Popular culture certainly is the realm in which hierarchies are flattened by the rebellious works of entertainment mavericks, though it does not seem right that all such rebellions should be taken in bad taste when they have something more pure and complex at heart. One such maverick is Walt Disney, and his Fantasia was one such rebellion. Its reception was as varied as its composition — most film critics were awed, and most music critics were appalled. It effectively moved the chains on taste, and left as its legacy the visual concert, eventually to be the music video. Did Disney know that he was introducing a totally new wave to popular culture? Was he knowingly usurping the kings and masters who had established clear lines between the high and the low, the tasteful and the distasteful?
When I was three years old, in 2001, I watched Fantasia every day. I consumed a lot of other media too, but I distinctly remember ‘othering’ Fantasia, being overwhelmed by the grandness of its music while each scene bursted with color. It was my first introduction to classical music (I probably wouldn’t have been listening to any Beethoven otherwise). Though I wasn’t yet aware of any cultural hierarchy, I consciously set it apart from Dragon Tales and Barney.
It is the nature of popular culture that using terms like ‘bad taste’ is problematic, because what may have been labeled such in 1940 could now be seen as the opposite. Fantasia gave a huge new momentum to classical music, which carried it all the way to the 21st century, to a new and youthful unexpecting audience. In that time, cultural tastes have changed, and there are fewer gatekeepers now than ever. This is in no small part due to the impact of Fantasia, a cultural monolith which Henry Allen of the Washington Post called “Walt Disney’s glorious monument to mid-century “middlebrowism” (Allen, 1990). The idea of there being a “middlebrow” reinforces the hierarchy, though it creates a grey area into which innovative popular culture can rise and expand, no longer being relegated to the pit. With Fantasia, Disney created this space for future generations of artists.
The project of blending low culture, in the form of cartoon animation, and high culture, in the form of the most sophisticated classical scores, was consciously devised in order to shake things up. According to historian John Culhane, Walt Disney “had vowed, when he was snubbed as a mere ‘cartoon-maker’ 17 years before, that his animated productions would someday be treated to the same kind of gala premieres accorded live-action films” (Culhane, 1983). Disney was obsessed from the outset with changing the culture, and breaking down the mechanisms which might saddle his work with such descriptors as lowbrow, bad taste, or “mere.” To get to the gala premier, he had to draw on high culture in a manner of appropriation (he admitted to not caring for classical music himself) and as a true champion of popular culture, its lowly forms, and its spirit of innovation (what some might call “bad taste”) he became a rebel.
I never thought beautiful music with beautiful animations would be viewed by anyone as bad taste. On the contrary, the impression left by Beethoven and Bach is one of exceedingly good taste, high class. But when the movie was released, many in the audience — especially those Beethoven fans — were appalled. What sort of lowbrow cartoonist huckster would dare try to repackage the classics with circuses of naked centaurs and battling dinos? One critic for the New York Times said, with some indignation, “Disney’s toddling cannot keep pace with the giant strides of Ludwig van Beethoven” (Crowther, 1940).
Fantasia’s release in 1940 triggered objections from cultural purists, who were not amused by Walt’s interest in making classical music the subject of his ‘experimental’ phase. Before 1940, classical music was untouchable — the domain of kings, bosses and masters — and arguably the highest culture in the popular hierarchy. A producer for Minnesota public radio reviewed the impact of Disney’s choice, stating that “to mess with Beethoven was to mess with Music Itself” (Gabler, 2015). At the time of the film’s premiere, the New York Times wrote, “Disney’s toddling cannot keep pace with the giant strides of Ludwig van Beethoven.” And “what the music experts and the art critics will think of it we don’t know. … Probably there will be much controversy, and maybe some long hair will be pulled. Artistic innovations never breed content” (Crowther, 1940).
Disney did not intend rebellious bad taste at all; he wanted refinement, despite how it was received by some. There will always be traditionalists in the crowd who feel scandalized, who see popular culture as low culture. But Disney wasn’t trying to buck the kings and masters — he was no punk. He said of the film, “we’re not going to be slapstick. There’s a certain refinement in the whole thing: we’ll go for the beautiful rather than the slapstick” (Disney, 1939). Nonetheless, it’s hard to imagine that Disney did not have a provocative streak in him when selecting the Rite of Spring for inclusion in his grand experiment. The infamous 1913 performance of Stravinsky’s piece provoked riots in Paris precisely because of its startling juxtaposition of music and visuals, and one could not think of the Rite of Spring in 1940 outside of this cultural context. In this vein, choosing to pair a few of the most sophisticated classical scores of all time with animations of Mickey Mouse and dancing mushrooms, directing the same artist who created Goofy to animate segments set to Beethoven’s elaborate Pastoral Symphony, Disney had to have known that some if not all of his audience would be scandalized.
Fantasia set a new bar — nothing was off limits. Thereafter, any and all forms of pop culture existed to be remixed. “Critics may deplore Disney’s lapses of taste, but he trips, Mickey-like, into an art form that immortals from Aeschylus to Richard Wagner have always dreamed of” (TIME, 1940). The monolithic nature of Fantasia, as a pivotal artifact in cultural history, is well summarized by Michael Broyles:
“In giving expression to his own rich visual imagination, Disney created a piece both ripe with potential and threatening in implications. In retrospect Fantasia is late-twentieth-century musical culture’s Pandora’s box, for with Fantasia the visual dimension could no longer be downplayed, or relegated to the listener’s own fantasy” (Broyles, 2004).
The novel concept of the “visual concert,” as Disney referred to this aspect of his legacy, lived on in popular culture through the psychedelic movement of the 60s (think Yellow Submarine) and eventually in the music videos of the MTV era, and even in the Visualizer algorithm that accompanies iTunes or Windows Media Player. Through all of this, because of the quality of the music and that unique marriage to Disney animation, the 1940 film has a lasting appeal. Today, drug users and kindergarteners find something in it to love. The website “Shroomery” hosts a forum titled, “Was Fantasia invented for people on hallucinogens?” from 2011. Twitter boasts a slew of wacky tweets on the film, such as “Fantasia & fantasia 2000 are on tv. Trippy stuff – imagine it on mushrooms!?!” and “My first year in LA, I had a buddy who decided he was going to drop acid and go see FANTASIA in the theater. Good plan, right?” Disney itself came out with a psychedelic blacklight poster for the re-release of Fantasia in 1969.
The narrator of Fantasia prefaces the first and most abstract score with the sentiment: “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” (italics added).
The music that exists “simply for its own sake,” which has no explicit narrative, is perhaps the most important form to Walt, because it is the raw material that can inspire multiple lines of imagination. The word “fantasia” itself is a musical term that translates to “beyond language,” which is inherently liberatory and unrestrictive. The narrator states that occasionally it is “all to the good” we have the guys who made Mickey Mouse interpreting this music for us. We’ve been liberated from those constraints that tell us how and when to appreciate classical music. This seems to be the film’s only self-conscious concession that it might be venturing into ‘bad taste,’ and it comes with no shame. In fact, it asks the audience to agree and admit that this new, more stimulating form of entertainment is superior to what trained musicians alone could muster.
Works Cited
Allen, Henry. “Fantasia.” Washington Post, 30 Sept. 1990.
“Beethoven in ‘Fantasia’: Awesome, or awkward?” Review of Fantasia, by Jay Gabler, 1940. Classical MPR, 29 Oct. 2015, www.classicalmpr.org/story/2015/10/29/fantasia-beethoven-pastoral.
Broyles, Michael. “Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music.” Yale University Press, 2004, pp. 299-305. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1npxvx.18.
Crowther, Bosley. “Walt Disney’s ‘Fantasia,’ an Exciting New Departure in Film Entertainment, Opened Last Night at the Broadway.” The New York Times [New York], 14 Nov. 1940.
Culhane, John. Walt Disney’s Fantasia. 1983.
Disney, Walt. “Walt’s Words: Fantasia Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6.” Interview by Leopold Stokowski. Disney History Institute, 8 Aug. 1939, www.disneyhistoryinstitute.com/2010/09/walts-words-fantasia-beethovens.html.
“Disney’s Cinesymphony.” TIME, no. 21, 18 Nov. 1940.
This essay was read by Juna Khang.