Fantasia (1940) - full transcript

How do you do?

My name is Deems Taylor,

and it's my very pleasant duty
to welcome you here

on behalf of Walt Disney,
Leopold Stokowski

and all the other artists and musicians
whose combined talents

went into the creation of this
new form of entertainment, Fantasia.

What you're going to see

are the designs
and pictures and stories

that music inspired
in the minds and imaginations

of a group of artists.

In other words,
these are not going to be



the interpretations
of trained musicians.

Which I think is all to the good.

Now, there are three kinds of music
on this Fantasia programme.

First is the kind that tells
a definite story.

Then there's the kind that,
while it has no specific plot,

does paint a series of, more or less,
definite pictures.

Then there's a third kind,

music that exists simply
for its own sake.

Now, the number that opens
our Fantasia programme,

the Toccata and Fugue,
is music of this third kind,

what we call absolute music.

Even the title has no meaning beyond
a description of the form of the music.

What you will see on the screen is a
picture of the various abstract images

that might pass through your mind



if you sat in a concert hall
listening to this music.

At first you're more or less
conscious of the orchestra.

So our picture opens
with a series of impressions

of the conductor and the players.

Then the music begins to suggest
other things to your imagination.

They might be,
oh, just masses of colour.

Or they may be cloud forms
or great landscapes

or vague shadows or geometrical objects
floating in space.

So now we present

the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor
by Johann Sebastian Bach,

interpreted in pictures
by Walt Disney and his associates,

and in music
by the Philadelphia Orchestra

and its conductor, Leopold Stokowski.

You know, it's funny how wrong
an artist can be about his own work.

Now, the one composition of
Tchaikovsky's that he really detested

was his Nutcracker Suite,

which is probably the most
popular thing he ever wrote.

It's a series of dances
taken out of a full-length ballet

called The Nutcracker

that he once composed
for the St Petersburg opera house.

It wasn't much of a success
and nobody performs it nowadays,

but I'm pretty sure you'll recognise the
music of the Suite when you hear it.

Incidentally, you won't see
any nutcracker on the screen.

There's nothing left
of him but the title.

And now we're going to hear a piece of
music that tells a very definite story.

As a matter of fact, in this case,
the story came first

and the composer wrote the music
to go with it.

It's a very old story,
one that goes back almost 2,000 years.

A legend about a sorcerer
who had an apprentice.

He was a bright young lad,
very anxious to learn the business.

As a matter of fact,
he was a little bit too bright

because he started practising
some of the boss's best magic tricks

before learning how to control them.

One day, for instance,
when he'd been told by his master

to carry water to fill a cauldron,
he had the brilliant idea

of bringing a broomstick to life
to carry the water for him.

Well, this worked very well, at first.

Unfortunately, however,
having forgotten the magic formula

that would make the broomstick
stop carrying the water,

he found he'd started something
he couldn't finish.

Mr Stokowski. Mr Stokowski.

My congratulations, sir.

Congratulations to you, Mickey.

Gee, thanks.

Well, so long. I'll be seein' ya.

Goodbye.

When Igor Stravinsky wrote his ballet,
The Rite of Spring...

I repeat,

when Igor Stravinsky wrote his ballet,
The Rite of Spring,

his purpose was, in his own words,
to "express primitive life."

And so Walt Disney and his fellow
artists have taken him at his word.

Instead of presenting the ballet
in its original form,

as a simple series of tribal dances,
they have visualised it as a pageant,

as the story of the growth
of life on Earth.

And that story,
as you're going to see it,

isn't the product
of anybody's imagination.

It's a coldly accurate reproduction
of what science thinks went on

during the first few billion years
of this planet's existence.

Science, not art,
wrote the scenario of this picture.

According to science,
the first living things here

were single-celled organisms,

tiny little white or green blobs
of nothing in particular

that lived under the water.

And then, as the ages passed,
the oceans began to swarm

with all kinds of marine creatures.

Finally, after about a billion years,

certain fish, more ambitious
than the rest,

crawled up on land and became
the first amphibians.

And then,
several hundred million years ago,

nature went off on another tack
and produced the dinosaurs.

Now, the name "dinosaur"
comes from two Greek words

meaning "terrible lizard."

And they certainly were all of that.

They came in all shapes and sizes,

from little, crawling horrors
about the size of a chicken

to hundred-ton nightmares.

They were not very bright.

Even the biggest of them
had only the brain of a pigeon.

They lived in the air and water
as well as on land.

As a rule, they were vegetarians,

rather amiable
and easy to get along with.

However, there were bullies
and gangsters among them.

The worst of the lot,
a brute named tyrannosaurus rex,

was probably the meanest killer
that ever roamed the Earth.

The dinosaurs were lords of creation
for about 200 million years.

And then... Well,
we don't exactly know what happened.

Some scientists think that
great droughts and earthquakes

turned the whole world
into a gigantic dustbowl.

In any case,
the dinosaurs were wiped out.

That is where our story ends.

Where it begins is at a time
infinitely far back,

when there was no life at all on Earth.

Nothing but clouds of steam,

boiling seas and exploding volcanoes.

So now,
imagine yourselves out in space

billions and billions of years ago,

looking down on this lonely,
tormented little planet,

spinning through
an empty sea of nothingness.

And now we'll have
a 15-minute intermission.

Before we get into
the second half of the programme,

I'd like to introduce somebody to you,

somebody who's very important
to Fantasia.

He's very shy and very retiring.

I just happened to run across him
one day at the Disney studios.

But when I did, I suddenly realised

that here was not only an indispensable
member of the organisation,

but a screen personality whose
possibilities nobody around the place

had ever noticed.

And so I'm very happy to have
this opportunity to introduce to you

the soundtrack.

All right. Come on.

That's all right. Don't be timid.

Atta soundtrack.

Now, watching him, I discovered
that every beautiful sound

also creates
an equally beautiful picture.

Now, look. Will the soundtrack
kindly produce a sound?

Go on, don't be nervous.
Go ahead. Any sound.

Well, that isn't quite
what I had in mind.

Suppose we hear and see the harp.

Now one of the strings, say, the violin.

And now... now, one of the Woodwinds,
a flute.

Very pretty-

Now, let's have a brass instrument,
the trumpet.

All right. Now, how about
a low instrument, the bassoon?

Go on. Go on.
Drop the other shoe, will you?

Well, now to finish, suppose we see
some of the percussion instruments,

beginning with the bass drum.

Thanks a lot, old man.

The symphony that Beethoven
called the Pastoral,

his sixth, is one of the few pieces
of music he ever wrote

that tells something
like a definite story.

He was a great nature lover,
and in this symphony,

he paints a musical picture
of a day in the country.

Now, of course,
the country that Beethoven described

was the countryside
with which he was familiar.

But his music covers
a much wider field than that,

so Walt Disney has given the Pastoral
Symphonya mythological setting.

And that setting is of Mt Olympus,
the abode of the gods.

And here, first of all,
we meet a group of fabulous creatures

of the field and forest,

unicorns, fauns,
Pegasus, the flying horse,

and his entire family,
the centaurs,

those strange creatures
that are half-man and half-horse.

And their girlfriends,
the centaur-ettes.

Later on, we meet our old friend,
Bacchus, the god of wine,

presiding over a bacchanal.

The party is interrupted by a storm.

And now, we see Vulcan
forging thunderbolts

and handing them over to the
king of all the gods, Zeus,

who plays darts with them.

As the storm clears, we see Iris,
the goddess of the rainbow.

And Apollo, driving
his sun chariot across the sky.

And then Morpheus, the god of sleep,

covers everything
with his cloak of night,

as Diana, using the new moon as a bow,

shoots an arrow of fire
that spangles the sky with stars.

Now we're going to do one of the most
famous and popular ballets ever written,

The Dance of the Hours
from Ponchielli's opera La Gioconda.

It's a pageant of the hours of the day.

We see first a group
of dancers in costumes

to suggest the delicate light of dawn.

Then a second group enters

dressed to represent
the brilliant light of noon day.

As these withdraw, a third group enters

in costumes that suggest
the delicate tones of early evening.

Then a last group, all in black,
the sombre hours of the night.

Suddenly, the orchestra
bursts into a brilliant finale

in which the hours of darkness
are overcome by the hours of light.

All this takes place in the great hall
with its garden beyond,

of the palace of Duke Alvise,
a Venetian nobleman.

The last number
on our Fantasia programme

is a combination of two pieces
of music so utterly different

in construction and mood
that they set each other off perfectly.

The first is A Night on Bald Mountain,

by one of Russia's greatest composers,
Modest Mussorgsky.

The second is Franz Schubert's
world-famous Ave Maria.

Musically and dramatically,
we have here a picture

of the struggle
between the profane and the sacred.

Bald Mountain, according to tradition,

is the gathering place
of Satan and his followers.

Here on Walpurgis Night, which is
the equivalent of our own Halloween,

the creatures of evil gather
to worship their master.

Under his spell, they dance furiously

until the coming of dawn
and the sounds of church bells

send the infernal army slinking back
into their abodes of darkness.

And then we hear the Ave Maria,
with its message of the triumph

of hope and life over the powers
of despair and death.