordings in order to select the ideal numbers for the “Concert Feature.” By September

14, 1938, the planned order was as follows: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice by Paul Dukas,

The Nutcracker Suite by Piotr Illytch Tchaikovsky, “Bee, Mosquito, Butterfly or

Mechanical Ballet,” by various composers, by Modest

Mussorgsky, by , Cydalise et le chévre-pied by Gabriel Pierné,

Toccata and Fugue in D Minor by , “Ride of the Valkyries” from

42 Schickel, 239. 43 David R. Smith, 65-66. 19 Die Walküre by , Clair de Lune by , “Dance of the

Hours” (listed as “the Animal Ballet”) taken from ’s La

Gioconda, and the notorious ballet The Rite of Spring by , which had caused a riot at its premiere.44

The order may in part have resulted from Deems Taylor’s initial objection to opening Fantasia with the Toccata and Fugue, feeling it would be a poor choice to start the program. However, Disney and Stokowski both agreed that the piece was an ideal opening for the film since it demonstrated the full orchestra in the version that Stokowski himself had prepared.45 Toccata and Fugue was also a fitting choice because Stokowski had a long history of transcribing Bach’s works for organ into orchestral works, recording many of these between the years 1927 and 1929.46

“The Nutcracker Suite” was a more surprising choice, as Tchaikovsky’s ballet had

not premiered in its entirety in the United States at the time Fantasia went into

production. The ballet’s first complete premiere was in in December 1944,

four years after Fantasia was first screened. Like “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” “The

Nutcracker Suite” sequence had evolved from an idea for a Silly Symphony short entitled

Ballet des Fleurs. The segment is also a natural evolution from previous musical shorts released by the Disney studio that featured anthropomorphized plants.47

If “The Nutcracker Suite” was a culmination of previous work by the studio, “The

Rite of Spring” was a decided departure, as it was one of the first attempts by the Disney

44 Solomon, 123. Allan, 96. 45 John Culhane, 42. 46 William Ander Smith, 170. 47 John Culhane, 54. 20 Studio to synchronize a dark, dramatic Modernist score tone to images. The question of how Walt Disney became aware of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring as suitable music is a difficult one since there are multiple stories concerning how it happened. Most historians claim that Stokowski suggested it to Disney, an idea Huemer supports:

“We always had preliminary meetings before we did any of the episodes or musical numbers in Fantasia, and out of nowhere one day Walt said, ‘Say, is there any kind of music that would support the idea of the creation of the world, or the beginning of life on this world?’ And before he was finished saying it almost, Stokowski said, ‘Why, yes! The Sacre!’ Walt said ‘The sock?’ And Stokowski said, ‘Yes, Sacre du Printemps by Stravinski (sic)!’ – which means Rites (sic) of Spring… So Walt said, ‘Let’s hear it.’ So we happened to have a record (we did everything from records at first, like with Beethoven, we had Toscanini’s version to work from originally), and got the record and played it. And that was it. Walt said, ‘This is great!’”48

Culhane maintains that it was Deems Taylor who recommended the piece, citing the minutes of a September 13, 1938 story meeting. In spite of The Rite of Spring being

Taylor’s recommendation, Stokowski seems to have been much more enthusiastic about the use of Stravinsky’s work than Disney himself, and states that the Disney Studio was capable of “[bringing] this music to the consciousness of people so they will see how great it really is.”49 Disney’s quick acceptance of the idea of using Stravinsky’s controversial ballet may be in part due to an interest in dance. Culhane notes that Disney overheard John Hench, one of his artists, mocking ballet dancers. In response, Disney assigned Hench to watch the Ballet Russe from backstage. 50

The sequence extracted from the Pastoral Symphony has a more interesting origin still as it was initially a last-minute substitution for Gabriel Pierné’s Cydalise, which had

48 Huemer, 99-100. 49 John Culhane, 109-110. 50 Ibid, 29. 21 gained some popularity in the 1920s.51 At first the “Cydalise” production seemed to go well and the visual concept achieved a fairly advanced state; many of the ideas considered for use in “Cydalise” eventually found their way into the finished film, such as the flying horses swimming in a lake like swans. Disney also expressed a great deal of enthusiasm for the material being produced at the time and encouraged a comic approach to this music and other pieces.

By November 1938, however, Disney began expressing dissatisfaction with how

the “Cydalise” episode was turning out. He felt that the music was not appropriate for the

story and that as a composer Pierné was a risky choice with little mass appeal that could

overcome its unfamiliarity. He must also have felt that the imagery was inappropriate for

the tragic story. In a December 23 story meeting he stated that “we’ve taken good music

and bastardized it.” 52 Disney was not the only one having second thoughts; Dick Huemer and Joe Grant, the story designers for the project, found the task of synchronizing the animation to Pierné’s music to be nearly impossible:

“Joe Grant and I worked with [“Cydalise”] quite a while, but we couldn’t find any visual contact. It was very strange music… it bounces along without stopping, [with] never a pause or slowdown. So it didn’t give us any kind of a handle or contrasting phraseology. You have to have phrases to work with when you transpose something from music to animation. You’ve got to have resting points, in other words, and we found none. This music would just go straight ahead. We couldn’t stop it, we couldn’t cut it, and here come the fauns, and here come the Centaurs, and here comes Jove throwing thunderbolts… we couldn’t find a place to put all this fine pictorial material in.”53

Huemer and Grant attempted to search for another classical piece that could replace

Cydalise and settled on Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, which Disney approved of

51 Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons, 253. 52 Allan, 111-112. 53 Huemer, 143. 22 despite the fact that the imagery remained more apt for the original choice of music. (As

we will have occasion to note, even Stokowski disagreed with the visualization of the

Beethoven excerpt.)

The “” was more popular with Walt Disney and his employees

than it was with Deems Taylor and Stokowski. Taylor initially labeled it “very poor music,” although he eventually warmed up to the idea of using the piece for comic

purposes. Stokowski felt the Ponchielli piece was overplayed and wanted Disney to

adapt lesser-known pieces of merit.54 Disney and his artists, on the other hand, believed that the “Dance of the Hours” was a perfect choice for a satire of ballet conventions. This

was not the first time a Disney film used Ponchielli’s piece; a short excerpt of the “Dance

of the Hours” had been used in the 1929 Silly Symphony Springtime.55

The origins of the “Night on Bald Mountain” sequence also involved substitutions

and changes of mind. Walt Disney initially wished to set a “witch’s tale” to Bach’s

ominous D-Minor Toccata in Fugue, but Stokowski said that this concept sounded “too

straight for our purposes” and suggested setting the witch’s tale to Night on Bald

Mountain instead.56 Very little of Mussorgsky’s orchestral and operatic work survives as he wrote it, and the choice was both more apt and adventurous. Perhaps Stokowski felt that the association of the Toccata and Fugue with horror was passé even at the time; the piece had been used in the of horror films since the early 1930s starting with the 1931 adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.57 Stokowski was also a promoter of

Mussorgsky’s music and recorded several of the Russian composer’s works before

54 “Dance of the Hours – Ponchielli: Notes Taken from Story Meetings,” 1. 55 McCall, 201. 56 John Culhane, 38. 57 Neumeyer, 186. 23 Fantasia, including the Entr’acte to Act 4 of the opera Khovanschina (1927) and Boris

Godunov: Symphonic Synthesis (1936), his of excerpts from the opera.

Stokowski even attempted to restore the original version of in order to produce a full-scale concert version.58

The sequence that follows “Night on Bald Mountain,” Schubert’s Ave Maria, is

notable for being the only piece in Fantasia with sung lyrics. The lyrics used for the

Fantasia performance were an English translation expressly written for the film by poet

Rachel Field. Unlike some of the other pieces, Ave Maria is an obvious choice; it was a fairly popular song at the time period and has remained so. Robin Allan notes several performances of the piece around the time period that Fantasia was in production, including a 1939 film entitled It’s a Date that features singing it while being surrounded by nuns.59

There were other pieces considered for use in Fantasia that were eventually

rejected. “The Insect Suite” combined the music of several composers, including Frédéric

Chopin’s “Minute” Waltz. The idea was revisited for the “Bumble Boogie” segment of the 1948 anthology film .60 Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” was also

considered, but was eventually rejected, in part because Wagner had been appropriated as

a propagandist for the Nazi cause and was considered an inappropriate piece to show

during wartime.61 Of the discarded selections, the segment that made it the furthest into

production was Debussy’s Clair de Lune. Walt Disney liked the idea of using Clair de

58 Chasins, 121, 169. 59 Allan, 168. 60 Ibid, 266. 61 Ibid, 265. 24 Lune as a “break” from the more fast-paced Fantasia segments.62 This segment was never theatrically released, although Disney considered using it in future re-releases of

Fantasia. The footage created for this segment would eventually be used for the 1946 package film . As this film was more oriented to popular music,

Debussy’s piece was removed in favor of a ballad entitled “Blue Bayou” that was written specifically for the film.63

Taking into consideration all of these choices applied to pieces slated for production or even in production, Fantasia can be seen as a product of circumstance, its final form the result of several concurrences. The film’s initial concept, a short adaptation of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, was one of several ambitious ideas that Walt Disney set in motion when Snow White was performing well at the box office. The collaboration with

Leopold Stokowski proved to be a fruitful one; Stokowski and Disney got along well and the former’s approach to music was a perfect match for the latter’s confidence in the capacities of animation. Finally, the musical choices for Fantasia were a combination of attempts at taking what was generally regarded as “highbrow” culture and giving it mass appeal while challenging the existing conventions governing the production of animated films.

62 Solomon, 130. 63 Allan, 263. 25 CHAPTER 2: ISSUES OF INFLUENCE AND AVANT-GARDE AUTHORSHIP

Although written in part as a moderate corrective to François Truffaut’s aggressive denunciation of formulaic adaptations of literary works into film by the then- prominent scriptwriters Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, André Bazin’s influential essay,

“De la Politique des Auteurs,” emphasized the role of a single creative artist, the

individual genius, as the author of the best films.64 Bazin stresses that “the individual transcends society, but society is also and above all within him.” Consequently, he argues, one must consider societal influences and background when contemplating a work of art. It is for this reason, according to Bazin, that critics evaluating American cinema should be aware of the great achievement of American studio production: “The

American cinema is a classical art, but why not then admire in it what is most admirable, i.e. not only the talent of this or that film-maker, but the genius of the system, the richness of its ever-vigorous tradition, and its fertility when it comes into contact with new elements.”65 The films produced by Walt Disney’s studio while under his management are excellent examples of this system in operation.

However, many creative artists would have disapproved of such an assembly line or “factory” method of production. This proved to be the case in a number of instances,

64 This has been an issue of contention; see Semenza, 353-371 and Guneratne, 391-412 for summaries of the debate on film authorship. 65 Bazin, 22, 27. 26 as evidenced by a disagreement with Stokowski at the start, and with at least one avant- garde artist – a friend of Stokowski’s – who felt stifled by Disney’s demands and methods. Other artists who influenced Fantasia were also avant-garde artists whose approach to filmmaking contrasted significantly to Disney’s. In all of these cases, their influence continues to be felt in the finished film.

It should be noted that despite his insistence on complete control of the studio’s system of production, Disney’s practice was to consult with others he respected even about such matters as technological innovations that he intended to pioneer. His rapport with Stokowski was immediate because they were kindred spirits who shared a fascination with new technologies and the desire to make their respective mediums more accessible to the public. 66 The two even came up with ideas for improvements in film sound. When Stokowski and Disney agreed that current sound recording technology could not replicate the sound of a full orchestra, Disney assigned his studio’s sound department to develop a multichannel system to be used for Fantasia. The results were a system dubbed “Fantasound.”67

Nevertheless, there were times where even Stokowski’s creative input would be overruled during the film’s production. The first and most significant instance would be during the production of the Beethoven sequence. When the adaptation of Gabriel

Pierné’s Cydalise proved unsatisfactory, Disney’s story designers – Richard Huemer and

Joe Grant – suggested using Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony instead. Although Walt

Disney approved, Stokowski objected. According to Huemer, Stokowski believed that since the Pastoral Symphony was about human interactions and nature, Cydalise’s

66 Allan, 93. 67 John Culhane, 18-19. 27 mythological imagery was incompatible with Beethoven’s music, which very specifically

depicts scenes from nature that the composer had himself observed.68

Stokowski was also overruled during story development for Ponchielli’s “Dance

of the Hours.” In a September 8, 1938 story meeting, Stokowski agrees to the use of the

music for comedy, stating that it is “real, old Italian ‘enjoy-yourself music.’” However,

when “Dance of the Hours” was played the next day, Stokowski determined that the piece was overplayed in concert halls and on the , and suggested using Carnival of the Animals by Camille Saint-Saëns instead. Dick Huemer disagreed with Stokowski’s suggestion and stated that he preferred the “Dance of the Hours” arguing “I like the idea of satire.” In a September 14 story meeting, Stokowski suggested that Disney use a section from the opera Samson & Delilah (also by Saint-Saëns) as a substitute. This time, it was Joe Grant who disagreed with him, saying that Samson & Delilah “[doesn’t] hold a candle to the ‘Dance of the Hours.’ ‘Dance of the Hours’ is sillier. You have to have light music for heavy characters.” 69

Stokowski’s concern about the “Dance of the Hours” being overplayed and his

suggestion that Disney use lesser known, more appropriate pieces for Fantasia is significant because it reveals why he was interested in the project in the first place.

Throughout his career, Stokowski had a desire to get the general public more interested in classical music, which at the time was seen as being primarily the realm of an “elitist and remote” group of people.70 In his concert hall work, Stokowski would also program pieces he enjoyed that he felt deserved more public attention. For instance, during the

68 Huemer, 142-143. 69 “Dance of the Hours – Ponchielli: Notes Taken from Story Meetings,” 2. 70 Allan, 91. 28 1920s he was a major proponent of Igor Stravinsky’s music among American conductors, and was instrumental in making the Russian composer’s work more known to the

American public. In 1922, he became the first conductor to perform Le Sacre du

Printemps to an American audience, a delayed event since its 1913 premiere had resulted in a full-scale riot. Seven years later he would be responsible for its first

American recording and its first radio broadcast.71 Stokowski’s passion for introducing

classical music to the public continued for the rest of his life; in a 1971 interview he

mentions receiving letters from people who were “afraid to go to a concert hall” before

watching Fantasia.72

Joe Grant and Dick Huemer’s disagreement with Stokowski’s recommendations

in favor of using a more familiar, “overplayed” piece such as the “Dance of the Hours”

shows that as story-men and employees of the Disney studio, they were more concerned

with utilizing music that jived with the images they could best produce. This may well be what motivated the choice of Beethoven’s familiar symphony over Gabriel Pierné’s esoteric Cydalise even though they simply repurposed the “fine pictorial material” conjured up by the latter piece.

Like Disney, Huemer and Grant were also concerned with the film’s mass appeal, and the character designs for the centaurs and centaurettes in the “Pastoral Symphony” sequence reflect this. In the final product, the centaurs and centaurettes resemble nothing more than American teenagers of the time period, with hair styles and hats resembling popular fashion of the time. 73 According to Dick Huemer in a 1973 interview, this was

71 Chasins, 170. 72 Allan, 94. 73 Ibid, 145. 29 intentional: “I still believe that to the average person in the street, there’s nothing more than something ancient Grecian, or Persian. No identification… You can’t laugh at something you don’t dig.”74 Other character designs in the “Pastoral” sequence received

a similar treatment; the gods Zeus and Vulcan bear a resemblance to conventional

cartoon designs of the time period, although John Culhane has noted that the sketchy

Zeus and Vulcan designs in the finished product may have been due to animator Art

Babbitt’s background in caricature and his lack of training in rendering realistic

anatomy. 75 The Cupids and Fauns were influenced by the immensely popular comic strip

“,” by Rudolph Dirks, which Disney directly references in story

meetings.76

There are examples of Disney himself rejecting Stokowski’s suggestions. In one

of his letters to Disney, Stokowski suggested that instead of having Mickey as the

protagonist in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” the Disney team should create “an entirely

new personality… that could represent you and me – in other words, someone that would

represent in the mind and heart of everyone seeing the film their own personality, so that

they would enter into all the drama and emotional changes of the film in a most intense

manner.” 77 Needless to say, such a character was not created for the final product and

Disney did not even acknowledge the suggestion.78

74 Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons, 278. 75 John Culhane, 148 76 Allan, 138. Disney may also have been inspired by “The Captain and the Kids” series produced by MGM, which was an adaptation of strip and lasted from 1938 to 1939, the same time period Fantasia was being produced.. This short-lived animated series is discussed further in Lenburg, 17, 123, 133. 77 David R. Smith, 20. 78 Ibid, 22. 30 Perhaps the reason why Disney rejected Stokowski’s suggestion to replace

Mickey with “a personality that could represent you and me” is because he may already

have seen Mickey as an extension of himself, something that has been noted by critics

and film theorists such as Sergei Eisenstein.79 In “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” Mickey desires the power of the sorcerer, but is too inexperienced to control this power when he has access to it. John Culhane notes how this is a parallel of sorts to Disney’s life and career at the time “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” was being produced:

“Walt Disney, only five weeks away from the premiere of Snow White, was on the verge of having more money and power than he had ever had before. So it is perhaps not surprising that he was most interested in Mickey’s dreams of power… the Mickey in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” is Walt Disney at the time of Fantasia, having risen in just a few years from a few associates in to becoming the dreamer on a mountaintop, conducting the stars… Walt Disney’s identity was entwined with Mickey’s. He dreamed Mickey’s dream of being given ‘complete control of the earth and its elements’ – a dream that resulted in , , and Center.” 80

Culhane’s argument can be further reinforced by statements made by Disney

himself at the time, including a 1937 essay written for an anthology entitled We Make the

Movies. Walt Disney opens this essay with a description of the omnipotent power of the

cartoon creator:

“The World of the animated cartoon is the world of our imagination, a world in which the sun and the moon and the stars and every living thing obey our commands. We pluck a little character from our imagination, and if he becomes disobedient we liquidate him with an eraser. No dictator has power half so absolute.” 81

This description bears a striking resemblance to the first half of “The Sorcerer’s

Apprentice;” Mickey brings the broom to life and destroys it when it refuses to obey his

79 Eisenstein, 158-159. 80 John Culhane, 84, 100. 81 Disney, 253. 31 commands, and in the middle of the sequence he has a dream where he is an all-powerful sorcerer who controls and the stars.

Robin Allan also points out that the subsequent events following the completion

of Fantasia – the film’s failure and the 1941 Studio strike in particular – bear an unintended parallel to Mickey’s situation in this short:

“Like Mickey, Disney released great power; he is both the childlike Mickey at play with the forces he unleashes, and also the remote father figure of authority in the person of Yen Sid who dominates and controls chaotic creativity; unlike Yen Sid, however, Disney was not able to dominate or contain the events of 1940 and 1941 which led to loss or revenue (because the war in Europe prevented distribution) and loss of confidence (which led to the strike of 1941). Like Mickey, he is a child who has unleashed forbidden forces. The story of Pandora’s box is painfully retold.”82

Needless to say, during the production of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” Disney could not have known that Fantasia would initially be a financial failure; nor could he have possibly known that the strike of 1941 would happen. Still, of all the Fantasia sequences,

“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” seems to parallel Walt Disney’s own feelings and concerns most closely.

Perhaps Disney’s Mickey fixation led to the enhanced oversight and frequent expressions of dissatisfaction in the regular story meetings he convened during the production of Fantasia. Some artists bridled under the most dispiriting of his demands, that even as he insisted on teamwork, he held veto rights over all creative work and the right of approval to any and all elements before they went into the final product. If an artist was to succeed, he or she would have to be able to produce work that was compatible with what Disney wanted in his studio’s product. One of the highly individualistic creative personnel who did manage (although reluctantly) to adapt to

82 Allan, 122-123. 32 Disney’s demands and pressures to maintain a high work-flow was , who would later express disappointment with his time at Disney. But others whose ideas did notably contribute to the origins of Fantasia’s more abstract visuals had little sympathy for his methods. The most prominent among these was , a celebrated auteur who rebelled against his strictures and eventually proved to be unwilling or unable to compromise his vision to accord with Disney’s.

During the thirties, Fischinger was well-known for his abstract animations,

including the first color abstract film, Composition in Blue (1935). When the Nazi regime seized power in Germany in 1933, Fischinger’s work became labeled as “”

(a general National Socialist appellation for much of Modernist art) and he was only able to continue working through the advertising industry. Critics sympathetic to Fischinger and his innovations attempted to pass off his abstractions as “decorative,” but their attempts were unsuccessful and Fischinger was eventually forced to leave Germany.83 He went to the United States and sought a job at Hollywood, where he was known for his work on an advertisement for Muratti featuring dancing cigarettes.84 He worked at

Paramount for a short period and was assigned to create an abstract sequence for a film

entitled The Big Broadcast of 1937. Fischinger did eventually complete his segment,

which he called “Radio Dynamics,” but it was late and in color while Big Broadcast was intended as a black and white film.85

While working for Paramount, Fischinger befriended Leopold Stokowski, who

helped him in his application for citizenship in the United States. Fischinger hoped to

83 Leslie, 89-90. 84 Allan, 111. 85 John Culhane, 37. 33 collaborate with Stokowski based on some of the latter’s musical , one of them being Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. Knowing that the project would be too expensive and complex for Fischinger to handle on his own, Stokowski told him that he should consider working with a large studio. After some hesitation, Fischinger decided to work for Disney, as he needed the money to provide for his family and he hoped that he could produce art of an even higher quality with the resources of the Disney Studio.86

Fischinger’s time at Disney started well enough; his films were screened and well received by the staff and he was immediately put to work on the “Toccata and Fugue”

sequence. As time went on Fischinger found himself having difficulties working in a

studio setting and was unable to put most of his ideas on the screen. Frustrated, he finally

left the Disney studio on October 1939 and regretted his involvement in such a populist

venture as Fantasia for the rest of his life. The only known instance where he directly

mentions his involvement in Fantasia is in a letter to a friend where he expresses dissatisfaction with the final product and criticizes the Disney Studio for fostering a competitive atmosphere:

“I worked on this film for nine months; then through some “behind the back” talks and intrigue (something very big at the Disney Studios) I was demoted to an entirely different department, and three months later I left Disney again, agreeing to call off the contract. The film “Toccata and Fugue by Bach” is really not my work, though my work may be present at some points; rather it is the most inartistic product of a factory. Many people worked on it, and whenever I put out an idea or suggestion for this film, it was immediately cut to pieces and killed, or often it took two, three, or more months until a suggestion took hold in the minds of some people connected with it who had their say. One thing I definitely found out: that no true work of art can be made with that procedure used in the Disney Studio.” 87

86 Allan, 111-112 and Leslie, 90. 87 Moritz, Optical Poetry, 85. 34 In a 1947 article he wrote for Art in Cinema, Fischinger echoed this sentiment by

criticizing the motion picture industry as a whole. Notably, he singles out the “cartoon

film” as being a “mass product of factory proportions… No sensible creative artist could

create a sensible work of art if a staff of co-workers of all kinds had his or her say in the

final creation.” He concludes that “the creative artist of the highest level always works at

his best alone, moving far ahead of his time.”88

Fischinger’s criticisms of the “competitive atmosphere” of the studio undoubtedly

came from his own personal experience, as he found himself at odds with some studio

employees. His most notable antagonist was Cy Young, head of the special effects

department to which he had been assigned. Young’s strictness and Fischinger’s shyness

caused an immediate personality clash which resulted in most of Fischinger’s ideas being

rejected outright. There was also a language barrier between the two artists, and they had

difficulties communicating.89

Fischinger’s stint at the Disney Studio is sometimes written about as evidence of

Walt Disney’s incompatibility with abstract animation and the avant-garde in general;

Robin Allan goes so far as to say that Fischinger and Disney’s artistic visions were incompatible: “Disney’s views were anathema to Fischinger; the latter’s work was pure abstraction, uncompromising, distinct, and mystical. Moreover, it was visually complex, its patterns and images not only overlapping but also interlocking and counterbalancing each other in a structurally complex way which Disney could not comprehend.”90

88 Fischinger, 113. 89 Allan, 113. 90 Ibid, 111-112. 35 There is strong evidence to support the claim that Walt Disney – and the Disney

Studio as a whole – were not fond of the kind of abstract animation in which Fischinger specialized. Several employees in the Disney Studio expressed a dislike for Fischinger’s

initial contributions to the Bach sequence, including Dick Huemer, who in retrospect

described Fischinger’s drawings as “little things dancing dinkily,” and “not the thing for

[the Disney Studio] to do. We had to be above little dinky things dancing.”91 Disney himself showed a hesitance to accept Fischinger’s purely abstract work, afraid that audiences would be unable to respond: “You should give them something realistic. I don’t think the average audience will appreciate the abstract, but I may be all wrong.”92

The rest of the Disney Studio had little understanding of abstract animation, something which becomes most apparent when one examines how they approached the

“Toccata and Fugue” project. Early continuity storyboards for it were created by Young,

Fischinger, Miles Pike, Eric Hansen, John McLeish, and Walt Scott. While Fischinger approached the storyboards the same way he approached his own abstract works, the rest of the team stuck to imagery that would be easily recognized by audiences. Their early storyboards bore little resemblance to abstract art and were little more than distortions of

Stokowski and his orchestra’s instruments.93

Despite the Disney Studio’s general distaste for Fischinger’s work and for pure

abstraction, some historians have noted the persistence of his influence in Fantasia. Allan

notes how the intermission sequence bears a stronger resemblance to Fischinger’s work

than the Bach sequence:

91 Huemer, 147. 92 Allan, 112 93 Canemaker, Paper Dreams, 191. 36 “There is a short live action intermission after “The Rite of Spring” while we assume Stokowski has left the stage… There is also an interview with the sound track which creates abstract shapes reflecting the sounds of various instruments. This item is more purely abstract than any imagery in the Bach section and is a reminder, in colour and design, of the influence of Fischinger’s films. The colours are primary and bright, bursting from a vertical key line which runs down the middle of the screen, so that the shapes extend laterally across it in a mirror image of colour.”94

It is evident that Fischinger’s influence persists in the “Toccata and Fugue” and intermission sequences. On the other hand, there is another abstract influence in Fantasia that is generally overlooked: that of New Zealand-born artist . Walt Disney himself claimed that his first exposure to abstract animation was in the mid-1930s, when

he saw Len Lye’s A Colour Box. Contrary to widespread notions about his hostility to

abstraction, after watching the film Disney became interested in making an abstract animated film, but it was not until Fantasia that he had an opportunity to do so.95

The soundtrack’s character and its movements in the brief intermission sequence following “The Rite of Spring” bear a likeness to the wavy lines that appear throughout

Colour Box. As with Fischinger’s, Disney simplifies Len Lye’s work so as to make it more “accessible” to a mainstream audience: there is only one abstraction at a time during Fantasia’s intermission sequence, and the vertical line representing the soundtrack remains still until Deems Taylor instructs it to make a sound. Taylor’s narration also serves as an “intercessor,” as his commands help explain to the audience what they are about to see. For instance, when Taylor tells the soundtrack to make the sound of a harp, it does exactly that and produces the sound of a harp glissando. On the other hand, the lines in Colour Box move constantly and at a frantic pace. Furthermore, there are multiple

94 Allan, 135. 95 John Culhane, 36-37. 37 forms of animation going on during each portion of Len Lye’s film, and there is no voice- over narration to explain to the audience what they are seeing. The audience must decide for themselves what they are seeing in A Colour Box, which is also true of Fischinger’s visualizations of musical sounds with closely-synced abstract imagery.

When one examines Disney’s tendency to simplify avant-garde concepts, it seems as if he did so primarily because he was concerned that the average filmgoer would be unable to grasp experimental works unless they were made more accessible. In many story meeting notes, he voices his opinions about what audiences like and dislike. One story meeting, in particular, reveals Disney at his most unguarded, stating that a film should not have the audience “asking too many questions,” as audiences “are not that patient.”96 Disney makes a similar argument in a June 5, 1939 story meeting: “an audience is always thrilled with something new, but fire too many things at them and they become restless.” 97

However, Disney’s wariness of purely avant-garde works may not have been entirely motivated by concern with negative audience reactions, something that becomes more noticeable in another incident in 1946 where Disney collaborated with an important avant-garde artist. This time, the collaboration was with surrealist Salvador Dalí, who was briefly hired by Disney to work on a short film entitled , which was intended to be used as a segment for one of the anthology or “package” films that the Disney studio worked on immediately after World War II. Dalí’s time at Disney was far more

96 Field, 124. 97 Ibid. 38 pleasant than Fischinger’s, and he seemed more enthusiastic about working at the studio.

Nevertheless, the project was unsuccessful and Disney soon lost interest.98

There are also instances where Disney would insist on something in spite of what

audiences supposedly wanted. In a December 1938 story meeting, Disney expressed his

desire for slower-paced scenes and his disappointment at some of the editing in Snow

White:

“I feel in Snow White we should have had something like [“Ave Maria”], something a little slower. I knew they kept cutting that prayer of Snow White’s, and I would like to have been slower with that, but there was that pressure everywhere – ‘You’ve got to keep moving.’ And then when we came to the coffin scene, I would like to have run that a little longer. People like those things… they appreciate things more when you don’t fire them too fast.” 99

Disney’s discussion of slow-paced scenes in movies shows more of a confidence in the

audience’s abilities to appreciate innovation than his comments on abstract and avant- garde works. There are other instances during Fantasia’s production where he was more than willing to defy audience expectations and take risks. The Stravinsky segment takes a darker and more dramatic approach to dinosaurs than any previous work done by the

Disney Studio. Disney insisted on this in spite of his employees warning that dinosaurs were inherently comical and would be impossible to portray in a serious way. Throughout the story meeting notes for “Night on Bald Mountain,” Disney tried to find ways to present frightening creatures without falling into common clichés of the medium such as

“bats and cats and graves and spooks.”100

While the crew behind Fantasia were given some creative freedom and their individual styles shine through their work, the film is ultimately a highly typical Disney

98 Canemaker, Paper Dreams, 200. 99 John Culhane, 205. 100 Feild, 124. 39 production, with Disney initiating the concept and having the final say on what was and was not acceptable in the film. If an animator or artist was to do well at the Disney

Studio, she or he would have to accede to Disney’s terms, and those who were unwilling to compromise were likely to find their time at the studio to be unrewarding. Thus,

Disney’s films are very much a reflection of his own interests and ideas, and the interests and ideas that he felt appealed to audiences. Concepts with which Disney may have dabbled but did not fully understand were simplified or changed in a manner that would be more easily digestible both to him and his audiences, real or imagined.

40 CHAPTER 3: THE GENIUS OF THE STUDIO SYSTEM: DISTRIBUTED

AUTHORSHIP IN FANTASIA

While some creative artists shared Truffaut’s conception of authorship, others

(such as Gore Vidal), stressed the input of personnel other than directors.101 Even within the context of film direction, a variety of forms of authorship have recently been discussed in the critical literature. Whereas the most obvious form of authorship remains direct authorship, in which a single director maintains primary creative control over a film. ’s films are clear examples of direct authorship. He was the undisputed creative force behind all his films after 1915. In contrast, dispersed authorship can be attributed to a film such as Gone with the Wind (1939) or The Wizard of Oz

(1939), whose authorship becomes unclear due to the involvement of equally divided (or disputed) creative forces. Additionally, a case can be made for distributed authorship, where a dominant creative force employs other, subsidiary creative talents to fulfill a particular artistic vision. Uniquely, Fantasia pertains to direct, dispersed, and distributed authorship. Many authorial hands are clearly present in both the music and the visual images, and no one individual could have undertaken such an involved project. Yet, given the many individuals involved in its actual creation, the film would be a jumble of ideas if not for Walt Disney’s active guidance and aesthetic interests, and therefore it illustrates distributed authorship to a greater extent than direct or dispersed authorship.

101 Vidal, 35-39. 41 In contrast to Fischinger, we might argue that it is a particularly artistic product of a factory, albeit a factory run by a single guiding spirit.102

Disney’s input and interventions should thus be clarified. Throughout his career,

he regarded his task as that of the presiding arbiter who offered the initial story ideas, vetting the reactions to them, and then distributing each concept optimally by assigning his employees the tasks to which each one was ideally suited. When choosing his collaborators, he would consider an employee’s previous work, his or her artistic

experience, and his or her areas of technical expertise. Disney’s role differed from that of the contemporary television showrunner or executive producer in that as head of the studio he planned projects far in advance, maintained creative control during the process of production and exerted absolute authority over the finished product.103 This strategy

reveals itself most clearly when one examines a Disney production in light of the work of

102 These concepts have recently surfaced in print, notably in two articles concerning the authorship of Shakespeare films. In discussing the cinema of the Shakespearean auteur, Garrett Sullivan uses a similar term “distributed auteurism” to describe the collaborative team of the Archers, the production company run by scriptwriter editor Emeric Pressburger and the cinematographer-director Michael Powell (Sullivan, 386). This same issue of Shakespeare Bulletin contains an article by Anthony Guneratne that discusses numerous forms of authorship including “dispersed authorship,” which is when a film has so many equally creative forces that it is difficult to discern any one authorial voice. His example is a 1912 adaptation of Richard III written and ostensibly directed by James Keane and starring Frederick Warde, which has a narrative structure which resembles Colley Cibber’s free adaptation of Shakespeare’s play more than the original (Guneratne, 396-397) Guneratne has written other articles and books on authorship, including his book Shakespeare, Film Studies, and the Visual Cultures of Moderninity and his article ‘Thou dost usurp authority’ contributed to Henderson, 31-53. My discussions with Professor Guneratne proved useful in clarifying the kinds of authorship available to filmmakers. In addition to direct authorship and distributed authorship, we can also discern examples of indirect authorship, co-authorship, and collaborative authorship. Indirect authorship occurs when a director is merely following the wishes of the primary creative force behind the project. The films of , where the director would follow Keaton’s instructions when directing, would constitute an example of indirect authorship. Yet another type of authorship is co-authorship, which occurs when there is not one, but two or more primary creative forces behind a film whose contributions are inseparable. Two pertinent examples are the films of the Coen brothers and those of the Taviani brothers. Co-authorship should not be confused with collaborative authorship, which is a type of authorship most common in anthology films such as Aria (1987) or New York Stories (1989), with individual episodes created independently by renowned directors. 103 Wray, 470. This article discusses the television auteur and cites definition 2 of the word “showrunner,” which is “the executive producer having overall creative authority and management responsibility for a television programme.” 42 the actual animators before and during their assignments. In Fantasia, Disney assigned the optimal animators and sequence directors to work on film segments compatible with their individual talents.

In the Disney studio at the time of Fantasia’s production, the job of a sequence director was to take the work of the story department once the story development was complete, and to initiate the process of making the apt visual translation. The sequence director would be in charge of a unit of animators and layout artists, and it was his job to tell them how Disney wanted things done.104 In an interview, Huemer describes how the storyboard artists and story department’s work was integrated into the final product, or rejected owing to incompatibilities of concept or vision. The avant-garde filmmaker,

Oskar Fischinger, is an obvious example of such an incompatibility. Huemer notes:

“Fischinger was a contributor, he couldn’t do it all [by] himself. He worked at his board and he drew what he thought was called for. Then it was taken and finished by other people. The director, Sam Armstrong, then took the music and made it more his own, with big church windows rising up, Gothic things and shapes the music seemed to suggest, and all the other fantasies of interpretation.” 105

It is worth placing emphasis on Huemer’s statement that the director “took the music and made it more his own,” as the previous work of each animator can be discerned distinctly in his or her contributions to Fantasia. Before being assigned as

director for the Bach and Tchaikovsky sequences, Samuel Armstrong had worked as a

background artist for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs – one of his notable

104 John Culhane, 48, 62 105 Huemer, 147. 43 contributions to the film was his design for the Dwarfs’ cottage. 106 The two shorts he was in charge of placed an emphasis on backgrounds, colors, and special effects, although figures more prominently in the Tchaikovsky sequence.

Another prominent animator whose work appears in the final versions of the

“Toccata and Fugue” and “Nutcracker Suite” segments is Cy Young. Young was head of

the special effects department and had a reputation at the Disney Studio for his strictness;

Shamus Culhane claims that Cy Young would crumple up unsatisfactory work and throw

it into a wastebasket. Known for his quick temper, he was prone to getting into arguments

with others in the studio. In spite of his notoriety, his department’s artists were well

known for the high quality of their work and for being so fast at improving that “as

[films] progressed… their initial effects were outdated a few months later.” 107 For

Fantasia, Young was assigned to work as an animator in “The Nutcracker Suite” segment and was put in charge of the team responsible for storyboard continuity for the “Toccata and Fugue.” Along with Armstrong, he was tasked with overseeing the latter sequence.

Disney’s choice of Young was due at least in part to his previous work with color abstractions set to music, including a 1931 adaptation of Mendelssohn’s music in Spring

Song.108

Spring Song contains many elements that seem to anticipate the Bach and

Tchaikovsky sections of Fantasia. In , plants and clouds morph and move to the soundtrack, as they do in the “Nutcracker Suite” segment. One section of Spring Song has a butterfly that causes flowers to bloom as it hovers over them. The butterfly then

106 John Culhane, 46. 107 , 160. 108 John Culhane, 37, 42. 44 flies into the background, and the clouds above it morph into four fairy silhouettes which throw dewdrops onto the flowers below. Fantasia’s Tchaikovsky sequence has a similar scene, with fairies hovering over and sprinkling dewdrops on flowers.

An individual whose presence is comparable to even Young in the finished version of the “Nutcracker Suite” segment was Sylvia Moberly-Holland, one of two proficient graphic artists involved in the production of Fantasia who had musical training. According to Theo Halladay, her daughter, Holland was often consulted by

other Disney artists because of her talents in both music and art: “she knew all the

answers, drew pictures and made wonderful suggestions. She knew music backwards and

forwards and could relate to the musicians.” She was also trained in architecture and was

influenced by notable book illustrators such as . Holland was assigned to

work on “Cydalise” before it was discarded for “The Pastoral Symphony.” On their

introduction, Disney was immediately impressed with her abilities and put her in charge

of the story department for “The Nutcracker Suite.”109

Robin Allan suggests that Holland’s influence on “The Nutcracker Suite” segment

gives it “a feminine element absent from the rest of the film. Power imagery, (podia,

rocks, mountains, trees) is lacking and the camera movement is predominantly lateral and

horizontal, not vertical. The animation is circular, oval, elliptical.”110 This “feminine element” seems to have been noticed by the men working under Holland’s management, who at times expressed dissatisfaction with her supervision of their work.111 However, given the plot of Cydalise et le chévre-pied – in which a mischievous faun, wounded by

109 Allan, 118 and Canemaker, "Sylvia Moberly Holland," 50. 110 Allan, 117. 111 Canemaker, Before the Animation Begins, 111. 45 Cupid’s arrow, falls in love with a kind and beautiful dancer, Cydalise, only to yield in

the end to the call of the woodland creatures – it is possible that this segment, too, would have benefitted from a more female perspective than what remains of it in “The Pastoral

Symphony.”

While absent from “The Nutcracker Suite,” the “power imagery” as noted by

Allan is abundant in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” In fact, the entire segment’s plot

revolves around the visualization of Mickey Mouse, who has a talking role and

congratulates Stokowski at the end of the film, assuming the guise of a magician-in- training and gaining access to incredible power that he proves unable to control. When production for “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” began, Perce Pearce was assigned to direct

the short, and he worked simultaneously on story development with Carl Freeburg.

Eventually Pearce and Freeburg were assigned to work on the new feature Bambi instead, with being given the task of directing “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” It was quite possibly a strategic choice because the music builds slowly to a thunderous climax, and Algar was a trained musician with a master’s degree in journalism who edited and contributed to a humor magazine at Stanford University before being hired by Disney in

1934. His first task after being hired was working as an animator for the animals in Snow

White and the Seven Dwarfs.112

Two more significant animators who worked on “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”

were and , both of whom were considered “Mickey Mouse

experts.” Moore was previously involved in designing Mickey Mouse in The Brave Little

Tailor and had a reputation in the studio for being an exceptionally talented animator and

112 Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons, 243. David R. Smith, 20. 46 artist. One of his earliest jobs was animating in the short of the same name, and his work’s quality showed instantly:

“…Moore animated his characters from one pleasing shape to another. There was no sense that their true form had been compromised just to inject a little life into the animation. Instead, whatever shape they assumed at any given moment had the same pleasing roundness and solidity. had shown animators how to suggest that a character was alive. Now Moore showed them how to enhance that illusion, almost to the point that it seemed that the character had a personality. His animation in Three Little Pigs – he handled the scenes at the start of the cartoon when the pigs introduce themselves – was charm itself.”113

Moore’s art and character design had a visible influence on the studio and became “the standard against which other character animators’ work was measured.”114 Many of the character designs and animations for Disney’s next major feature, Pinocchio (1940) were inspired by Moore’s style.115 The instructions left for Disney’s animators include this reference to Moore’s design concept: “Work for a cute, short, chunky Mickey… When the first key poses have been drawn, please refer them to Fred Moore for possible suggestions. Fred Moore is assisting all animators on this picture in an attempt to make the Mickeys conform to a cute style.”116

In addition to his work on The Three Little Pigs, Moore was one of several animators, including (most prominently) Vladimir “Bill” Tytla, who supervised animation of the seven dwarfs in Snow White. Moore and Tytla worked together to redesign the dwarfs from early concept art and concentrated on making each of the seven

characters distinct. Although the two shared the same assignment, their visual styles

differed: “Tytla was a powerful draftsman whose work naturally veered away from

113 Barrier, The Animated Man, 95. 114 Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons, 255. 115 Ibid, 255-256. 116 David R. Smith, 64. 47 Moore’s softness and cuteness in favor of a more intense and muscular sort of animation.”117 When assigned to animate a character, Tytla would conduct research in order to analyze the way a character was supposed to move.118 In “The Sorcerer’s

Apprentice,” Tytla supervised the animation for the Sorcerer, while Fred Moore was

responsible for supervising Mickey Mouse’s animation. For this segment, Moore also

redesigned Mickey Mouse in order to give the character a wider range of facial

expressions – Mickey was given a rounder, less rigid form and – most noticeably – pupils in his eyes.

The difference in style between Moore and Tytla becomes obvious in the physical contrasts between the Sorcerer and Mickey Mouse. Tytla’s Sorcerer comes off as a stern and almost intimidating authority figure. The character’s intensity is enhanced by his impassivity – his only display of any real emotion is a barely noticeable smile at the end of the film – and the fact that the viewer tends to see him either from a distance or from lower camera angles resembling low-angle shots. His movements are also slower and less energetic than Mickey’s, and his proportions are more realistically anthropomorphic.

Mickey’s movements and appearance in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” offer a stark contrast. He displays many of the traits that defined Fred Moore’s characters – his design emits a childlike charm that accentuates his “cuteness,” and he moves quickly and gracefully.

The assignment of animating Mickey Mouse went to Les Clark. Clark had an interest in animation and cartoons since he was in high school, and he applied for a job at the studio in 1927 when it was still making Oswald the Lucky shorts. During his

117 Barrier, The Animated Man, 119, 121. 118 John Culhane, 185 48 first year at Disney he rapidly rose through the ranks. By the time Disney lost the Oswald character to , Clark had a job as an “in-betweener” – an animator who

draws the frames between pivotal points of action.119 Clark would assist with in-between animation for some of the first Mickey Mouse shorts, including the 1928 short The Gallopin’ Gaucho. When Iwerks left the Disney Studio in 1930, Clark became one of the primary Mickey Mouse animators, one of his most acclaimed projects being

the scenes he did for The Band Concert (1935).120

The Band Concert is an earlier example of the Disney Studio combining animation with classical music. Mickey’s animation in this short is also significant, as

Les Clark combined several elements of other animators’ work into something unique to his own style:

“One can spot several influences in Clark’s Band Concert animation. There is a bit of Ub Iwerks in the exaggerated, cartoony length of Mickey’s tongue as he licks his thumb, and the way the hat flies off his head to mirror his surprise. There is Fred Moore’s malleable stretch-and-squash in the way Mickey does ‘takes’… [Norman Ferguson] influenced the way Mickey thinks before he acts. But Clark wove all of these inspirational sources together in a seamless whole and made the scenes his own.”121

These characteristics are apparent in Clark’s animation of Mickey Mouse. Several of

Mickey’s movements in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” seem to mirror the movements he

makes in The Band Concert, from the comical use of Mickey’s overlong sleeves to the

gag where Mickey licks his finger to turn the page.

119 Canemaker, Walt Disney’s Nine Old Men, 12. Walt Disney lost the character of because he had refused Universal Pictures’ offer. Since Universal owned the character and had “secretly signed up Walt’s animators,” the studio took the character away from Disney. 120 Ibid, 19-20. 121 Ibid, 21. 49 The sequence that follows “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” “The Rite of Spring,”

also contains a great deal of character animation. It was directed by Paul Satterfield and

Bill Roberts. Satterfield was a special effects animator. Roberts was a character animator

with a reputation as a “ specialist” who approached his work with a “ferocious

honesty.”122 The two directors were assigned to direct different portions of “The Rite of

Spring,” and it shows; in part of the sequence special effects dominate, but in the later scenes character animation comes to the fore.

“The Rite of Spring” segment opens with a “Trip Through Space” where the camera tracks past several planets and eventually stops at a planet later revealed to be

Earth. This shot alone took a great deal of innovation in the Special Effects Department,

which came up with a unique way to portray outer space. In order to give the animators a

good image of what the Earth would look like in space, the Special Effects department

created an eighteen-inch model “Earth” which they placed in a small dark room made to

resemble an infinite universe. The room was surrounded by small beads of different sizes

to resemble distant stars and planets, and there were small holes punctured all over the

wall behind the Earth model.

A later scene shows how the Earth was formed through volcanic eruptions. One of

the special effects supervisors, Josh Meador, found a way to depict these eruptions in a

realistic manner: “he mixed a gummy mess of oatmeal, mud, and coffee in a vat. Then he

sent bubbles up through it with air hoses. High-speed cameras photographed this action.

The individual frames were processed on dyed against a yellow background.

Animation was added to create more splashes and broaden the action.”123

122 Shamus Culhane, 153, 155. 123 John Culhane, 120-121. 50 The second half of “The Rite of Spring” places an emphasis on character animation rather than special effects. Bill Roberts supervised the animation of the dinosaurs, which was an arduous task on its own. This task became especially difficult due to the animators struggling to portray the dinosaurs’ immense size accurately.

Roberts suggested that they “draw a twelve-story building in perspective, then convert it into a dinosaur and animate it.” The result is that the camera in the dinosaur scenes are kept low, leaving audiences looking up at the looming dinosaurs. 124

The “Pastoral Symphony” sequence was directed by , Ford Beebe

Jr, and Jim Handley. Handley directed the Bacchanal and Storm scenes, Beebe undertook the closing scene (“Sunset”) and the scene that introduces the centaurs & centaurettes, and Luske was involved in work on all five scenes. Luske had got his start as a cartoonist working on several newspapers, such as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, and the

Oakland Post-Enquirer. While at Disney, he was known for his analytic mind and obsession with the principles of animation and motion, and in lectures to new animators he emphasized animating each character with personality and candor. In spite of his passion, Luske lacked a natural talent for draftsmanship, and his assistant recalls that Lusk “had to work like the dickens to draw.” Through trial and error, Luske’s own animation improved throughout the 1930’s; he animated the titular Hare from The

Tortoise and the Hare and Jenny Wren – a of – in Who Killed Cock

Robin. In Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Luske supervised the animation for both

Snow White and her animal friends.125

124 Ibid, 121. 125 Canemaker, Walt Disney's Nine Old Men, 59-63. 51 Although Luske was not an animator in the “Pastoral Symphony” sequence, his

influence does show in the segment, which is the one perhaps closest aesthetically and

thematically to the Silly Symphony shorts. As Robin Allan puts it:

“[Fantasia’s “Pastoral” sequence] also relies on the animation conventions of the previous decade [the 1930’s], and especially the formulae of the Silly Symphonies. These, too, had used classical music for lyrical and comic effect, but not within a larger structure. Their success lay in their very . This new work is a Silly Symphony stretched and distended beyond a seven minute short cartoon. It has the qualities which characterize the later films in that series; naivety, archness, self-consciousness and a straining for effect coupled with technical accomplishment and delicacy in rendering. These are all present in the Beethoven film.” 126

The more simplistic and comical character designs are more reminiscent of the Silly

Symphony shorts as well. Fellow animator noted Luske’s preference for

animating “cute” characters. The “Pastoral Symphony” segment is filled with such

characters: the Cupids, Fauns, the Baby Pegasii, and even Bacchus and his donkey steed

Jacchus, all seem designed with “cuteness” in mind.

Perhaps one reason as to why Luske’s influence permeates “The Pastoral

Symphony” is because one of his assistants, Eric Larson, did contribute significantly to

the animation. When Larson started working at the Disney studio, Luske was assigned to

train him. The two got along well and Larson later considered Luske to be one of the

most influential people he ever met. 127 Like Luske, Larson did not have a natural drawing talent and struggled to perfect his craft – he was highly critical of his own work, especially the work he did when he had just started. He worked with Luske in animating

Snow White’s animal friends and later remarked that his resembled “sacks of wheat”. In spite of Larson’s self-criticisms, Disney seemed to be impressed with his

126 Allan, 136. 127 Canemaker, Walt Disney's Nine Old Men. 59. 52 work, as he continued to assign Larson to animate animal characters. After Snow White,

Larson animated characters for Farmyard Symphony (1938) and

(1939) before eventually taking on the task of animating Geppetto’s cat Figaro in

Pinocchio.128 Larson’s task for the “Pastoral” sequence was animating the Pegasus family and the centaurs. Like with his work on Snow White, Larson would later criticize his contribution to the centaurs, saying that the centaurs’ movements had “a certain human feeling” that was inappropriate for the creatures.129

The two directors for the “Dance of the Hours” sequence were Norman Ferguson and Thornton “T.” Hee, and it is unsurprising that these two animators were chosen to direct this comic sequence when one examines their history at the studio. Ferguson was a notable character animator who was responsible for creating Pluto, Mickey’s dog.

Shamus Culhane credits Ferguson’s Pluto animations as being instrumental in

introducing a more subtle form of comedy than the slapstick that was popular among

Disney artists at the time: “[Ferguson] began to make use of pantomime. He started to

slow down the pace of the scenes to the point where audiences could almost watch the

thought processes going through Pluto’s befuddled head.”130 Although he had little

training as a draftsman, he had a talent for being able to instill emotions in his characters,

using and stage performances as an influence; notes how

Ferguson-animated characters moved in a manner similar to actors on a stage. In Snow

White and the Seven Dwarfs, Ferguson was responsible for supervising the animation of

the Queen after she had turned into a witch, and in Pinocchio he worked on the animation

128 Ibid, 59-63. Quote from an interview of Larson by Michael Barrier quoted in the Canemaker text. 129 Ibid, 65. 130 Shamus Culhane, 151-152. 53 for the seedy, secondary characters of the fox and the cat.131 In “Dance of the Hours,”

Ferguson did very little of the actual animation, but was responsible for much of the

supervision and staging – “[his] mastery of the staging of broad action is apparent in

every scene.”132

His co-director, Hee, was also chosen because of his skills in animating scenes of comedy. Before working for Disney, Hee worked for Warner Brothers, where he designed the caricatures used in shorts such as Coo-Coo Nut Grove (1936). Impressed by

Hee’s talents, Disney hired him to animate the 1938 short Mother Goose and Hollywood.

Hee was later assigned to work on Pinocchio as a story artist and director – he directed some sequences involving Stromboli, the fox, and the cat.133 He soon found himself working with Norman Ferguson as co-director of The “Dance of the Hours,” where he designed the choreography.

The “Dance of the Hours” combines Ferguson’s vaudeville influences with Hee’s skills in amusing caricature. A primary target of parody is the work of George

Balanchine, one of the most famous choreographers at the time and one of several celebrities to visit the Disney Studio during the production of Fantasia. Perhaps the most obvious example of the “Dance of the Hours” satirizing Balanchine is the scene where

the hippopotamus protagonist (Hyacinth Hippo) rises from a pool. Alastair Macaulay

notes that this is a direct parody of a scene from the 1938 film Goldwyn Follies that

131 Canemaker, Walt Disney’s Nine Old Men, 4, 243, 247. 132 John Culhane, 170. 133 Canemaker, Paper Dreams, 102-104. John Culhane, 164, 166. 54 Balanchine choreographed and in which the svelte ballerina Vera Zorina, a long-time

Balanchine dancer, rises tantalizingly from a pool.134

The influence of the celebrated film theorist and director Eisenstein, who took a personal interest in Disney’s films and wrote about them,135 was noted by Hee himself: “I was involved with the direction, the design, the choreography. I was very much impressed by some Eisenstein films wherein he used the camera in motion at different eye levels, like in Potemkin and I did a lot of thinking about what should happen according to the music.” 136

Wilfred Jackson directed the “Night on Bald Mountain” and the “Ave Maria” sequences. He was one of the first directors for the Disney Studio and he had directed many integral shorts, including (1934), The Band Concert (1935), and (1937). These shorts are worth noting as precursors to Fantasia and the feature length projects of the Walt Disney Studio in general. The Goddess of Spring, which tells the story of Persephone and Hades with characters singing the dialogue in a manner evocative of opera, was an early experiment at drawing human characters with realistic proportions. However, the most interesting thing about the short is the appearance of the character of Pluto, the god of the . In Goddess of Spring,

Pluto is portrayed as the devil himself, and he is surrounded by flames and demons when he arrives to kidnap Persephone. The underworld is portrayed as being hell, where demons dance and perform music for Hades and Persephone. The sequence that introduces Pluto and his minions is a less menacing predecessor to the interactions

134 Macaulay, 865. 135 Eisenstein, 79-185. 136 T. Hee quoted in Canemaker, Paper Dreams, 105. 55 between the satanic giant and his worshippers in the “Night on Bald

Mountain” sequence.

As a precursor to Fantasia, The Old Mill is also significant, as it was designed to showcase the new special effects department and was meant to give the special effects artists some practice before moving on to the feature Snow White and the Seven

Dwarfs.137 Like The Old Mill, many of the sequences in Fantasia, including the Jackson- directed “Ave Maria” sequence, illustrate advances in special effects. The Old Mill also takes a more serious and realistic approach than other Silly Symphonies, making it closer

stylistically to “Night on Bald Mountain” and “Ave Maria.” However, the most notable

aspect of The Old Mill and The Goddess of Spring concerns the plot structure of the two

films, which follows the same formula as many of the segments in Fantasia.

Allan notes that:

“There are two major themes running through [Fantasia]; the first is a cyclical theme of natural order that stresses growth, rebirth, development and ultimate harmony. The second theme is allied to this and concerns power, with natural forces dominated and opposed by authoritarian figures reasserting order after chaos and confusion. Sometimes the forces of nature are allowed free rein and the film celebrates a natural order and energy, but in many instances this freedom from restraint is curtailed and bounded.”138

The Goddess of Spring also follows this formula closely. The opening scene, which introduces Persephone and her subjects, emphasizes “ultimate harmony” both visually and lyrically. Persephone’s subjects consist of elves, birds, animals, and flowers who dance and perform music for her. Harmony is also accentuated through the narrator’s lyrics, which describe Persephone as “The Goddess of Eternal Spring,” and a

“maiden so gentle… that all the world had loved her tenderly.” Under Persephone’s reign

137 Shamus Culhane, 159. 138 Allan, 97. 56 “life was then so pleasant, and joy was ever-present, and the world grew more lovely each day.” This tranquil scene is interrupted with the arrival of Pluto, who abducts her and forces her to live with him as “Queen of Hades” and puts this “eternal spring” to an abrupt end. Pluto plays the role of the “authoritarian figure” who subdues the forces of nature. Imprisoning Persephone in his underworld kingdom causes the of Earth to die as the winter comes. When he arrives with Persephone, his army of demons celebrate the coronation of the new queen. Persephone’s subjects are not as happy, and they sadly endure snow and winter hoping that she will return. Eventually,

Pluto and Persephone come to a compromise (departing from the original myth where

Rhea, the mother of Zeus, and Demeter, the mother of Persephone, are the ones who propose this compromise): – each year she will spend six months on Earth and six months in Hades. Through this agreement the forces of nature and spring are “curtailed and bounded”; they are “allowed free reign,” but only under Pluto’s terms.

While there are no such authoritarian figures in The Old Mill, the film does follow a similar formula, with this short being a celebration of nature. The first few minutes introduce the different animals that live in an old abandoned mill. We see birds, mice, frogs, and bats, all in different areas of the mill, living in harmony with each other. The

“authoritarian figure” which threatens to overthrow this peaceful scene is replaced by another natural force: a storm. The storm tears apart portions of the old mill and threatens to destroy its inhabitants, but the animals survive as the storm eventually passes. The final moments of the film show all the creatures inside the mill continuing their peaceful coexistence.

57 The two Jackson-directed segments in Fantasia, which are part of the same story and which segue into each other, follow this formula as well. In “Night on Bald

Mountain,” Chernobog represents the authoritarian figure who threatens nature. Rather than celebrating “growth, rebirth, development, and ultimate harmony,” Chernobog and his minions celebrate death, destruction, and chaos. He is shown to be incapable of creating things; he can only destroy and distort them. He defies nature by summoning the dead from their graves, who on an appointed night in the calendar year fly to Bald

Mountain in a concerted, but disorderly and chaotic manner. The monstrous, bat-winged giant picks up some of his demons with his hands and either crushes them or drops them into the flames of hell. Mussorgsky’s evocative music enhances the segment’s frightening tone.

Peace and harmony win out when the sun rises and drives Chernobog back into

Bald Mountain. When he disappears, the “Ave Maria” segment begins and a procession of nuns can be seen moving across the forest below. Unlike Chernobog’s minions, who fly about wildly, the nuns march together in unison. Fire is prominent in both parts; in

“Night on Bald Mountain,” fire consumes everything and is untamed. In “Ave Maria,” fire is kept under control and is only seen in the tapers used by the nuns to light the path in the forest. The calm, soothing Schubert piece adds to this segment’s serene mood.

Although the Virgin Mary herself does not appear in the segment, the lyrics emphasize her benevolent nature:

“Ave Maria, Heaven’s bride The bells ring out in solemn praise For the you the anguish and the pride, The Prince of Peace your arms embrace While hosts of darkness fade and cower – Oh, save us, Mother full of grace

58 In life, and in our dying hour. Ave Maria!”

These lyrics portray a protectress who rewards her followers, shields them from evil, and

guides them even at their worst moments. This is in contrast to Chernobog, who is

portrayed as a sadistic and unpredictable entity who mistreats and destroys his followers

for his own amusement.

Chernobog was animated by , who used director as a

model for the animation. Like the Sorcerer in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” Chernobog

moves in a highly theatrical fashion, his movements being reminiscent of dance in live

action cinema. Some of Chernobog’s movements and behavior resemble another villain

Tytla animated: the giant from The (1938). It is true that the giant

from that short is a more comical character with a design owing more to the cartoon

conventions of the time period – his cherry nose and facial expressions recall the dwarfs

from Snow White, whose animation was also supervised by Tytla. Personality-wise, the

giant’s destructive behavior seems less malevolent than Chernobog’s and is more a result of his excessive size and clumsiness. However, certain aspects of the giant seem to be a

precursor to Chernobog such as the way his shadow looms over the village and the way

he places Mickey Mouse in his hand and raises him to his face to examine him. In the

opening of “Night,” the shadows of Chernobog’s hands hover across the village in a similar – if more insidious and far reaching – manner than the giant’s body in The Brave

Little Tailor. Later in “Night on Bald Mountain,” Chernobog picks up some of the flames and brings them up to his face to look at them in a way that brings to mind the giant’s movements while examining Mickey’s movements in his hand. Chernobog even makes

59 similar attempts to crush the things in his hands, although unlike the inept giant,

Chernobog succeeds.

Working alongside Tytla, Kay Nielsen made many of the visual choices for

“Night on Bald Mountain” and “Ave Maria,” as he, too, was assigned to design the two segments. Although Nielsen was born in and was known primarily for illustrating children’s books, in 1936 he went to after being hired to design

Max Reinhardt’s version of Everyman. It was during this time that Nielsen gained an interest in the process of filmmaking, and he began seeking work in Hollywood and was hired by Disney in 1938. Nielsen did have some assistants while at Disney, in part due to his slow working pace. Some additional pastel drawings were done by Bill Wallett, while

Campbell Grant translated Nielsen and Wallett’s art into storyboard sketches. 139

Nevertheless, Nielsen’s style permeates the segment, and many of his sketches are

mirrored in the finished film right down to the angles and designs.140 Nielsen’s artistic background show in his drawings and in “Night on Bald Mountain.” One of his greatest

influences was Chinese and Japanese art, and he recalled admiring Chinese paintings that

were kept in his mother’s room.141 Robin Allan notes this influence in Nielsen’s design of Bald Mountain, whose undulating forms and mountainscapes bear a resemblance to the art of Ando Hiroshige and Katsuhika Hokusai. 142 Although he was given considerable creative freedom and was allowed to work at his own pace, Nielsen still did not enjoy his time at Disney. He found the work schedule and meetings to be exhausting and stressful, and he sent letters to Disney asking for more time to develop his ideas and permission to

139 Canemaker, Before the Animation Begins, 77, 79. 140 Ibid. 141 Ibid, 75-76. 142 Allan, 163. 60 work from his home in the evenings. More notably, Nielsen was at times disappointed with how his drawings translated to animation.143

Upon first glance, Fantasia seems to be an example of direct authorship, with

Walt Disney as the primary auteur and creative force. However, giving all credit for

Fantasia’s outcome to Disney seems a disservice to the artists and animators who worked under Disney’s supervision, as each had a particular style evident in the final product.

The myriad of influences might suggest that Fantasia seems the result of dispersed authorship. However, when one considers the method of production used by Walt

Disney, the type of authorship that seems to be most appropriate for Fantasia is distributed authorship, as Walt Disney generated the ideas, selected the most appropriate personnel, and distributed the work among his animators whose styles endure.

143 Canemaker, Before the Animation Begins, 77, 79. 61 CHAPTER 4: FANTASIA AS SOUND FILM

Save for the “Dance of the Hours” sequence, there are no sound effects in the

animated sequences of Fantasia. Even “Dance of the Hours” has only two sound effects:

a “thump” sound as an ostrich ballerina collapses into a split and the sound of the Grand

Duke Alvise’s ballroom doors crashing shut at the very end of the sequence. In his

critique of the “Pastoral Symphony” sequence, Michael Barrier brings up an interesting

point on the true nature of Fantasia:

“So well constructed are “Dance [of the Hours]” and [“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”] and much of the rest of Fantasia – so snugly are the pictures harnessed to the music – that sound effects are usually missing, as it were, subliminally; the mind may be half-aware that something is lacking, but it is probably not sure what it is. Only in the “Pastoral,” where music and pictures threaten most insistently to go their separate ways, are sound effects needed desperately as a kind of glue. It is through their absence that Fantasia reveals its secret: touted in 1940 as a revolutionary film, it is instead profoundly retrograde. It is a silent film, with orchestral accompaniment.”144

Although raised as an adverse criticism of the “Pastoral” sequence’s construction,

Barrier’s insight raises an interesting question: how does Fantasia add to early debates on sound film? Could Fantasia be seen as nostalgic and an alternative to the direction into which films veered after the 1927 watershed of The Jazz Singer, namely the dialogue- centered “talking pictures”?

144 Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons, 278-279. 62 Although the majority of films today use sound effects and music as supplements to synchronized dialogue, this was not the original intent behind sound synchronization at

the time it was achieved to adequate effect in the 1920s. Indeed, the desire to synchronize sound and image goes back to the very beginning of motion pictures. One of the earliest experiments with a synchronized soundtrack was the Dickson Experimental Sound Film

(1894) directed by W.K.L. Dickson, who created the film for Edison in order to test the

“kineto-” or Kinetophone, a device intended to synchronize sound with image.145 Edison would continue his experiments with synchronized sound, and would publicly exhibit his Kinetophone in 1913.146 In , Léon Gaumont exhibited his

Chronophonograph on November 9, 1902. More than a decade later in June 1913, he would exhibit his Chronochrome films in .147

Edison’s and Gaumont’s experiments were no anomaly, as many other filmmakers experimented with synchronized sound. In 1900, Clément Maurice exhibited a color-tinted version of Cyrano de Bergerac with a synchronized soundtrack. This short film was part of the Phono-Ciné-Théâtre, a series of experiments with sound and film that premiered at the 1900 Paris Universal Exposition.148 Oskar Messter was also producing sound films with a sound-on-disk “Kosmograph” system, which was first demonstrated

on August 30, 1903.149 By 1906, French filmmaker Georges Mendel was producing sound films where actors would lip-sync to musical recordings pre-recorded on a phonograph.150 Attempts at synchronized sound continued into the , with Edison

145 Wierzbicki, 72-73. 146 Rogoff, 61. 147 Gaumont, 65, 67. 148 Eagan, 114 and Friedberg, 271. This was not the first of Maurice’s experiments with sound; he had also filmed a series of surgeries which were set to a synchronized soundtrack. 149 Altman, 158 and Narath, 115-117. 150 Abel, 427, 489-490. 63 introducing his Kinetophone to the public in the same year Gaumont’s “Chronochrome”

films in 1913 were first exhibited.151

By the mid-1910s, the concept of synchronized sound had become such a fascination that occasional films were advertised as being a union of music and image.

One such example, the Italian film Histoire d’un Pierrot (1914), was a film version of a pantomime with a soundtrack that was synchronized with the actors’ gestures and body language. When the film was distributed in the United States by George Kleine, it was advertised as “a new and unusual kind of motion picture” that “Sets Pictures to

Music.”152

During the 1920s, there was an increasing desire to synchronize music and images

in a less technologically complex, reliably synchronized, and more economical manner

than those hitherto commonly used. Several different machines, such as the

Rhythmonome by Carl Robert Blum, the Cinepupitre by Pierre de la Commune, and the

Phonofilm by were created in order to address this issue. 153 When Warner

Bros. began implementing the process, it was seen as an improvement over previous attempts to synchronize sound with image, and motion pictures did not immediately switch to dialogue-centered films. In fact, the first feature-length film using the sound-on-disc process, (1926), contains no spoken dialogue and merely uses the synchronized soundtrack as a substitute for a live orchestra. Michel Chion

describes it as “a silent film whose musical accompaniment is recorded and reproduced

151 Rogoff, 61, 66. 152 Anderson, 4 and "Sets Pictures to Music." 6. 153 Blum’s Rhythmonome is discussed further in Cooke, 270. De La Commune’s Ciné-pupitre is discussed in Freeman, 34. De Forest’s Phono film is discussed further in De Forest, 358-400. 64 by technological means.”154 The Jazz Singer is much in this vein, and the only sequences with synchronized speech are the musical numbers with one exception: a scene where

Jackie (Al Jolson’s character) speaks to his mother. Their conversation is interrupted when Jackie’s father enters the room and yells “Stop!” Even during Jolson’s monologue, he continues to play the piano, making his speech to his mother “in the manner of the chansonniers, and not true dialogue.” Chion notes that this scene can be interpreted as filmmakers being hesitant to incorporate the spoken word into cinema, “as if the cinema, having happily set out into song – since the ease of playback posed no problem for its fluidity or mobility – hesitated, on the riverbank of dialogue, to set foot on the terra firma of realism, as though synchronous speech implied something vulgar, an enslavement to realism, which could still be tempered or sublimated by musical accompaniment.”155 This ambivalence towards the spoken word in film would define the debate on sound film during the early period of synchronized sound.

The early period of the sync dialog era and the “sound film” was highly experimental, with filmmakers utilizing the new technology in a variety of ways. Some early sound films were more dialogue-based, with Warners’ Lights of New York (1929) being an early example of a sound film with continuous dialogue throughout. Other films were shot silently, the dialogue and sound added in post-production. There were also films that alternated between scenes with dialogue and scenes without dialogue, an example being Storm over Mont Blanc (1930).156 Use of music varies in films from this

period as well, with some films only featuring diegetic music whose production is

154 Chion, 34. 155 Ibid, 31. 156 Ibid, 36. 65 visualized and other films featuring nondiegetic music. Chion attributes this experimental

phase to “the gradual dissolve from one art to another and by the fact that certain films

and images adapted well to the new techniques.”157 In other words, this experimental phase was simultaneously a transition period from silent film to fully-integrated sound

film and a period where filmmakers discovered new techniques appropriate for emerging

recording technologies and mechanisms of synchronization.

Not everyone was enthusiastic about the effect that subservience to dialogue

would have on the art of the moving image. Russian filmmakers Sergei Eisenstein,

Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Grigori Aleksandrov released a “statement” on sound film in

1928 expressing fear that the adhesion of image to sound will result in the “culture of montage” being lost and the medium of film becoming little more than an imitation of theater. In order to prevent this, the filmmakers suggested a “contrapunctal use of sound” where sound is used as another component of montage. In other words, Eisenstein,

Pudovkin and Aleksandrov did not want cinematic image-making to be compliant to dialogue and sound; they advocated that sound to become simply another component of film’s dialectical structure of meaning production.158

Fantasia takes yet another approach, sequestering the dialogue into an ancillary role, and making music the driving force of the narrative. There is even one sequence in

Fantasia that makes a notable use of sound counterpoint, namely the “Dance of the

Hours” sequence. The most obvious use of visual counterpoint is in the contrast between the elegant and graceful music with the awkward bodies of the animals and their clumsy, sometimes out-of-sync attempts at dancing to the music. This contrast results in a

157 Ibid, 38. 158 Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Aleksandrov, 257-260. 66 disjunction of which the theorists of counterpoint could have approved, since it

the visuals that would expectedly be of an idealized notion of the elegant prima ballerina

and her gallant beau: Richard Shickel terms the sequence “a broad satirical comment on

the absurdities of high culture.” 159 The influence of Eisenstein and other Russian filmmakers is not a coincidence or unintentional; “Dance of the Hours,” as evidenced by

T. Hee’s references to Eisenstein’s silent films.160 Kendall O’Connor, art director for the sequence, also mentions how Eisenstein and his “symphonic principles of handling graphic forms threatened to turn [the animators’] pencils into batons until this tendency was concealed by crass considerations such as the need for our audience to know what was going on.”161

Another alternative to the “talking picture” from this early period of synchronized sound is the early sound cartoon of the 1930s, which reflected the aural pleasure of synchronized sound through depictions of animated concerts and characters playing musical instruments.162 The first Disney film with a synchronized soundtrack, Steamboat

Willie, highlighted the use of sound effects in a musical manner and concludes with a

musical sequence in which Mickey dances to the popular tune “” while using animals on the ship he steers as musical instruments. The Silly Symphonies, from which Fantasia descends, are also celebrations of synchronized sound through music. As its title implies, (1929) depicts skeletons and other ghouls dancing to the soundtrack and playing instruments made out of their own bones. Hell’s

159 Schickel, 243. 160 T. Hee quoted in Canemaker, Paper Dreams, 105. 161 Kendall O’Connor as quoted in John Culhane, 170. 162 Chion, 38. 67 Bells from the same year features demons playing instruments, dancing, and moving in synchronization to the classical pieces in the film’s soundtrack. 163

Early sound cartoons like these are significant because they provide an alternative

model to the “talking picture” craze that overtook studio filmmaking in the late 1920s and

early 1930s. These early sound cartoons place an emphasis on visuals and music and

minimize dialogue. The imagery in sound cartoons is not tied to the film’s sound effects

as is the case with later animations. Instead, it is the opposite; sound effects are often tied

to the music used in the cartoon. Chion notes that the early sound cartoons of the 1930s

“[are among] the rare cases in film history where the separation between noise and music,

if not completely dissolved, is at least partly so. Cartoon noises, and bumps and crashes

in particular, are posited as possible music – they need only to be repeated rhythmically

for music to ignite… Moreover, by insisting, as they do, on the material genesis of each

sound, these cartoons show music and noises as having a shared source – real bodies that are struck, scratched, or rubbed together.”164

The sequence in Fantasia that most resembles early Silly Symphonies such as

Hell’s Bells and the Skeleton Dance is “The Nutcracker Suite” – understandably so due to the segment’s origins as a Silly Symphony. “The Nutcracker Suite” features a series of dances where animate flora, fungi, and fauna dance to selections of Tchaikovsky’s music.

Each scene features a different group of creatures dancing to the music; the “Chinese

Dance” features mushrooms, the “Arab Dance” features fish, and the “Russian Dance”

163 Although the music in The Skeleton Dance is often mistaken for Danse Macabre, the soundtrack was primarily original music composed by Carl Stalling. The only non-original music in the film is an excerpt from Trolltog (referred to in English as “The March of the Trolls” or “The March of the Dwarfs”) by . See Barrier, Gray, and Spicer, 40, 57. On the other hand, Hell’s Bells features music from Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King and ’s Funeral March of a Marionette. 164 Chion, 42. 68 features thistles. Even the characters who are not dancing, such as the dewdrop fairies at the beginning of the short, perform their actions to the rhythm and the notes of

Tchaikovsky’s music – with a very precise fall of water drops to the beats of the music.

Other sequences show characteristics of these early Silly Symphonies as well, because in them characters move and dance to musical rhythms and emphases with exact timing. This is even visually underlined by the use of diegetic sound in the “Pastoral

Symphony,” in which characters can be seen playing instruments heard on the soundtrack. For instance, fauns play and when those instruments are heard in the Beethoven piece, a centaur plays a horn in a segment where incorporating a horn solo, and cupids play flutes during a section in which brass and woodwind instruments can be heard.

Even the turbulent, apocalyptic “Night on Bald Mountain” section could well have emerged from earlier experiments found in the studio’s Silly Symphonies, and has been noted by several historians and critics as being a more advanced, dramatic version of The Skeleton Dance.165 As narratives, they are close parallels, and “Night on Bald

Mountain” follows the same formula as its 1929 predecessor: at midnight, ghosts and other creatures of the night celebrate in a Witches’ Sabbath. When the dawn comes, they retreat to their graves and everything returns to normal. It is in the visuals, especially in the treatment of scales and proportions, where the later film proves vastly more ambitious.

The Silly Symphonies grew more advanced as time went on; they began incorporating narratives instead of just being a series of gags set to music. However, the

165 John Culhane, 188 and Schickel, 242. 69 approach to music remained the same, with characters moving and dancing to an “apt” soundtrack. Perhaps the best example of this is The Three Little Pigs (1933), which follows a simple story with clearly defined characters and builds the musical and sight gags around this straightforward narrative. In the opening scene, the pig living in the straw house has a and the pig with a stick house has a fiddle. Throughout the beginning of the film, they sing the carefree ditty “Who’s Afraid of the ?” while playing their instruments, and a flute and fiddle can be heard while they play.

When the Wolf is introduced and begins chasing the pigs, the movements are set to the soundtrack. Even some of the sound effects, such as the Wolf blowing down the pigs’ houses, become part of the music. In Fantasia, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” sequence follows the structure of these later Silly Symphonies. It follows a clearly defined plot and the characters move to the music. Although there are no instruments to be seen in the sequence, Mickey Mouse can be seen moving his arms around during the conjuration just as a conductor wields his ..

There is evidence that Disney and his animators were even more concerned with the idea of visualizing pure music in Fantasia than in his earlier films. This is inarguable in the interludes in which instrumental sounds are represented as shapes and visual patterns, a common theme in abstract animation. Indeed, Disney’s distinction in this regard might have been the studio’s penchant for using sound effects in similar ways.

Unlike the Silly Symphonies, which used sound effects in such a “musical” manner, there are no sound effects in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” or any other sequence in Fantasia except in “Dance of the Hours.” Instead, the visual and audio elements are mixed in a way that the music takes the place of diegetic sound. This is perhaps the most significant

70 way in which Fantasia differs from early sound cartoons, and this difference brings

Fantasia closer to the manner of sound use in 1920s silent cinema than its Silly

Symphony predecessors.

The sequences which are most notable in their use of music as an alternative to diegetic sound are the “Pastoral” and “Dance of the Hours” sequences. In the beginning of the “Pastoral” sequence, we see a family of Pegasii flying in the air and landing in a lake. While the mother and father do these actions gracefully and without trouble, the baby Pegasii struggle to land, and one by one they all plop into the lake clumsily. Each time a baby Pegasus falls into the lake, the orchestra plays a loud note, which substitutes for a splashing sound. The Storm scene of the “Pastoral” is a more extended example of the use of music to replace atmospheric diegetic sound. The Storm in question is caused by Zeus, who hurls lightning bolts made by Vulcan at the denizens of Mt. Olympus below. Vulcan brings his hammer down on the anvil to the music, and Zeus’ lightning bolts fall in such a way that the orchestra’s crescendos seem to replace the sounds of thunder.

It is in the “Dance of the Hours” that the connection between noise and music being “real bodies that are struck, scratched, or rubbed together” is most apparent. Every movement the characters make is timed precisely to the soundtrack with telling precision.

At the very beginning of the segment, the lead ostrich wakes up and proceeds to awaken her fellow ostriches. Before she does this, she twirls and arches her foot (in the manner of a ballerina), to the sound of a quick orchestral glissando. When the other ostriches get up, they yawn, and the musical notes mimic the sound of their yawns. Later, when the hippo rises from a water , she shakes herself dry, with a flurry of musical notes

71 accompanying this action. Perhaps the most striking example is when the lovelorn alligator crashes into the fountain accompanied by a clash of .

Fantasia’s replacement of diegetic sound with music is significant not only in its relation to early sound cartoons, but in its relation to silent film. According to Chion, early sound cartoons drew their inspiration from “the imaginary of radio, more precisely from the acousmatic imaginary.” Chion defines acousmatic sounds as “sound that one hears without seeing its cause.” According to Chion, acousmatic sounds create a

“narrative indeterminacy” that leaves room for interpretation, and early sound cartoons were “a playful response to the question of narrative indeterminacy” brought up by the radio. Sound production in silent cinema contrasts to that of radio in that in most pre-

1927 films, viewers see the origins of sounds but do not hear them. Chion argues that

“the sound film could well be, in the beginning, not just the union of a sighted person (the

silent film) and a hearing one (the radio) but also the union of a deaf person and a blind

one, thus preserving for a while the imaginary [sound perspective] proper to each.” 166

As a successor to early sound cartoons, Fantasia also attempts to answer the

question of narrative indeterminacy raised by sources of sound that one sees but does not

hear. In fact, this is hinted at by Deems Taylor in his introduction to the “Toccata and

Fugue” sequence, where he states that the segment is designed to portray what might go

through one’s head while listening to Bach’s music. Early drafts of his introductions,

including one dated to as early as October 7, 1938, accentuate the “Toccata and Fugue”

sequence’s role as a visual interpretation of Bach:

“Most of the music the orchestra is going to play is so-called program music – that is, music that paints a picture or tells a story; and what you’ll see on the screen is Mr. Disney’s conception of that picture or story. But it so happens that

166 Chion, 39-40. 72 we’re opening this program with Mr. Stokowski’s orchestral transcription of the Toccata and Fugue in D minor by Johann Sebastian Bach. Now this is very great music; but it is abstract music. It suggests no definite images or narrative, and the only appropriate way to make it visual is to show it in forms that have no definite meaning. So we’ve taken the sound tracks of the orchestra as they were recorded, and by throwing them on the screen, we’re going to let them arrange their own abstract patterns. In other words, you’ll not only hear this music, but you’re going to see what it actually looks like. [emphasis Taylor’s]”167

Although none of the other musical sequences in Fantasia are as abstract as the

“Toccata and Fugue,” they do generally try to be visual interpretations or annotations of

the music. In other words, they attempt to explore the narrative indeterminacy left by music that one can hear, but cannot see except in the form of musicians playing.

However, the film’s absence of diegetic sound and dialog in its animated sequences distinguish Fantasia from early sound cartoons and bring the film closer to the films that grew directly out of silent cinema, so aligning it with Chion’s idea of a sound film that unites “a deaf person and a blind one.”

Furthermore, Fantasia’s synchronization of sound and image references another popular art form that achieved its height in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: the musical pantomime. Although pantomime is a stage-based art, it exerted a great deal of influence on early cinema. Gillian Andersen notes that between the years 1890 and 1916

there were three different types of theatrical pantomime, the first being “the singing and

dancing acrobatic/comic type,” the second being entirely mimed to a musical soundtrack,

and the third being long narratives rendered with formal movements and stylized

gestures, the pantomime ballet. In all three, music was designed to fit the actions on

stage, as well as the movements and gestures of the performers, but the second and third

types are particularly notable because of their non-reliance on dialogue and singing. The

167 Taylor, 2-3. 73 latter two types were also instrumental in popularizing the genre in the United States, with of L’Enfant Prodigue and Histoire d’un Pierrot being popular examples of the

second type and the work of Russian ballerina Pavlova and Mikhail Mordkin being

popular examples of the third type. By the turn of the century, pantomime had become a

widely acclaimed art form, with composers being commissioned to create full-scale

original scores to pantomimes. 168

By the mid-1910s, several films were released that were being advertised as being related to pantomime. Among these were Histoire d’un Pierrot (1914) and The Birth of a

Nation (1915). Both films received similar publicity:

“The publicity for Histoire d’un Pierrot and Birth of a Nation has many elements in common – music utterly essential, close synchronization of music to action or scenes, composer present on set, forty-piece orchestra, absence or implied absence of intertitles, connection to pantomime, and the sumptuous expressiveness of the music implied by the use of the word ‘opera.’ What is more, the music was continuous, for almost an hour and two hours and forty-five minutes, respectively.”169

These two examples are celebrated ones, but certainly not alone in drawing from the art

of pantomime. Throughout the silent period, critics would often compare silent film to

pantomime and opera.170 D.W. Griffith would frequently refer to his films as pantomimes and initially believed that the spoken word was unnecessary to film, predicting that

“Music – fine music – will always be the voice of the silent drama.”171

The early sound cartoons of the thirties bear some resemblance to pantomime, as

music was integral and synchronized to the images. However, many of these sound

cartoons still utilized sound effects and dialogue, even if the former was added to the

168 Anderson, 12-15. 169 Ibid, 11. 170 Canudo, 133. 171 Griffith, 7. 74 soundtrack after the images had been created. By eschewing any obligation to diegetic

sound (and using it extremely selectively), Fantasia returned to the aesthetic of pantomime and the films that drew on that tradition. Fantasia also approaches narrative and characterization in a manner that greatly resembles pantomime, as music is used to tell the story, establish characters, and set the mood. While this is noticeable throughout the entire film, it is most apparent in sequences that have distinct narrative trajectories. In the beginning of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” we see the sorcerer performing a magic trick where he is creating images with smoke. While the sorcerer performs this trick,

Mickey Mouse passes by him and glances at the sorcerer’s activities from afar. During this short scene, the music is quiet and gives off an aura of mystery – matching the delicate nature of the smoke and Mickey’s fascination at the sorcerer’s act of conjuration.

This moment ends with the sorcerer bringing the smoke back into the skull from which it had emerged, which concludes with a powerful crash in the soundtrack as the condensed smoke turns into a bright flash of light.

The music becomes softer again as the sorcerer yawns, takes off his hat, and leaves his cavern. The music stays quiet as Mickey tiptoes through the room to make sure the sorcerer is gone. After putting on the hat, Mickey spots a broom and attempts to bring it to life in hopes that the broom can help him with his chores. The music becomes louder again during this scene, and Mickey’s movements and gestures begin matching the increasingly propulsive music right down to the individual notes. The broom comes to life, moves towards the buckets in front of Mickey, and sprouts arms with every note the wind section of the orchestra makes. The melody that plays as the brooms march towards the fountain is easily the most recognizable passage in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” and

75 it has a rhythmic marching beat spelled by the that sets the broom’s stride.

Throughout the sequence, this melody functions as a theme for the march of the broom as it approaches and draws water from the fountain.

As he begins his own attempt at sorcery and guides the broom to the fountain,

Mickey becomes increasingly excited as he realizes that his magic seems to have worked.

Eventually, he falls asleep and dreams that he is an all-powerful sorcerer who controls all the elements. Again, the gestures and movements of Mickey and the broom match the music right down to orchestral figures and patterns of notes – for instance, they move to the running scales played by the strings when the broom pours water – and the musical accompaniment gathers energy and matches Mickey’s growing enthusiasm during this scene. When he wakes up from his dream, he finds himself surrounded by water and realizes that the broom will not stop carrying water to and from the fountain. At this point, the music, intended by the composer to convey exactly this emotion, seems to grow tense and apprehensive, matching Mickey’s own fear. When he lashes out at the broom, one can hear crashes with every hack he makes. As the cymbal crashes become faster, Mickey begins lashing faster. Only after he has chopped the broom into fragments does the music become calmer as Mickey emits a sigh of relief. This quickly changes when the fragments of the broom transform into an unstoppable army of brooms.

As they get nearer to Mickey, the music gets louder. Soon, the brooms begin fetching water from the fountain at a speed and frequency that overwhelms Mickey. As the sorcerer’s lair becomes flooded and Mickey becomes increasingly desperate to put an end to the brooms’ antics, the music begins matching his desperation by becoming increasingly loud and frantic.

76 Just in the nick of time, the sorcerer returns and puts an end to the deluge with his magic. Each movement he makes is echoed by the orchestra, which plays a loud note every time he makes a step and raises his arms. The music finally quietens as the water recedes and the sorcerer turns his eyes on Mickey and a single, inanimate broom. The music pauses until the last few raucous notes, which are reflected onscreen by the sorcerer smacking Mickey with the broom.

Although not structured precisely on the plot envisaged by the composer, as is

“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” “The Nutcracker Suite” segment also makes use of pantomime. Each of the selections from Tchaikovsky’s ballet suite introduces different characters with dances and gestures that fit the character of the music. “Dance of the

Sugar Plum Fairy” introduces Dewdrop Fairies who spread dewdrops among the flowers.

To match the delicate, quiet tone of the music, the Dewdrop Fairies are animated to seem unobtrusive, considerate of the forest’s slumbering inhabitants. The “Chinese Dance” introduces sentient mushrooms who jump and dance to the lively music. The “Reed

Flutes” section features flowers with petals that resemble ballroom dancers floating and spinning on a lake before tumbling down a nearby waterfall. The quiet, slow “Arabian

Dance” portrays female goldfish who are modeled on a certain type of oriental dancer (or almeh), and make slow, swaying movements to the music. As would be expected of the cloistered women of a harem, some of the fish are shy and run away at the approach of the camera, a prefiguration of the cinema vérité effects in documentary. In contrast, the characters who accompany the loud and energetic “Russian Dance” are thistles modeled after Russian Cossacks and peasant girls. Unlike the goldfish, they are eager to perform for the audience – they jump towards the viewers and relish close-ups offered by the

77 camera. The finale, “Waltz of the Flowers,” features autumn leaves falling to the music and frost fairies turning the landscape into a winter wonderland.

In many silent films, the music composer was required to create music that would fit the images and the story presented on the screen. Thus, music composed for film required especially precise sound synchronization, and was best served by composers with specific sets of skills. One such composer was Louis Silvers, who composed scores for several D.W. Griffith films before landing the job of selecting music for The Jazz

Singer. Silver’s practice was first to watch and study the film at regular speed, making

note of the film’s atmosphere and “emotional color.” He would then have the film

projected at the slowest speed possible, as an aid to creating “a script embodying each minute detail of plot and characterization.” He would then play the film at normal speed again, timing the length of each change in “action, character, and mood” with a stopwatch. Finally, Silvers would begin to take note of ideas for the themes of each character and come up with music that would fit the mood of each scene.172

In exactly the reverse process, in Fantasia the images were designed to fit the music. Richard Huemer detailed the process of creating something Disney would approve of using the “Pastoral” sequence as an example:

“We had a recording by Toscanini to work with. The notes are the same no matter who plays them, so we figured the timing would be about the same too. Toscanini may have had a different interpretation, some spots might be a little faster than another conductor. But that would be the only difference – fundamentally we knew what we had to deal with in timing… The group was divided into four different movements, and the idea was to play the record and see what ideas you would get that would fit the music… So these four different rooms maybe had sometimes only two guys working on their part, and they would play the record all day and make sketches to fit what they thought was best.”173

172 Van Vranken, 54, 105. Anderson, 20-21. 173 Huemer, 108-109. 78

Fantasia’s roots in the Silly Symphonies – and in early sound cartoons in general

– give it a link to an earlier type of filmmaking that functioned as an alternative to the dialogue-defined “talking picture.” However, Fantasia’s almost complete avoidance of diegetic sound and compartmentalization of synchronous dialogue brings the film closer to silent cinema than its early sound cartoon predecessors, and the film’s substitution of music for diegetic sound results in a near-perfect exemplification of what Michel Chion would describe as the union of the imaginary of radio – where sounds are heard, but not seen – and the imaginary of silent cinema – where sounds are seen but not heard.

Furthermore, the film’s approach to narrative and character animation recuperates the tradition of musical pantomime that was a notable influence on “silent” film. For all of its many innovations, Fantasia’s roots lie grounded in aesthetic terrain that defined both

classical and avant-garde silent cinema.

79 CONCLUSION

This thesis began as an investigation into the creative involvement of Leopold

Stokowski in Fantasia. During this research, I discovered that Stokowski was highly involved in the film, both as a creative force and as a musical educator of sorts for Disney and his employees. Furthermore, the film did not achieve its final form – as indeed

Disney intended –until well into the process of its gestation.

As my inquiries into Stokowski’s involvement continued, I began noticing that the film’s aesthetic choices were determined in many instances by the animators and graphic artists involved in the project. Each individual Disney brought into the studio had her or his own particular style and approach to art discernible in the portion of the finished film that she or he worked on. With this recognition in mind, I became interested in how a film such as Fantasia contributes to our present discussions concerning film authorship. As I inquired further into Fantasia’s origins and production history, I noticed that in spite of these many contributions, Disney was still the main creative force behind the project, as everything had to be approved by him during the production process and before ending up in the finished film. I was inspired by a much-cited passage of André

Bazin’s “De la Politique des Auteurs” in which he discusses “the genius of the [American

80 studio] system.”174 Some may regard Disney as an auteur. To a far greater extent than a

television executive producer his influence can be felt in all the studio products during

the period he helmed the organization. While at MGM was a “hands-on”

executive producer, the studio’s visual style depended entirely on its director’s aesthetic

perspectives. Disney demanded consistency and conformity to his overarching vision.

Even so, Fantasia remains Disney’s unique experiment with creating three tiers of

authorship, with himself occupying the topmost one, Stokowski and Deems Taylor the

second, and the artists and animators in the third.

Other critics would suggest the opposite: that Disney’s own hand is absent from

the features produced by the company, while creative personnel with widely different

visual styles, narrative interests and working methods created films that exemplified their

own strength and aesthetic tastes. For these critics, a film such as Fantasia would be an example of dispersed authorship, with Disney’s being merely the dominant voice in a truly collaborative venture. The most apt category, however, seems to assign the film to distributed authorship: a type of film authorship where the aesthetic impulses may be distributed between a variety of individuals with authorial signature styles, albeit in this instance under the umbrella unfurled by an exemplary representative of the genius of the system.

The fourth and final chapter was developed after reading the passage of

Hollywood Cartoons where Michael Barrier critiques the “Pastoral Symphony” sequence.

Claiming that sound effects are “needed desperately” in the segment, he claims that the

segment’s lack of sound reveals Fantasia’s “secret”: that the film is a silent film with a

174 Bazin, 22, 27. 81 synchronized soundtrack.175 Bringing to bear Michel Chion’s theories with regards to

early sound cinema and those of Gillian Anderson with regards to pantomime’s influence on movement in silent film, I decided to expand on Barrier’s claim and look into whether or not Fantasia could be considered the last great sound film. I discovered that, through its roots in silent film and pantomime, Fantasia meets Chion’s criteria for what the sound film could have been: a combination of the primarily visual silent cinema and purely audial radio.176 Paradoxically, it is the culmination of films’ earlier history rather than a technological window into the future. As such, the “Rite of Spring” sequence may actually be an allegory of Fantasia’s own place in the history of a vanishing cinematic tradition.

Fantasia is an important film, not only to the , but also to debates on film authorship and the history of sound cinema. The history of Fantasia and other films produced by the Walt Disney studio are well-documented, and studying this history reveals that Disney’s studio was a consummate example of the American studio system in action. Furthermore, the film’s resemblance to silent cinema and pantomime makes its approach to narrative a viable alternative to the “talking picture” that is prevalent in contemporary cinema, as evident from remakes and revivals of Fantasia and such films as Michael Hazanavicius’ 2011 Academy Award-winning feature, The Artist.

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