Playing in 'Toon: Walt Disney's "Fantasia" (1940) and the Imagineering of Classical Music Mark Clague American Music, Vol. 22, No. 1. (Spring, 2004), pp. 91-109. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0734-4392%28200421%2922%3A1%3C91%3API%27WD%22%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Z American Music is currently published by University of Illinois Press. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/illinois.html. 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For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. http://www.jstor.org Thu Jan 17 14:44:09 2008 MARK CLAGUE Playing in 'Toon: Walt Disney's Fantasia (1940) and the Imagineering of Classical Music I believe that music can be an inspirational force in all our lives-that its eloquence and the depth of its meaning are all-important . . . that music comes from the heart and returns to the heart-that music is a spontaneous impulsive expression-that its range is without limit-that music is forever growing-and that music can be one element to help us build a new conception of life in which the madness and cruelty of wars will be replaced by a simple understanding of the brotherhood of man. -Leopold Stokowski, Music for All of Us, 318 In my business we'd say it another way. W e say that the public-that is, the audience-would always recognize and appreciate quality. It was this faith in the discrimination of the average person that led us to make such a radically different type of entertainment as Fantasia. We simplyfigured that ifordinary folk like ourselves couldfind entertainment in these visualizations of so-called classical music, so would the average audience. -Walt Disney, quoted in Culhane, Walt Disney's Fantasia, 10 Hailed as a "new kind of art form," Walt Disney's Fantasia (1940) harnessed recent developments in recording (multichannel editing and stereophonic surround playback) and photography (the multiplane camera and Technicolor process) to bring "a wider understanding of good music to the general public."' Rather than threaten the nature of art, mechanical reproduction was to give the best to the rest, taking the music of one of America's finest ensembles, the Philadelphia Orchestra, under one of its best conductors, Leopold Stokowski, to Mark Clague is assistant professor of musicology at the University of Michigan School of Music and associate director of the University's American Music Institute. His research focuses on music and institutions, particularly in Chicago. He was previously executive editor of Music of the United States of America ( M U S A ) , a series of scholarly editions of American music. American Music Spring 2004 O 2004 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois 92 Clague every city and town. As Stokowski writes in the opening pages of the film's souvenir "roadshow" program: The beauty and inspiration of music must not be restricted to a privileged few but made available to every man, woman and child. That is why great music associated with motion pictures is so important, because motion pictures reach millions all over our country and all over the world. Their influence is immensely powerful and deep. We cannot measure how greatly music and motion pictures contribute toward a higher standard and enjoyment of living, increasing the well-being of each one of us, as well as our nation, by giving us not only recreation and pleasure, but stimulation and nourishment of the mind and ~ p i r i t . ~ Fantasia presumed no musical knowledge. In fact, the lack of musical knowledge among Disney's creative staff was touted as evidence that the "average listener should be much less humble about his abilon nineteenth-century con"~ ity to understand good m ~ s i c . Building ceptions of art music as a moral force for community ~ p l i f tFantasia ,~ uses color, image, pattern, and narrative to articulate musical experience for its audience. In studying Fantasia, critics of music on film can learn much about the chemistry of sound and image, especially with regards to how audiovisual alignment can articulate form, how gestures of melody and motion reinforce one another, and how musical rhetoric and image fuse to create meaning. Fantasia is a series of didactic vignettes, covering musical topics, such as form and tone color, and ranging far afield to connect the art of music with everyday life. Its musical segments are structured as if a concert feature with intermission (see Table In nontechnical and sometimes even colloquial language, Fantasia's narrator, Deems Taylor, introduces each musical segment, offering background to the music and its imagery. He identifies three kinds of music in the film: 1) program music that "tells a definite story"; 2) music that "while it has no specific plot does paint a series of more or less definite pictures"; and 3) absolute music that "exists simply for its own sake."6 Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (BWV 565), which opens the film, belongs to this last, abstract category. Here images guide the listener's experience. To describe the music in pictures, Disney's animators provide members of the audience with, as Taylor explains, "abstract images that might pass through your mind if you sat in a concert hall listening to this music." As the curtain opens on the screen's virtual stage, Fantasia's didactic impulse becomes apparent. Musicians appear, gradually walking onstage as if before a live concert. The opening neighbor note plus scalar theme of Bach's Toccata (see Ex. 1)is foreshadowed when bass Table 1. The Musical Program of Fantasia (1940) Title T~pe Composer Nationality Date Length 1. Toccata and Fugue in D Minor 2. The Nutcracker Suite 3. The Sorcerer's Apprentice 4. The Rite of Spring Organ Solo Ballet Suite Tone Poem Ballet J. S. Bach-Stokowski Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Paul Dukas Igor Stravinsky German Russian French Russian c. 1708 1891 1897 1913 9:22 16:15 9:17 22:28 5. Meet the Soundtrack 6. The Pastoral Symphony [Sixth] 7. Dance o f the Hours [La Gioconda] 8. Night on Bald Mountain 9. Ave Maria Demo Symphony Balletlopera Tone Poem Song American German Italian Russian German 1940 1808 1876 1866-86 1825 3:24 22:OO 12:13 7:25 6:27 Intermission 1500 Disney Ludwig van Beethoven Amilcare Ponchielli Modeste Moussorgsky F. Schubert /Rachel Field (new text) Note: Titles taken from 1940 Fantasia program; timings from Walt Disney's Fantasia Remastered Original Soundtrack Edition, Buena Vista Records 600072, 1990. Example 1. Opening page of Leopold Stokowski's "symphonic transcription" of Johann Sebastian Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor BMV 565 (New York: Broude Brothers, 1952; used by permission) showing the explication of structural melodic repetition through the use of contrasting instrumental choirs (here: strings, woodwinds, full strings, then full orchestra). TOCCATA AND FUGUE IN D I MINOR BACH-STOKOWSKI gio (Improvisato) J = atmr Flutes 1.2.3.4 ?B EnglishHom Clarinets (C) 1-2-3 c,o%- (c) Bassoons 1-2-3 Celesta 1 - Harps 1 2 Adagio (Improvisato) Violin I Vlolin 2 Copyr,ght, IPS?, byleopsld SlokarrY International Conright Sewred All Righk Rerewed 63 if". Bus B.B.92 96 Clague clarinet (1:06-8), trumpet (1:22-29), and bassoon (1:4547) state the motif during their informal warm up^.^ Here, sound connects to image. As each instrument is heard, the camera focuses on the corresponding performer, making the ritual of the musicians' entrance and tuning a lesson in timbre and orchestration. Originally for organ, Bach's Toccata is heard here in a "symphonic transcription" by Stokowski. The orchestration builds upon this impulse to teach by juxtaposing instrumentaI choirs of contrasting timbre to articulate melodic structure.* Fantasia's audience thus watches the architecture of Bach's work unfold in time. Disney's imagery reinforces Stokowski's interpretation, using light, color, space, and stereophonic sound placement to further differentiate the choirs. Standing on an Olympian podium, the conductor towers over the performance as Zeus. His opening baton motions are for the viewer, not the performer, as he faces left, right, then center to indicate the different instrumental forces for each of the opening motivic statements. Disney's imagery enhances this explication of musical structure. Shadowy profiles of the musicians performing and later pictures of these instrumentalists colored by tinted spotlights highlight successive thematic statements. As the second section, the fugue, begins, the film stretches representation toward increasing abstraction. An image of Stokowski dissolves into what Taylor has called "cloud forms." As the fugue continues, abstractions of string instruments, such as bows, bridges, and sets of strings, swoop across the screen to mimic sonic gesture and explicate melodic structure. While motion reveals meIody, image color reflects tone color. Violins are represented by bright colors like yellow, while dark lower timbres, such as the celli or brass, are shown by red or deep green. Fantasia thus teaches its viewers how to listen. As described in the 1940 roadshow program, Fantasia offers the opportunity of "seeing music and hearing pictures," suggesting that sight informs listening and vice versa.9 Fantasia is an early example of Disney's "imagineering." This term was coined by Walt Disney in the 1950s to refer to the creative process used to plan Disneyland, later becoming a central management paradigm for the company as a whole.10 Yet more than a decade earlier, with studio research labs exploring the animation of natural phenomena such as the motions of bubbling liquid for The Rite of Spring segment, Fantasia exemplifies the combination of science and creativity, engineering and imagination that Disney's term represents. Fantasia is literally an imagineering of music. Its images and stories introduce layers of signification to sound that add meaning to and comment on music. The effect of image was a key question for music critics reviewing the film in 1940. Did Fantasia damage music? Many Walt Disney's Fantasia (1940) 97 found the film's humor offensive; audience laughter was evidence of distraction, not appreciation.ll Despite admiration for its innovative RCA sound system, music critics generally disliked the film.12Edward Downes, in the Boston Evening Transcript, summed up the complaint of many of his colleagues: Great music always tends to dominate no matter what combination of the arts. . . . And the greater the music, the more irresistibly it dominates. On the other hand, it is a fundamental law of the film that a moving image on a screen dominates everything else, dialogue, music and sound effects. Therefore, unless the film does violence to its own nature and retires, so to speak, into the background, it will do violence to any truly great music.13 Such concern about the influence of image on sound signals the need to look closely at how image shapes musical experience. In Fantasia image does not simply explicate sound, it introduces a host of associations, ideas, and references to music that bring new meanings to Bach and Beethoven. Fantasia is an audio-visual synthesis that transformed both sound and image into a "new form of entertainment."14 It appealed to middlebrow culture, puncturing social barriers between high and low, education and entertainment, to nurture a middle-class American culture by making classical music accessible. Something familiar described something unfamiliar. Story described musical form, taking the film's audience on an artistic journey made more intelligible and satisfying by the overlay of (usually narrative) image. Classical music was not sacred or inviolate to Disney's animators. They cut and spliced it to fit their narrative designs. The amorphous opening bassoon solo of T h e Rite of Spring, for example, returns at the close of Fantasia's prehistoric Stravinsky segment in place of the composer's own final punctuation. This reprise transforms the ballet of sacrifice into a cyclic dance of birth, death, and rebirth, changing Stravinsky's work into something else. In Fantasia, the animator ruled the filmic concert; the composer became subject to arrangement and transformation. On one hand, such musical surgery deflated classical music's pretensions, popping the cult of the composer. Fantasia deployed music as an art of delight and pleasure as well as of genius and learning. Another strategy used to forge bonds between art and audience was to connect the abstractions of music with imagery from day-to-day experience. Images of animals and plants, nature and the heavens, parents and children, boyfriends and girlfriends, the seasons, a storm, rainbows, sunsets, and the arches of a gothic church forge links between Fantasia and archetypal experiences in the lives of its audience. This connection of music and life was at the heart of Fantasia. Disney 98 Clague and Stokowski saw the film/ music synthesis as a vehicle to improve modern life. As Stokowski wrote, music was "an inspirational force" with which to "build a new conception of life."15 The movie thus connects music to life through image. This connection invites Disney's imagineers to offer pictures of this new vision. Such a project reveals the ideological processes at work in Fantasia or what might be called the ideological imagineering of classical music. Fantasia, for example, celebrated the triumph of technology and science in modern living.16 Implicit in the film is a faith in scientific research and progress. This belief becomes explicit in T h e Rite o f s p r i n g segment.17T h e Rite no longer inspired riots,18 but reason as Stravinsky's modern poem of primitivism becomes a marker of the Enlightenment. Disney's animators were seen to be contributing to science by providing the first recreation of how dinosaurs might have moved. Fantasia also demonstrates evolutionary theory. A series of vignettes depict stages of prehistoric life from one-cell animals and other early sea life to fishes, mammals, and dinosaurs. Yet, particularly in the American context, Darwin's ideas crossed ideological fault lines among certain religious groups. The laws forbidding the teaching of evolution that had inspired the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial would not be declared unconstitutional in the United States until 1968 with Epperson v. Arkansas.19 Through its tableaux showing the evolutionary stages of life on Earth proposed by science, however, Fantasia taught Darwin's theory. At least one critic complained of this hijacking of Stravinsky to teach elementary science: "To impose upon this a children's lesson in geology, sociology and bacteriology is to us a far cry indeed from the quality of Stra~insky."~O The synchronicity of sound and animation in Fantasia lent authority to Disney's ideological imagery. Fantasia was itself an example of relentless scientific advance.21In 1940 synchronized sound had been used in American theaters for just over a decade. The rich network of interconnections between motion and phrase, design and motif, music and narrative in Fantasia demonstrates a new level of integration. As the roadshow program points out: Making Fantasia was a far more complex undertaking than just listening and painting what happened to flash into the imagination. The host of impressions had to be organized and expressed in harmony with the rhythm and structure of the music itself. The Herculean nature of the task becomes evident as you see that the artists have not only remained faithful to the spirit of the various compositions, but they have a l s o . . . translated the very phrases and measures and even individual notes into just the right colors and actions. The perfection of color blending, color harmony and color meaning in Fantasia is remarkable.22 Walt Disney's Fantasia (1940) 99 Disney's technical virtuosity made Fantasia's interpretations credible and gave its images a naturalness that made the whole more compelling. It paired music with "just the right" imagery, giving the whole ideological construction the imprimatur of Art. The convincing integration of music and image might naturalize Fantasia's arguments. For viewers sympathetic to the teaching of evolution and the Enlightenment notions of progress it represented, the Stravinsky segment would be ideologically concordant. For those preferring creationism or modernist fragmentation, Fantasia would be ideologically discordant. Such discord required resolution, either by rejecting the evolutionary narrative altogether or through change. By harmonizing music and image Fantasia argues for the fundamental acceptance of its rhetoric-its pairings of music and image are defined as "right" through the film's own aesthetic force. With Fantasia, Disney played in 'toon / tune with the ideological imagination. The film portrays its interpretations as concordant, artistic, scientifically informed, original, and definitively American. Such social harmonics saturate the image-music synthesis that is Fantasia, thus leveraging music and image as tools of comprehensive ideological construction concerning issues of gender, ethnicity, race, class, and power. Stokowski recognized this power of music to shape society. In Musicfor All of Us (1943), he wrote: The influence of music on individuals-communities-nations is so powerful that it would be well for governments to have a department of all the arts, including music, which would study these physical and psychological influences. They are the food of the mind and soul. They can influence the morale of a nation so that in times of stress everyone is able to meet the emergen~y.~3 According to Stokowski, music could shape the behavior of individuals, communities, and nations. Fantasia can thus be seen as an effort toward the invention of a better conception of life through ideological imagineering. In one case, an ideological shift in American culture has led to social dissonance, revealing the constructed nature of the imagelmusic alloy. Today, the picaninny centaurettes of Fantasia's Beethoven Pastorale segment strike a sour "wrong" note, so much so that they have been excised from the film. The sixtieth-anniversary release of Walt Disney's Fantasia reinstates nearly all of the footage from the original November 1940 premiere.24 Viewers again see the intermission segment in which musicians gradually leave the stage and the curtain closes for a fifteen-minute break, thus enhancing the film's frame tale as a symphony concert.25An informal jazz-inspired jam among the musicians suggests the broad talents of "classical" musicians and associates Fantasia with what was 100 Clague contemporary dance music. Other recoveries show how humor was used to soften further the severe formality of the classical concert ritual for Fantasia's broad target audience. One restored gag interrupts Deems Taylor's introduction to Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring when a glistening set of chimes falls crashing, sounds a riotous metallic interlude, and entangles its p e r f ~ r m e rTwo . ~ ~ other percussionists rush to his aid as audience laughter rises to transform the accidental solo into a duet. While serving as another reminder of the pitfalls of live performance, the gag further defuses some of Fantasia's highbrow pretensions. For initiates, the crash may operate on a different level as it reflects not only the enormous percussive forces needed for the ballet but also the legendary riot and aesthetic controversy over modern music evoked by the Rite's 1913 Paris premiere. While the packaging of the sixtieth-anniversary edition claims to offer "Walt Disney's Original Uncut Version," cartoon historians Jim Korkis and John Cawley, in their book Cartoon Confidential, cast doubt upon this advertising claim of c0mpleteness.2~The authors state that in the Beethoven Pastorale segment of the 1940 original, a black-coded servant c e n t a ~ r e t t esometimes ,~~ referred to as the "picaninny centaurette" (see Fig. I), primps a white-coded centaurette by polishing her hoof .29 Figure 1. The first self-censored "Picaninny Centaurette" from Fantasia's Beethoven Pastorale segment. Walt Disney 01940. Walt Disney's Fantasia (1940) 101 Figure 2. The second self-censored "Picaninny Centaurette" from Fantasia's Beethoven Pastorale segment. Because of her hairpiece, this character seems the most likely match for the name "Sunflower" often given to the character in Figure 1. There is a third picaninny centaurette figure for which no publicity photo has been found. Walt Disney 01940. Two other racist characters also have been removed. A second servant picaninny, with a large yellow flower in her hair, two blue ribbons in her ponytails, and hoop earrings (see Fig. 2), braids flowers into the tail of a yellow centaurette. 30 This picaninny shows her frustration when a flick of her charge's tail sends the results of her decorative labors flying, yet she chases after in a futile attempt at repair. A third picaninny carries a prancing centaurette's floral train, almost crashing into her graceful mistress after a pause, but then catching her poise and merrily jogging behind.31Although not visible in the film's current release, the existence of these racist characters is confirmed by contemporary publicity stills, published illustrations in the film's souvenir program, and a 1940 issue of N e ~ s w e e k . ~ ~ 102 Clague These picaninny caricatures follow certain conventions of illustrator Freddy Moore's "Lovely, Alluring, Bewitching" centaurette figures.33For example, the colors of their brown bodies harmonize with matching hair and lighter tan torsos. Yet closer inspection reveals an aggressive vocabulary of difference. The picaninny centaurettes' sensuality is discounted.34 As yet children, their chests lack breasts. The long curvaceous body and tail of the centaurette Lolitas are stunted for the picaninnies. Their stomachs protrude rather than accentuating the hips. Their stubby fingers are those of working servants. The extreme characterization is most apparent in the face. Their Mickey Mouse features include exaggerated brow ridges, big minstrel smiles with buckteeth, and huge eyes with comic pupils that lack the realistic detail of eyelids and lashes drawn for the sensuous centaurettes. The first picaninny's large hoop earrings even evoke a tribal identity and the four bows in her hair accent a crown of spiked ponytails incongruous with the centaurettes' long flowing tresses and elegant hairpieces. According to Korkis and Cawley, the picaninny centaurettes appeared in the original Fantasia but were excised before a 1969 rerelease. Given that at the time the civil rights movement had suffered such events as the assassination of Martin Luther King and hundreds of resultant riots, the appearance of the picaninny centaurettes would have offended many and likely undercut Disney's social and financial aspirations for the film.35 Such socially inspired editing, however, left awkward gaps in the soundtrack. Initially the racist scenes were simply cut off the reel, soundtrack and all, creating skips in the musical argument. For the fortieth-anniversary 1980 theatrical rerelease, musical continuity was restored by hard zooming and magnification that allowed much of the original footage to be retained, while the picaninny characters remained safely cropped out of frame.36Of Figure 1, for example, only the upper right-hand corner of the frame remained in the film. That a racist figure such as the picaninny would be deleted from a film reminds us that cartoons are not simply innocent fantasy, but have the potential for ideological imagineering. The picaninnies expose Fantasia to be a product of its place and time affected by the social and cultural bias of its creators. Disney's concert feature is firmly rooted in late 1930s and early '40s America and serves to perpetuate its ideological assumptions, including racist attitudes of social hierarchy. Recognizing the blatant ideological content of these overtly racist images brings the more textured social rhetorics of the remainder of the Pastorale segment, and indeed, Fantasia as a whole, into sharper focus. Fantasia is not a work of art that transcends time and place completely; rather it reflects and perpetuates the attitudes of its day. Walt Disney's Fantasia (1940) 103 Fantasia's caricatures inscribe constructs of appropriate behavior. As the Pastorale segment continues, the mythical centaur-centaurette couples pair off by color, with the young women displaying a lighter pastel hue in the same color family as their beaus. For example, the centaur that leaps forward to retrieve the rose dropped by a blue centaurette is also blue (1:21:45). Pairings in magenta and tan follow, while the cupids find the perfect match for a final single blue centaur in another blue centaurette (1:23:40-1:24:50). This attention to color establishes a message of sexual concordance reinforced by technology-the subtle pastels that Walt Disney had realized by negotiating an exclusive contract with Technicolor to use its rich three-color Other scenes in the Beethoven Pastorale segment offer viewpoints on men, women, youth, love, family, parenting, gluttony, power, and the relationship of the individual to an idealized, benevolent, and spiritualized conception of n a t ~ r e . ~ 8 Fantasia's underlying rhetoric of race reaches its apex in the next Beethoven vignette-the Bacchanal, built on the musical and pictorial ideas of the third movement of the Pastorale, "Lustiges Zusammensein der Landleute" [Merry gathering of the country folk] (see also Fig. 3). Here the god of wine and celebration is disciplined for comic effect-his punishment required by a variety of social transgressions, including drunkenness, obesity, foreignness, a lecherous pursuit of the young centaurettes, and a homoerotic, if accidental, kiss. In contrast with the beautiful young centaurs, Bacchus has been portrayed as a lovable clown prone to excess. The film's creators have carefully steered audience sympathy away from Bacchus in order to enhance the comic effect of Zeus's attacks during the storm sequence. The flight of Bacchus and the harmless results of the god's lightning strikes, described by narrator Deems Taylor as "playing darts," echoes Disney's ideal of representing "fun without malice." Yet the implications of such humor are without malice only to the extent that they are concordant with prevailing ideology and therefore go unnoticed. If the veil of humor is lifted, to transgress is to anger the gods and receive punishment. The key to the humor of this sequence is the interaction between .~~ Bacchus and his donkey-unicorn or "mulicorn" sidekick, J a c ~ h u sThe name Jacchus, an echo of the words Bacchus and "jackass," refers both to the literal character-that is, a male donkey-as well as its comical behaviors. The small stature and exaggerated features (eyes, ears, mouth, and buckteeth) of Jacchus mark him as another minstrel character derived from nineteenth-century conventions of the buffoon Jim Crow. The Bacchanale scene ends with Bacchus unwittingly embracing and kissing Jacchus, thus transgressing racial and gendered boundaries of intimacy. Immediately following this social faux pas, rain be- 104 Clague Figure 3. One of the two "Nubian" or "Zebra Centaurettes" that attend the entrance of Bacchus in the country dance / Bacchanal portion of the Pastorale segment; seen in the distance and less prominent in a busy scene, these figures remain in the current release of the film. Note the accentuated sexual presentation here as compared to Figures 1 and 2 (see n. 35). Walt Disney 01940. gins to fall and the pair is attacked by Zeus who chases them across the screen with a series of lightning bolts (1:27:25-1:29:12). No other characters in the film are targeted by the gods' "play." For any humor here to work, the audience needs to understand through symbolic markers and actions where its sympathies should lie. Disney used a rhetoric of social taboos to label Bacchus as the target of slapstick comedy. Such humor has powerful ideological implications as it is just such locations as humor where socialization occurs. Play seems innocent and without manipulation, thus reinforcing the naturalness and apparent truth of the behaviors rehearsed. Thus Fantasia polices social boundaries and describes the risks and rewards of these same behaviors. The Pastorale Segment had originally been Walt Disney's Fantasia (1940) 105 conceived to the music of Gabriel Piern4's Cydalise. Yet, as the scene took increasingly dramatic and imaginative shape, Walt Disney decided that "[tlhis music is not so hot to me. . . . We should find music to fit the things we have in mind here-but good music. . . . Let's see if we can't put together the right stuff."40Beethoven's Pastorale turned out to be the "right stuff." It not only brought the drama of the Sixth Symphony to the service of Fantasia, but also lent the prestige and ideological power of the great German composer to the film's "conception of life." As a cultural hero, Beethoven served as an emblem of Western culture-a figure "right" for the job and one ideally suited as a vehicle of the ideological imagination. Although facilitating the continued appreciation of Fantasia, the Disney studio's self-censorship of the picaninny centaurettes perpetuates a fiction-the fiction that after such inappropriate characters have been purged, the cartoon returns to some fundamental state of i n n ~ c e n c eThe . ~ ~ picaninnies are not only unfortunate anachronisms but are emblematic of the fundamental conception of Fantasia as a utopian synthesis of art and society that crystallizes a set of social relations. In Fantasia classical music is harnessed to propel a corporate democratic vision of society that tacitly portrays certain ideologically concordant social positions and behaviors as natural and true. The seamless alloy of music and image dancing together without dropping a beat brings the momentum of narrative and the internal logic of music together in a convincing ideological synthesis. The Disney Studio did not invent sexism, racism, or homophobia; its attitudes are not individual or peculiarly institutional, but typical of 1940s America. Fantasia reflects the ideological viewpoints of its time, drawing from a wide range of well-established stock theatrical characters, notably from minstrelsy. In this sense, Fantasia serves as a remarkable site for social memory engraved on film and in sound. It captures the ideological position of a dominant white culture in a particular time and place. That many of these social issues continue to confront and challenge American society today only increases the value of the film as a living history of social and cultural life in the United States. Fantasia is an American artifact in 'toon / tune with its times. As such, the original film with all its delights and blemishes serves as an important reminder of where America has been and what it aspired to be. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A preliminary version of this article was read at the 2000 NYU media conference organized by Ron Sadoff and Gillian Anderson. The ideas and discussions offered at the conference greatly influenced my work. I am particularly grateful for the comments and observations offered by Michael Pisani, Tom Riis, Gillian Anderson, and Kathryn 106 Clague Lowerre. Thanks are also due to the students at the University of Michigan in my Music, Politics, and Popular Culture course as well as a 2000 seminar, Classical Music in the United States, especially Shannon A. Dubenion-Smith, Thomas R. Oram, and Shana Goldin-Perschbacher. NOTES 1. Walt Disney Presents Fantasia, souvenir roadshow program (Walt Disney Productions, 1940), [lo]. For a discussion of the politics of "good" music, that is, Western European classical music, and the expected salutary effects of classical music on American culture, see Mark Katz, "Making America More Musical through the Phonograph, 19001930," American Music 16, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 448-75. 2. Walt Disney Presents Fantasia, [5]. 3. In his introduction to Fantasia at the beginning of the film, Deems Taylor reiterates such encouragement to musical novices, telling the audience, "What you're going to see are the designs and pictures and stories that music inspired in the minds and imaginations of a group of artists. In other words, these are not going to be the interpretations of trained musicians, which I think is all to the good [laughter]" (track 2). 4. For the early history of music's social possibilities in America, see Michael Broyles, Music ofthe Highest Class (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).An 1885 statement by a Chicago patron that classical music (in this case opera) "at prices within the reach of all, would have a tendency to diminish crime and Socialism.. . by educating the masses to higher things" shows the further development of this philosophy, which traces its roots back to the writings of Plato and Aristotle ("The Opera Is Over," Chicago Tribune, April 19, 1885, 12). 5. Fantasia was conceived as a perpetually touring concert program that would be updated with new selections over time. Such substitute segments were already under development for inclusion: Clair de Lune (Debussy), "The Ride of the Valkyries" (Wagner), The Swan of Tuonela (Sibelius), Adventures in a Perambulator (John Alden Carpenter), and Invitation to the Dance (Weber). The roadshow program contains a note at the bottom of the program page that explains "from time to time the order and selection of compositio~son this program may be changed" [a]. 6. Quotations from track 1 of Fantasia DVD. Taylor is described in Fantasia's souvenir program as a "music critic, composer, author and radio commentator" who "has played an essential part in making fine music vitally interesting to millions of people" 161. 7. Just after the curtain opens (0:07-15), a horn foreshadows the "Waltz of the Flowers" theme from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite, which will be heard in the second musical segment of the Fantasia concert. Another instrument for which sound and image are connected during this segment is the harp. 8. For other examples of Stokowski's coloristic arrangement strategies see "BachTranscriptions" in Stokowski Stereo Collection, BMG Classics 09026-62605-2, 1997. 9. Roadshow program, [ll]. 10. In 2002 the Disney Company website at http://disney.go.com:80/techcenter/imaginethat/ offered a brief introduction to the term imagineering and stated that the company employed "nearly 2,000 imagineers representing more than 152 different disciplines." 11. Critic Edward Barry, in a Chicago Daily Tribune review of Fantasia, wrote, "When some of the composer's most incredibly lovely ideas are drowned out by audience laughter at the antics of centaurs one does not need to be an old fogy to cry 'Hold! Walt Disney's Fantasia (1940) 107 Enough!"'; Edward Barry, "Fantasia: Great Music Buried in Orgy of Color and Sound, Movie and Music Critics Find," Chicago Daily Tribune, Feb. 20, 1941, 13; quoted in Moya Luckett, "Fantasia: Cultural Constructions of Disney's 'Masterpiece,"' in Disney Discourse, ed. Eric Smoodin (New York: Routledge, 1994), 220. 12. See Luckett, "Fantasia," 214-36. 13. Edward Downes, "Fantasia Again," Boston Evening Transcript, Feb. 8, 1941, pt. 3, p. 6; quoted in ibid., 221. 14. Roadshow program, [18]. The term "audio-visual" is borrowed from Michel Chion. 15. Stokowski, Music for A11 of Us (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1943), 318. 16. Stokowski used technology to improve art, adjusting the balance among instruments during editing to correct perceived problems in orchestration. He writes, "For example, in the thunderstorm part of Beethoven's 'Pastoral' Symphony are certain intense phrases for bassoon, clarinet, and oboe which have an urgent agitated expression. These phrases are almost inaudible in the concert hall because the rest of the orchestra is playing loudly and furiously. In Fantasia we were able to give these important passages their true value" (Musicfor A11 of Us, 246). 17.The program booklet claims that "Disney has let Science write the scenario" and emphasizes that "world-famous authorities" such as "Roy Chapman Andrews, Julian Huxley, Barnum Brown and Edwin P. Hubbell" served as volunteer consultants. The studio even lays claim to advancing scientific study in that "it was not until Fantasia that anyone had seen such monsters live and breathe and move and die. And only after long months of study of skeletal remains, of balance and weight, were the Disney artists able to conclude how these creatures must have moved" (roadshow program, [201). 18. For an account of the riotous controversy surrounding the premiere of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, see Thomas Forrest Kelly, First Nights: Five Musical Premieres (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). 19. See Edward J. Larsen, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 1997); Paul Keith Conkin, When A11 the Gods Trembled: Darwinism, Scopes, and Americatl lntellectuals (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000); Kary D. Smout, The CreationlEvolution Controversy: A Battle for Cultural Power (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998); and Jeffrey P. Morgan, The Scopes Trial: A BriefHistory with Documents (Boston: BedfordISt. Martin's, 2002). 20. Olin Downes, "Disney's Experiment: Second Thoughts on Fantasia and Its Visualization," New York Times, quoted in Luckett, "Fantasia," 223. 21. Fantasia's many releases have strengthened the association of the film with cutting edge technology: widescreen format, the invention of VHS, and DVD have each prompted updates of the 1940 version. Fantasia 2000 was likewise filmed in 140mm IMAX format and makes effective use of computer animation technology. 22. Roadshow program, [lo]. 23. Stokowski, Music for All of Us, 308. 24. Walt Disney's Fantasia: Walt Disney's Original Uncut Version, Special 60th Anniversary Editiolz. Disney DVD 18268. A three-disc set titled The Fantasia Anthology also includes Fantasia 2000 and a supplemental disc titled Fantasia Legacy that contains supplemental materials (storyboards, concept art, character designs, etc.) for each segment in both movies. 25. This concert illusion is likewise supported by musicians entering and exiting the stage at the beginning and end of the movie, as well as environmental sounds of the musicians warming up and tuning before each half of the concert. 26. Beginning of track 7 of the DVD. Taylor completes only the phrase, "When Igor Stravinsky wrote his ballet The Rite of Spring . . ." before the gag interrupts. The laughter 108 Clague reassures the audience that no serious damage has been done. Taylor begins his narration again without further delay. 27. Jim Korkis and John Cawley, Cartoon Confidential (Westlake Village, Calif.: Malibu Graphics Publishing Group, 1991). See also David Williams, "Whatever Happened to Sunflower?" Animator 28 (October 1991): 13, and John L. Berger, "Disney and Censorship-A Match Made in Hell," dated April 2001, at http://www.widescreen.org/commentaries/2001-04-apr.shtm2. This site includes images and film clips of the censored scenes. Color images of the picaninny centaurette are available on the World Wide Web. 28. The term "centaurette" is credited to Walt Disney himself (DVD commentary, track 12, and John Culhane, Walt Disney's Fantasia [New York: Abradale Press, 19831, 133). It refers to a female centaur, a creature that has the legs, tail, and body of a horse but the torso, arms, and head of a human in place of the horse's neck and head. They are described in a 1940s Disney theatrical trailer as "Lovely, Alluring, Bewitching Centaurettes" (see "publicity" bonus material on Fantasia Legacy DVD, 2000). 29. See Dr. David Pilgrim, professor of sociology at Ferris State University, "The Picaninny Character" website (http://www.ferris.edu/news/jimcrow/picaninny/) at the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia. Among the earliest and most famous picaninnies was a character from Harriet Beecher stoke's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Topsy, who as a "wild child" exemplified the corrosive effects of slavery. Other picaninny figures include Little Black Sambo. 30. "Sunflower" is the name often given to the first of the picaninny centaurettes (see Fig. I), but the floral hairpiece of the second makes it a more likely candidate (see Fig. 2). 31. Korkis and Cawley, Cartoon Confidential, 37. 32. "Mickey Mouse in Symphony: Disney and Stokowski Combine Talents in Film 'Fantasia,"' Newsweek (Nov. 25, 1940), 50-52; the same image reproduced in Cartoon Confidential is found at the bottom of p. 50 in Newsweek and here as Fig. 1. The 1940 souvenir program Walt Disney Presents Fantasia published by Walt Disney Productions includes preliminary drawings of the centaurette (p. [24] upper left) and picaninny (p. [25] lower right) characters in versions slightly different from the publicity stills. This picaninny image seems to have escaped notice by Disney censors as it appears in the bonus material on the Fantasia Legacy DVD (see Fantasia Supplement Menu: More: Publicity). Even if inadvertent, this represents Disney's only corporate acknowledgment of the character. 33. The nubile adolescents were considered "typically American" and known around the Disney Studios, after their artist, as "Freddy Moore Girls." They are more commonly referred to today as Lolitas, after the heroine of Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov's novel Lolita (not published until 1955). 34. In contrast, two highly sexualized racial figures survive in the sixtieth-anniversary release of Fantasia, a pair of "Nubian" or "zebra" centaurettes (appearing track 12,1:25:52) that accompany the entrance of Bacchus as servants. One of the zebra centaurettes fans the god of wine, while the other carries a jug of his favorite libation. The zebras' black and white stripes enhance the exoticism of these centaurettes. In contrast to the asexual picaninny, their stripes accentuate the waist of each figure and their floral brassieres graphically portray the anatomy of the breasts. See also Bell Hooks, "Selling Hot Pussy," Black Looks: Race and Representation (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1992), 62. The jezebel dates back to at least the early nineteenth century as a young South African woman of the Khosian tribe named Sarah (Saarti) Baartman was put on display in London and Paris from 1810 to 1816. Termed the "Hottentot Venus," Baartman was thought to possess large buttocks and "deformed" genitalia, which were dissected and put on display after she died in 1816 (24).As Hooks notes about Baartman's body and black women's bodies in general: "They were reduced to mere spectacle. . . . Walt Disney's Fantasia (1940) 109 Their body parts were offered as evidence to support racist notions that black people were more akin to animals than to other humans" (25). 35. Although the figure would certainly undercut the overall film today, the offending racist figure is not unlike other black caricatures in American popular culture, such as the happy maids, friendly slaves, and singing and dancing boys featured on the radio shows, stages, comics pages, and screens of America at least since the minstrel shows of the 1830s. 36. With the added resolution of the sixtieth-anniversary DVD release the results of this process can be easily seen during the centaurettes' dressing and presentation sequence. At three points the image quality of the film drops precipitously as what is apparently the extreme magnification of the original image reveals the grainy structure of individual silver crystals on celluloid. Such otherwise inexplicable distortion in a high-budget art film like Fantasia lends further credence to the claims of social surgery. In the first instance (DVD track 12, 1:19:25-30), a pastel centaurette, whose picaninny pedicurist is out of frame, seems to gesture, blow a kiss, and respond to her unseen associate-presumably the missing black servant. The second surgical zoom (DVD track 12, 1:20:3644) occurs as another picaninny ties a bow around the tail of a pastel green centaurette at the back of a group looking through the trees at their approaching suitors. In the third instance (track 12, 1:21:15-26), the face of a strutting centaurette more than fills the frame-an extreme close-up with no precedent in the photographic style for this segment or indeed in Fantasia overall-apparently to avoid another appearance of a picaninny with yellow bows in her pigtails who daintily carries two floral garlands tied from a picanniny's waist as if the train of her gown. Despite the second's momentary frustration, each picaninny seems selflessly and happily dedicated to serving her centaurette. 37. Described by Walt Disney in bonus commentary on the sixtieth-anniversary F a r tasia DVD (track 12). 38. The most powerful figures in Fantasia are male and include characters such as Yen Sid ("Disney" spelled backwards), the magician in the Sorcerer's Apprentice segment and Tchernobog, the devil character from the Mussorgsky Night on Bald M o u n tain segment. The most powerful man in the picture, however, is not animated at all. The conductor, Leopold Stokowski, is always presented in a dramatic profile against a colored backdrop and filmed from slightly below to exaggerate his towering artistic persona. It is his hands, without baton, that bring the music of Fantasia to life and animate the entire film. 39. John Culhane, Walt Disney's Fantasia (New York: Abradale Press, 1983),133. Combining "mule" and "unicorn," the term "mulicorn" is used by Deems Taylor in his 1940 book Fantasia. Taylor does not claim to have invented the term, although I have yet to find an earlier use. 40. Quotations from a story meeting at the Disney Studios on Nov. 2, 1938, reported in Culhane, Walt Disney's Fantasia, 134. 41. This association is driven home by the dark-skinned zebra centaurettes that accompany the entrance of Bacchus and the donkey (see n. 34 and Fig. 3). http://www.jstor.org LINKED CITATIONS - Page 1 of 1 - You have printed the following article: Playing in 'Toon: Walt Disney's "Fantasia" (1940) and the Imagineering of Classical Music Mark Clague American Music, Vol. 22, No. 1. (Spring, 2004), pp. 91-109. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0734-4392%28200421%2922%3A1%3C91%3API%27WD%22%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Z This article references the following linked citations. If you are trying to access articles from an off-campus location, you may be required to first logon via your library web site to access JSTOR. Please visit your library's website or contact a librarian to learn about options for remote access to JSTOR. Notes 1 Making America More Musical through the Phonograph, 1900-1930 Mark Katz American Music, Vol. 16, No. 4. (Winter, 1998), pp. 448-476. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0734-4392%28199824%2916%3A4%3C448%3AMAMMTT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-P NOTE: The reference numbering from the original has been maintained in this citation list.