There has not been and will not ever be a week of Hit Me with Your Best Shot more perfectly attuned to my tastes than this one. The movie is Walt Disney’s Fantasia, (which I’ve reviewed, and adored) and the very specific rules Nathaniel laid out are:
1) Beginners (or Short on Time?): In honor of the May Centennial of “The Rite of Spring”, choose your Best Shot from that section of Disney’s experimental early feature.
2) Apprentice: Choose from “Rite of Spring” AND the movie as a whole. Two shots.
3) Sorcerer: Your post will contain six screenshots, your choice for “best” from each of the movies major classical movements: “The Nutcracker Suite”, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”, “Rite of Spring”, “The Pastoral Symphony”, “Dance of the Hours”, and “Night on Bald Mountain/Ave Maria”
Could there be any doubt at all? The only thing we like more than Disney animation here at Antagony & Ecstasy is intense completionism, and the only problem I have with this assignment is that he either forgot or ignored “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor”, featuring the eye-searing Technicolor cinematography of James Wong Howe. I will play according the rules as they were set out, but not so strictly as to not include, sans commentary, my favorite image from that sequence.
The rest:
“The Nutcracker Suite”
“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”
“The Rite of Spring”
“The Pastoral Symphony”
“Dance of the Hours”
“Night on Bald Mountain”/”Ave Maria”
The easiest by far for me to pick, and it was almost easier. As I mentioned in my review, my favorite piece of animation ever is the “Chinese Dance” segment, which was, in my head, a single uninterrupted take; I was going to simply put the whole thing out, declare a rather strict, mechanical definition of “shot”, and spend a couple thousand words cooing over character animation of inanimate objects. Unfortunately, there is a cut. So out went that idea, and I’ll have to ask the final position to stand in for the whole.
Two things I love about this sequence – the most racist left in the movie, what with Sunflower the centaur having been sent to the memory hole, but what can you do, it was the ’40s and “Chinese” was right there in the name of the piece – first being the way that mushrooms are animated to look exactly like people and still like mushrooms, moving in a way that does not for a second violate their essential nature. Except inasmuch as moving is a violation of a mushroom’s essential nature.
Second is the little baby mushroom, Hop Low (swear to God, he has a canonical name, and you can thank me whenever there’s a Disney night at bar trivia that I’ve just helped you to win), the best example in Disney’s many long decades of work of instilling personality into a non-speaking character whose face never changes. His clumsy, out-of-step dancing is pretty much as sweet and delicately-expressed as it gets, right up until he finally gets it together in and quickly arrives perfectly in place just in time for the music to stop. That’s the moment in the shot I’ve chosen: when even the clumsy little kid is able at the last second to get everything perfect. An absolute treasure of American animation.
Okay, so my favorite shot – my favorite two shots – are the same as everybody else’s I bet. The one with the silhouette axe, and the one with the fragments picking themselves up, the two blasts of Expressionist horror sitting right there in the middle of the single best Mickey Mouse short of all time. But going with either of those would have so lazy that “lazy” doesn’t even cover it. Instead, I picked this:
For a simple enough reason; “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” (and by extension, all of Fantasia) was designed from the ground up to give Mickey a chance to shine in a solo work, after Goofy and Donald had effectively reduced him to the role of straight man; a role he’d fully embrace in the years to follow. But in his earliest incarnation, Mickey was a plucky little shit, apt to get into trouble and be a prankster, and “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” is the final chance that aspect of his personality got to shine onscreen.
And so, I wanted to find a shot where Mickey got to have some personality; easily done, since he has personality in spades throughout the short, aided in large part by the new, more easily-readable design for his eyes that debuted in this sequence. I went with the particular image I went with because of how perfectly the expression on his face communicates a sense of surprise and confusion with just a hint of “wait, there’s no way this is my fault, right?” All pretty subtle and sophisticated stuff for a cartoon mouse.
Also, the great water animation. Long-time readers are well aware that I will absolutely give it up 100% of the time for great water animation.
Now, the reason we’re all here. A little ironic, honestly, given that of all the pieces in the film, Stravinsky’s radical ballet is the one which has been re-ordered and re-orchestrated the most dramatically, and to arguably the most damaging effect, though speaking as one who tolerates rather than enjoys most of Stravinsky, I’m not terribly annoyed by that, except in an abstract, intellectual sense.
The piece, in any incarnation, is about primitivism: human primitives for the composer, primeval Earth for the animators, who tell a story about the creation of the planet and the origin of life, plus dinosaurs (one of my favorite parts of the restored 124-minute version of the movie: listening to Deems Taylor patiently and authoritatively explain what “dinosaurs” are using all the best 1930s paleontology and laying out the most astonishing pack of lies). There’s a lot of good stuff with the dinos, too, but I headed off in a different direction.
Throughout this sequence, a great marriage is struck between graphic beauty and violent content, and there’s something about the soft, almost watercolor impressionism of this volcanic landscape that is absolutely haunting in its painterly beauty. And yet it is a wasteland, growling through Stravinsky’s music and guttering death. To me, the perfect encapsulation of what the animators were going for throughout this, the longest sequence of Fantasia.
My least-favorite part of Fantasia, and the only one where I’m willing to concede the “it’s so kitschy!” criticisms have a point, though I do not necessarily trust the word “kitschy” when it shows up in aesthetic discussion. Anyway, the use of buoyant cartoon mythological characters is a little weird, though what the sequence does have going for it that no amount of criticism can squelch, is its extraordinary control of color, telling its story entirely through the shift of color palette from pinks and baby blues to rich golds and reds to harsh greys to warm greens and yellows to navy blue in the end. There was absolutely no way to communicate any of that in a single shot. So after a lot false attempts, I ended up with this image from the last stage of the sequence:
The storm is over, the sun is out, the day is coming to a close, and all is well. Everything in this image – which strikes me as unusually Romantic in the context of the other imagery seen in this sequence – is calming and beautiful. It suggests a sense of scale and grandeur, but not in the “let’s go exploring” way that the rest of the sequence taps into, simply in a “the world is beautiful and good, and we needn’t be afraid of things” way. One of the most muted frames in a very colorful sequence, it’s a great wind-down in addition to being damn pretyt in its own right.
For this most exquisitely cartoony of the sequences in Fantasia, I cut right to the chase: my favorite bit of cartoon character animation.
Nothing sophisticated about my choice: it’s entirely due to the look of misery on Ben Ali Gator’s face (seriously, like, everything in this movie has an official name), and the outstanding rubber hose animation of his body as he tries to lift up a very fat Hyacinth Hippo, with her blissful look of not having any idea what the hell is going on. Particularly in light of how the dominant idea of the sequence, which is that graceless and large animals can dance with the effortless delicacy of the finest ballerinas, I love that just once, the animators tip their hand, and admit that yes, it is ridiculous to think that an alligator could life a hippopotamus. So let’s draw it to be as funny as we know how. It’s just great slapstick and character animation, in the most aesthetically simple but probably most readily enjoyable part of the film.
“Night on Bald Mountain”/”Ave Maria”
Agony. Pure agony. I totally get the logic of combining these two sequences with one Best Shot, but they’re so different, it’s impossible to know where to start. Bill Tytla’s career-peak, the feline, muscular Chernabog? Or the eye-watering triumph of multiplane camera in “Ave Maria”? Trying to decide between the two took longer than any other part of writing this post – I’ve been thinking about it since Nathaniel announced this week’s topic, and hadn’t made up my decision until in the actual process of writing.
Anyway, Tytla won out.
It’s right at the end, as Chernabog’s satanic revelries are interrupted by the church bell tolling midnight and the coming of a new day. You really need to see it in motion to get the full effect, but what’s going on, in essence, is that a being of total evil, doing nothing particularly destructive or menacing, just amusing himself by tormenting the damned all night, is annoyed that he has to go to bed. The expression he wears is not one of pain, or terror of God’s light, but of irritation and impatience, and given that his body is still tensely shaped for whatever bit of nastiness he was about to indulge in, it’s exactly like seeing a kid freeze up when he’s caught doing something naughty.
I love about this finale that it doesn’t resolve anything. Chernabog is still evil, unfathomably evil; he hasn’t been defeated, just sent back to nap in his mountain peak. Tytla’s animation, and the way that he makes the demon seem petulant rather than anguished, are so wonderful at emphasising that, making it clear that this creature is far beyond our human sense of narrative and conflict. The nuns and their lamps that end Fantasia aren’t banishing this, though they conclude the movie on a sense of calm; they’re just establishing the next repetition of an endless cycle, which this fleshy but indestructible Chernabog will undoubtedly be happy to perpetuate.
To send you all on your way, I’d like to share this 1933 pin screen animated adaptation of “Night on Bald Mountain”, made by Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker; I don’t know that it influenced the Disney version, but it seems awfully suspicious. More to the point, it’s an absolutely incredible piece of work, complicated as hell and wholly effective, and legitimately terrifying in its way.
