Disney didn’t bowdlerize this one.
The first movie that ever frightened me was a Disney movie. Weird right? Well, let me explain. Disney wasn’t always a kiddie culture brand-colossus that churned out toothless, G-rated snoozes that dumbed-down their source material and bolted it onto a formula that combined toy-transferable heroes with wisecracking animal sidekicks and insidious, merciless earworms, pausing occasionally to buy up fresher companies or demand tribute from the government in the form of trademarks to fairy tales that have existed for centuries.
No, Disney wasn’t always a behemoth. Disney, of course, used to be an actual person, a living, breathing artist who might have had some weird ideas about civil society, but was a bona fide creative genius who on occasion elevated animation to high art. Fantasia is one of those Disney films. Although Walt Disney didn’t direct any of Fantasia‘s eight segments, it was his idea to create a feature-length anthology of non-comedic animated shorts that would depict fantasies inspired by and set to great works of classical music, with the animation accompanying the music – not the other way around. It was like the 1940 equivalent of Heavy Metal or maybe Laser Floyd. My point is, for a variety of reasons, I think it’s safe to say this is a film that would not get made today. Disney used to push artistic and social boundaries.
My parents took me to see Fantasia during its 1982 theatrical run. I was three years old. I don’t remember where we saw it and neither does my Dad, though he suspects it was the then-giant seven-screen cineplex by the freeway. I have a fragmentary memory of passing a building with big, cuckoo-clock style figures over the door, which would indicate a downtown theater somewhere, but I might be conflating my memory of Fantasia with the Festhaus at Kings Island. I do remember the red curtain around the stage and the pink light cast on the screen as we waited and waited and waited for the movie to start. Dad hated to go to anything with a scheduled start time without arriving at least an hour early.