by Chef Troy
When Disney re-released "Fantasia" for its 50th anniversary, I went to see it without really remembering that much about it from the first time I'd seen it at about age six. I remembered fragmentary images from that screening but nothing all that coherent - except for Mickey as the sorcerer's apprentice, of course. I was looking forward to having my memory jogged. And sure enough, I did receive a few reminders. I was reminded that several of the pieces of classical music I always recognize as "something I've heard before" are in this film. That "the Dance of the Hours" is more than just the source of the melody for "Hello, Mudda...Hello, Fadda." That Disney's artists can capture the look of water better than any animation studio on earth.
The big revelation, however, came during Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring," which is used as the musical background to no less than the history of life on earth. I had forgotten how powerfully this section of "Fantasia" had affected me as a child until the jagged strains of the music washed over me again as a young adult. As soon as the dinosaurs made their appearance, I remembered.
Even as young as I'd been the first time I saw "Fantasia," I already knew about dinosaurs and that they were all dead. Seeing them recreated on the screen, I watched in uncharacteristic (for me at six years old) silence. The battle between the stegosaur and the T.Rex was interesting, but it didn't really get to me-too much like "Land of the Lost," I guess.
The later scenes showing the dinosaurs competing for dwindling water supplies and the final, fatalistic march across the desert toward some unimaginable horizon, however, grabbed me by the eyeballs and wouldn't let go. I was in a sort of horrible waking swoon as I watched these creatures trudging off to an ultimate doom that I knew about but they didn't. I sat there thinking, "They're all gonna die. Everything dies." It was a thought I'm sure had never entered my six-year-old head before. And sure enough, the next visual was of a dinosaur skeleton, picked clean, as if to say, "Yep, you were right, kid." And then came the earthquakes, and even that bony reminder of what once was, but was no longer, vanished from the screen.
Sitting in that later theater next to my girlfriend, I felt a pale echo of that sense of prescient dread I'd felt as a kid. Even though the dinosaurs' fate was the distant past to me, it was the future to them, but I had no power to change it, only knowledge of it. I reflected that knowing the future without having the power to affect the outcome of events one jot must be what drove seers and oracles insane.
I also remembered that the next day, I talked about the movie with my older brother and some of his friends. It was like we had seen two different movies. First they brought up "The Sorcerer's Apprentice." I had focused on the broomsticks, which had terrified me-mostly (I now think) because the animators had given them no faces. That legion of faceless, unstoppable automatons had driven my six-year-old face into my father's chest ... but Trey and his friends hadn't seen what I saw. They just thought Mickey's predicament was funny.
I brought up the dinosaur section and got the same sense of crossed wires. All they wanted to talk about was the cool fight scene; the doomed march across the desert hadn't registered with them at all. I gave up and left for my room, starting to wonder whether I was weird or they were.
At that 50th-anniversary screening, I bought a copy of "Fantasia" on video. Just recently, my four-year-old son pulled it down from the shelf and watched it. He's hooked. I don't think I'll be getting it back, but somehow I don't mind when I hear him walking around the house humming Tchaikovsky to himself. And the dinosaur march gives him the willies.