To this day, Fantasia is probably the most un-Disney Disney film ever made. What was shown in selected American cinemas in November 1940 was unlike anything else at the time. No cartoons, no slapstick, no southern drama, no cowboys – instead classical masterpieces such as Johann Sebastian Bach’s Toccata And Fugue In D Minor, Modest Mussorgsky’s Night On Bald Mountain and Franz Schubert’s Ave Maria featured. It was spectacularly performed by more than a hundred members of the Philadelphia Orchestra under Maestro Leopold Stokowski, in unprecedented sound quality, and accompanied by absolutely fantastic images, whose brilliant animations are precisely synchronised to the music. With his third major animated film, Walt Disney intended to bring the beauty of classical music to the masses, tell stories exclusively in pictures and sound, and make going to the cinema a unique experience. It was a ridiculously ambitious project into which Disney himself had poured years of his life and all of his heart and soul – and which almost ruined the company when it flopped mercilessly at the box office.
