How Disney’s ‘Fantasia’ Changed The Game
How often do you stumble upon a creative vision or an artwork that actually changes how you experience the world? Although clicky headlines spin narratives of designers, artists, and musicians "pushing boundaries" on the daily, if we're being honest, real game-changing moments are extremely rare. But when they do happen, it's magical.
The celebration of rare magic-making moments leads us to Highsnobiety's next collab, a capsule collection created in partnership with those who really know how to spin a spell: Disney. Specifically, our collab is dedicated to a Disney work that inspired a mammoth mentality shift for creators and audiences alike — the 1940 cult classic, Fantasia.
Walt Disney's third feature-length animation, Fantasia is often overlooked when it comes to discussing watershed moments in popular culture. But it shouldn't be: If you're immersed in contemporary culture then you're interacting with a world Fantasia helped to build, whether you realize it or not.
Released 82 years ago, Fantasia changed the future of animation and how it is viewed as an art form. It also changed how people interact with music and how films are experienced. But perhaps most vitally, it bulldozed through cultures of snobbery and created a kaleidoscope of creative possibilities where a glass ceiling once stood.
But first, the backstory.
Following the commercial success of his first feature film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937), Disney was on a mission to bring similar levels of love to Mickey Mouse whose popularity was declining. In 1938 he settled on the concept for a short animation called The Sorcerer's Apprentice (the famous marching mop scene). It was intended as an elaborate episode of his animated series, Silly Symphony, which pioneered the concept of matching classical music to cartoons.
This time, however, Disney wanted to step things up a notch and create something that conjured fantasy, rather than continuing the slapstick humor Silly Symphony was known for. After a chance meeting with Leopold Stokowski — a famous composer with a passion for experimental, challenging projects — in a Hollywood restaurant, a collaborative project was born. But before long, the production costs began to climb, growing to become far more than any short could have earned back at that time. So, a decision was made to create a feature production instead. The result was Fantasia — an eight-chapter animation set to classical pieces conducted by Stokowski and (with the exception of one) performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra.
A big reason the costs were so high is that Disney and Stokowski really wanted to impress with the sound. Recording took one-fifth of the film's overall budget but that was money well spent. As Fox Carney of Disney's Animation Research Library explains, "Fantasia was not only an experience of sight but of sound as well. [The film's tech team developed] a new technique of sound recording and playback, called "Fantasound," [which] was an early precursor to today's multi-track stereophonic sound systems and would expand upon the immersive abilities of theatrical presentations. The film's ultimate success over time set the stage for decades of experimentation in animation."
When did it become a cult classic?
At the 1940 premiere, the press reflected the sense of achievement Carney alludes to. The word "masterpiece" was sprinkled everywhere. The New York Times noted that "motion-picture history was made last night." The Chicago Tribune called it "an overwhelmingly ambitious orgy of color, sound, and imagination." But unfortunately, audiences weren't ready.
It wouldn't be until the late ’60s, when the film was rereleased, that Fantasia really found its footing, largely thanks to students,a growing love of weed, psychedelics, and a related appreciation for off-kilter, trippy film experiences (see also: Beatles' Yellow Submarine and 2001: A Space Odyssey). Filmgoers were always on the hunt for their next cinematic high, which helped to cement Fantasia's cult status.
“[Audiences] thought we were on a trip when we made it," Fantasia animator Ollie Johnson once told the Herald Journal. "Every time we’d go to talk at a school or something, they’d ask us what we were on.” (While Disney may play coy about the movie reading as a highbrow acid trip, Fantasia's ’60s rerelease was paired with a trippy technicolor campaign poster that totally played into that vibe.)
Fast forward through the decades to the late ’80s and early ’90s— past a huge frame-by-frame restoration and theatrical re-releases — and Fantasia finally found real success. In 1991, it was released on VHS and sold 20 million copies, making it the best-selling home video at that point.
How is Fantasia's impact felt today?
So many important figures in the art world and beyond have cited Fantasia as a huge inspiration for their artistic sensibilities. Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, David Hockney, Damien Hirst, and Diego Rivera have all at one point or another commented on the film's captivating visuals. Takashi Murakami has also spoken of how his characters, specifically Mr. DOB, have been influenced by Mickey Mouse. Since its creation in 1996, Mr. DOB has been featured on Louis Vuitton accessories, and in Murakami's 2018 "Future History" exhibition with Virgil Abloh. That is just a fragment example of how the film's influence continues to subtly seep into the current zeitgeist.
But why was it so important?
Firstly, Fantasia's pairing of animated sequences with classical music blended two art forms that, back in the ’40s, were not seen as compatible. While classical music was considered high art, animation was often dismissed as mainstream or just for children. The combination of the two gave animation real credibility as a sophisticated art form. Disney's Carney adds that after Fantasia "animation was free to break from traditional gags and literary narratives to express stories of pure mood and expression, bound only by the imaginations of the artists themselves."
The film also made classical music accessible to those who previously felt excluded by its elitist connotations. “I often receive letters from people to say ‘thank you for doing it,'" Stokowski once recounted, "'because I was always afraid to go to a concert hall. When I went to [watch] Fantasia I heard the great masters’ music and realized…I enjoyed it.’”
In this sense, you could think of Disney and Stokowski's Fantasia in a similar way to some of the most significant border-blurring moments in mainstream culture from the last years — obvious examples including Virgil Abloh's appointment to Louis Vuitton or Kendrick Lamar winning a Pulitzer for DAMN. What unites all of these things is an active approach that aims to dismantle cultural gatekeepers by taking one art form and introducing it to a space where it was once excluded. Through this, arbitrary dividers begin to crumble and instead create opportunities for new horizons to be explored.
And that is the energy we're championing in our Disney collab collection, which you shop below.
Scroll down to shop Disney Fantasia x Highsnobiety collection.
