Fantasia

Director: James Algar, Samuel Armstrong, Ford Beebe Jr.

1940 / 125min / 35mm

The Philadelphia Orchestra, following the hand of conductor Leopold Stokowski, performs selections from Bach, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Beethoven, and other giants, each accompanied by animated vignettes—most famously the mischievous Mickey Mouse vehicle “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”—to create a prodigious spectacle of music, color, and visual wit. The work of over 1,000 artists and technicians, teeming with individuated characters and pictorial invention, its “Fantasound” recording process a forerunner of surround sound to come, so undeniable was Disney’s coup de cinema as a feat of imagination and engineering that Yasujirō Ozu, who saw a seized print while working as a government censor in Singapore during World War II, would reportedly proclaim: “Watching Fantasia made me suspect we were going to lose the war.”

Distributor: Walt Disney Studios/20th Century

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