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Animation's evolution revolution 'Fantasia 2000' and other summer fare show off computer innovations Sunday, June 18, 2000 By Ron Weiskind, Post-Gazette Movie Editor
In perhaps the best-known sequence from the original "Fantasia," Mickey Mouse portrays the sorcerer's apprentice. When the wizard calls it a night, Mickey dons his hat and brings a broom to life to do his menial labor -- carrying buckets of water and dumping them in a cistern. But he bungles it, and finds himself all but submerged by hordes of frenzied brooms dumping hundreds of buckets at once.
This timeless scene reappears in "Fantasia 2000," which revisits Walt Disney's idea of melding classical music and animation. But Mickey's not the only one performing magic here -- and we're not talking about Penn and Teller pulling rabbits out of a hat or chopping off a hand at the wrist (it's only an illusion) to introduce a piece in the new film.
Uncle Walt himself might have wondered what kind of enchantment makes it possible to have three-dimensional whales flying above an icy seascape, as in the "Pines of Rome" segment. He might marvel at another of his studio's releases, "Toy Story," an animated film without drawings. Or he might view a competitor's current release, "Titan A.E.," and wonder how the backgrounds could look so real.
Then again, we can speculate at how Walt Disney might have used computers to further the art of animation.
"The computer kind of changed the world in an awful lot of ways," says Roy E. Disney. He's Walt's nephew, the chairman of Disney's feature animation department and the man who spearheaded the creation of "Fantasia 2000," which opened Friday at local theaters.
"It gave us -- meaning the whole animation business -- the ability to almost literally do anything you can think of, which is a frightening kind of prospect in a way. It gave more people entree into the art because there were things that now could be done in animation that could never have been before."
In "Titan A.E.," directed by Disney alums Don Bluth and Gary Goldman, an alien race attacks Earth a thousand years in the future and blows the planet to smithereens.
"It's an effects movie, in a way. That used to be a very expensive deal. Now you can blow up the Earth in a relatively cheap way," Disney says, chuckling, over the phone from Ireland, site of one of his homes.
But the Disney Studios also understood what the new technology might make possible in the advance of the art. It teamed with the animation studio Pixar to produce the two "Toy Story" movies and "A Bug's Life," which eschewed traditional techniques entirely and demonstrated the capabilities of the computer as an animation device.
The company's other current animated release, "Dinosaur," makes it look as if we are watching a film of the actual creatures, walking through the forests 65 million years ago. The dinosaurs are computer-generated, the backdrops are camera shots of real locations.
"[The computer] brings in a huge panoply of possible styles that can be used, and looks of movies. I think there will always be more now. But you've still got to tell good stories with good characters.
"Our success has had a lot to do with other people trying to do it," Disney says. "It is a lot harder than it looks. There will always be people trying to emulate what we've done. Some will be successful. That's one of the things that's important to us, because it keeps us going and keeps us on our toes."
So the sky's the limit?
"It starts to be a function of, you can do anything you want -- but how much to do you want to spend to do it? As they say in the computer business, every pixel costs more money. That next level of detail you might think you want, you might not be able to afford."
And there are those who prefer traditional animation because it seems, well, more human and more accessible than what comes out of the computer.
"You know what I really believe about that? If you can see through the art to the mind of the artist, that's when it really works best."
Roy Disney knows something about that. He remembers when the original "Fantasia" came out in 1940. He was 10 years old at the time, and Uncle Walt originally intended to update it regularly -- creating new sequences, dropping existing ones, mixing them all together.
He remembers his father -- Walt's brother, also named Roy, who co-founded the company -- coming home one day and saying Walt wanted to do "The Flight of the Bumblebee" next because the sound system would allow him to "fly" the bee all around the room. The man who conceived Disneyland was no stranger to technological innovation.
The younger Roy Disney decided the time was right to revive Uncle Walt's dream in 1991, when the original "Fantasia" was released on home video to great success. At the time, the studio had also begun reaping rewards at the box office for the revival of its big-screen animated franchise with such films as "The Little Mermaid" and "Beauty and the Beast."
So he wrote a note to Disney chairman Michael Eisner, saying the time might be right to make a new version of "Fantasia."
"I just started it as a teensy-weensy thing. We called it 'the spare-time project' for quite a while."
Roy Disney had planned to include three segments from the original movie in the new effort, but he realized ultimately that they were "from a different era. The look and the pacing especially didn't hold up."
But "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" did.
"When the brooms come to life," Disney says, "every kid in the room goes, 'uh-oh!' "
In choosing what to include, Disney says, the music always came first. He sent the Shostakovich Piano Concerto No. 2 to an artist who was going through old sketches of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Steadfast Tin Soldier," which the studio had been trying to make into an animated story for decades.
He also chose Respighi's "The Pines of Rome," one of his favorite pieces of music. When he played it for the artists and writers, they thought of flying, and then of clouds, and then of clouds shaped like whales, and then of flying whales.
The most un-Disneylike segment in the film is set to Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue," and features a drawing style inspired by the noted caricaturist Al Hirschfeld. Director Eric Goldberg approached Hirschfeld about the idea of adapting his style for animation, and the artist gave his enthusiastic approval.
" 'Fantasia' is a showcase for different styles -- and should be," Disney says. "We ought to be able to do anything in any style that fits the story."
And that brings us back to the computer, opening new windows of opportunity -- sometimes, too soon.
"We invented everything we did with those whales in 1992 or 1993," says Disney, adding that the segment was finished by 1995.
"It was an amazing piece of state-of-the-art computer graphics for its time. But I kept saying, 'Be careful, guys. If the technology starts to show through and this becomes some demonstration of look at what we can do now, it may look outdated as hell by the time the movie gets released.' "
And, he adds, "It would be a lot simpler today than it was then."
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