Release year: 1940

Studio: Disney

Runtime: 124 minutes

Audio Description Provided By: Deluxe

Written by:

Narrated By:

What is it?: A classic. Walt Disney originally intended for Fantasia to be a living project, and continue to evolve more over the years. Despite feature length animation being relatively new still in 1940, it didn’t attract the same attention as Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and didn’t get a second wind until fantasia 2000. The movie takes mostly silent animated shorts and sets them to classic compositions. Each segment is accompanied by a live orchestra, slightly visible on screen, with a conductor, and there’s an intermission. This film is most known for giving us the Sorceror’s Apprentice version of Mickey Mouse.

What Works: Fantasia is not my favorite Disney animated film, nor is it my least. I do have some reverence for what they accomplished in 1940, considering the medium, as well as the support for actually paying for a full orchestra.I’ve seen fantasia before, before my blindness, and i was really intrigued to know what this would be like with audio description.

Basically, the whole film is an audio description experience, as there is very little dialogue. we have a narrator, james Taylor, built in to the film who introduces each segment, and Mickey talks briefly, but everything else is animation set to music. Also, fun fact, this is the first and only Disney feature to openly feature Satan, and label him as such. hades in Hercules is a bit different.

What Doesn’t work: It’s not the age of Fantasia, it’s the structure that never pulled me in. I liked watching these as shorts, individually, not necessarily as a feature. The music is gorgeous, but it becomes even more about the music when you’re blind, and reliant on description. I did chuckle at how James Taylor introduces a piece from The Nutcracker as if it was obscure. It made me wonder if the Nutcracker didn’t catch on until much later, because by now, everyone has heard the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies.

The Audio Description: Do i think it could have done more? Sure. it feels a little underwhelming, but considering the heavy lifting it already is doing, it’s like complaining about someone who just push mode ten acres, because you think they could have done one or two more. A while back, I watched Wall-E for the first time, which truly is one of my all tie favorites, and the track just can never capture all the little ticks Wall-E has that gives him such a personality, but it really tried. I know what its missing, and that track just can’t connect that final dot. Here, this is a film I’m less endeared toward, and i think there is room for more verbose description. Although I acknowledge, there is a lot of description here.

Why You Might Like it: For the music. of you grew up with Fantasia. Disney junkies should check this out at least once.

Why you Might Not Like it: More than some other films, it has such a strong visual element, with almost no dialogue, that it might not be your thing.

Final Thoughts: I’m not going to be the guy to give Fantasia a rotten score. It is a film classic. It isn’t at the top of my list, nor at the bottom. I do love the Sorceror’s Apprentice sequence, and the Night On Blad Mountain is pretty classic. Walt wanted fantasia to be a living film, that evolved constantly over time, and that would be its legacy. In the end, it became known, as most Walt Disney projects do, because of a mouse named Mickey.

Fresh: Final Grade: 7.0/10