Metaphor in Fantasia: Chapter 3 Part 4 of
THE BIG PICTURE: A POST-JUNGIAN MAP OF GLOBAL CINEMA
by James Whitlark, Ph.D.
FANTASIA (1940)
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Clive Barker: And it [Fantasia] is
art house—I mean it was based on drawings by Kay Nielsen, after all, so it is very
much in a European tradition. (Cut!) |
Fantasia commences with the entry of the orchestra. Taylor justifies this beginning as what a concert audience first observes. Actually, instead of trying to photograph an audience’s first view, Fantasia presents a highly stylized ritual. From both sides, musicians in silhouette enter, their shadows crisscrossing at the center of the stage. Center screen is the point from which Taylor narrates and Stokowski conducts: “The Podium as a mountainlike dais, giving prominence to whoever occupies it, is a motif that will recur throughout the film—the actual conductors podium up which Mickey Mouse conducts the stars and planets; Bald Mountain, from which the devil conducts the Walpurgis Night dance of the damned. Real or fanciful, it is the central image of Fantasia” (Culhane 35).
At figurative and literal center is the conductor—a particularly modernist motif. Prior to modernism, small groups of musicians played together either with no conductor or with one of them leading from behind an instrument. Fantasia, however, reflects such concerns as the problematic relationship of moral order to centralized control—a timely issue at the period of its premiere (1940), with the rise of Stalinist, Nazi, and Fascist states boasting pivotal law and order, while the rest of the world lingered in a cusp, deciding whether to join or resist that centralization.
In shadow, identically dressed players are cogs of the orchestral
machine—with three partial exceptions, whose personality manifests amid the silhouettes:
the conductor and, more interestingly, two beautiful and gracious women harpists.
Shown in three-dimensions as they walk to their harps (on the audience’s left), these
latter smile engagingly at their colleagues. With conventional politeness, the latter
bow to them. In so mannered an introduction, even this tiny gesture carries significance.
Inconspicuously, it introduces the film’s leitmotif: the (ostensibly) honored but
(actually) ex-centric place of the female contrasted with the masculine drive to
dominate the center.
Toccata and Fog
Disney first wanted Stokowski’s transcription of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue to show
the devil with a violin. Dissuaded from that by Stokowski, Disney next decided its
abstract music might better resemble a drifting haze of cloud and radiance (Culhane
38). The story developers (Lee Blair, Elmer Plummer, and Phil Dike) have (more masculine)
musical tones accompany dark clouds. Soprano and contralto trills accompany visual
suggestions of stained-glass windows and floating lights. Thus, the piece introduces
the primary moral metaphors of Fantasia, but in such vague and abstract form
that they do not yet engage the ethical imagination.
Nutcracker-less Suite
Noting that Disney’s Nutcracker Suite lacks a Nutcracker, Taylor gives a real
clue to the adaptation of the second segment: no principal male figure. Instead,
the story developers Sylvia Moberly-Holland, Norman Wright, Albert Heath, Bianca
Majolie, and Graham Heid transform natural objects into attractive women, which personify
nature, i.e., free-flowingz life. On dragonfly wings, they hover, magically covering
the plants with dew, or, in winter, frost. In an underwater sequence of the Arab
Dance, distinctly feminine fish with large eyelashes assume the poses of harem dancers
or retreat bashfully in clouds of bubbles. Disney instructed his artists: “These
fish are beautiful, lazy things—very feminine and sexy.... There is a natural hootchy-kootchy
motion to a goldfish that can be made use of here” (Culhane 61). In the air, seedpods
become whirling ballerinas, as do blossoms on water. The mushrooms of the Chinese
Dance are long robed and of indeterminate gender. Only the thistles of the Russian
Dance are nominally male; and like the danseurs of old-fashioned ballet, their
function is to assist their partners, rather than to become personalities in their
own right. The underlying metaphors are not yet dynamic.
The Sorcerer as Apprentice
Opposite to the previous adaptation, Disney’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice excludes
the feminine. To a 1940s audience, the reason Mickey Mouse must do house work with
broom and bucket is that there is no Minnie Mouse available. His resentment of domestic
chores is also conventional. He prefers to dream of usurping the place of sorcerer
or even God, standing on a mound at the Center, conducting the sea and stars—a satanic,
masculine fantasy of imposing order on everything, even at the cost of destroying
it.
During his lifetime, Disney concealed that he was the voice of
Mickey Mouse. He identified with the character, making it the emblem for his many
ventures. His first thoughts of Fantasia were as a vehicle for his persona:
“It was as if Walt were using Mickey to caricature himself and his dreams—the conductor
of artists rather than musicians who now looks over a cliff into the future and sees
that everything is possible” (Culhane 84). Possible, but at the risk of the flood
that almost drowns Mickey in the film.
For the sorcerer, Disney also served as model, though not by his own intention: “Slyly, [Bill] Tytla gave the Sorcerer Walt’s raised eyebrow of disapproval when he takes his magic hat back at the end—the expression that Walt himself called ‘that dirty Disney look”’...” (Culhane 104). That both characters have the same model is appropriate. The function of an apprentice is to imitate and identify with the master (albeit not as prematurely as Mickey does). The relationship between the characters resembles what Transactional Analysts call the “Parent” and “Child” dispositions of a single person.
The story for both music and adaptation comes from Goethe’s poem
Der Zauberlehrling, The Magician’s Apprentice, itself adapted from an ancient
Greek story. Being pagan, the original source does not make the magic diabolical.
Goethe, however, mentions a “Kobold” (imp or hobgoblin); and Fantasia adds
gothic trappings, such as the scull from which the sorcerer conjures.
Darwin’s Rite
Disney had been looking for a “prehistoric” or “dawn of creation theme,” with the
unswerving assumption that it would show dinosaurs, not Eden. Indeed, he intended
to end with an ape-to-man transition and the discovery of fire. “But the fundamentalists,
according to John Hubley, threatened to make trouble for Fantasia if Walt
connected evolution with human beings” (Culhane 126). For this pre-human drama, Deems
Taylor recommended Rite of Spring, adding that Igor Stravinsky’s “idea of
sacrifice” (originally a maiden murdered for the pagan Russian gods) could be retained
but re-presented not with ritual sacrifice but with animals eating each other (Culhane
108).
The reasoning here is worth examining. How is animal appetite equivalent to religious
sacrifice? The idea may be that life is actually “dog eat dog”—to coin one of Disney’s
stock metaphors for it (Culhane 108). Where little girls of the 1930s would be told
that deaths were noble sacrifices leading to eternal life, boys saw ugly competition.
Now Fantasia offers something for them: dinosaurs eating each other.
Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du printemps) stands as a paragon of high modernism (i.e., the ascendancy of stage five). Its spring is not a harmonious, reassuring season, but a stridently dissonant one. It evokes not faith in Christ’s Resurrection but horror at the superstitious ritual (people dancing themselves to death). Instead of divinely inspired renewal, spring connotes the Darwinian struggle—birth paid for by death with no promise of eternity. According to Walt, “Stravinsky saw [the hungry dinosaurs of] his Rite of Spring and said that that was what he had in mind all that time” (Culhane 29). At any rate, it achieved precisely what Disney wanted to believe was the truth behind the music.
More a humanist, Taylor introduced the cartoon as a “coldly accurate representation of what science believes.” This sounds like an apology. The universe comes, he further explains, from an “empty sea of nothingness.” The sequence ends with the globe seemingly desolate.
According to an often-coined Victorian cliché, humanity
chooses between “head” (connoting the masculine) and “heart” (connoting the feminine).
Disney’s Fantasia surrounds a comparable cusp, trying to interplay the two.
A paean to science (at the time associated with the masculine), the Rite of Spring
comes at the core of the work and runs half an hour (while Taylor had suggested major
cuts). The length does not mean respect for the integrity of the music. Stravinsky’s
score was rearranged to suit the story of evolution, what Disney truly approved.
The studio gratefully recorded that Dr. Edward Hubble of Wilson Observatory and Dr.
Julian Huxley praised the authenticity of The Rite of Spring (Culhane 22).
“The New York Academy of Science asked for a private showing of Rite of Spring,”
according to Time, “because they thought its dinosaurs better science than
whole museum loads of fossils and taxidermy” (Culhane 121).
The Sound Track
Perennially fascinated with science and technology (e.g., the audio-animatronics
of Disney World), the studio next introduces the soundtrack as a character. Although
this short segment hardly rises above a weak joke, it fits into the structure of
the film. Throughout the Rite, having restrained as far as possible the cartoonists’
tendency toward cuteness, the studio encourages it. Beginning with a rude/masculine
Bronx cheer followed by heavenly/feminine harps, the soundtrack teaches film mechanics.
It combines scientific pedantry with whimsical personification—the unification of
mind and feeling sought by the film, but not yet presented in a developed manner.
The Pastoral Orgy
While Taylor’s introduction to Fantasia implies that the cartoonists listened
to music and illustrated what they imagined, evidence suggests that (as with Rite
of Spring) they more typically began with imagery and sought music for it. For
their sorté into ancient Greek religion, they first selected Pierné’s
Cydalise, then transferred the material to parts of Beethoven’s Pastoral
Symphony.
Musicologically, this was a provocative choice. Beethoven had written that his symphony was “not a painting in sounds ... [but] a record of sentiments ...” (Beethoven 68). As Lydia Goehr summarizes, this initiated centuries of controversy as to “whether [Beethoven’s] descriptions of pastoral sentiments [accompanying the music] are constitutive of literal descriptions of the music, whether they are metaphorical descriptions, or whether, finally, they are just to be treated as aids provided by [the] composer[] to help listeners comprehend the music’s expressive, musical form” (Lydia 213). Disney ignored this controversy.
Rather than separate the arts, he conflated them as manifestations of human personality and imagination. He coined the term “Imagineers” for his technicians and raised a pavilion to imagination at Epcot, where it is personified—anthropomorphism being his metaphor for the creative personalities behind all imaginings. As the classic version of nature personified, Graeco-Roman mythology invited cosmic treatment of the beauties and dangers of the imagination. The former are like those of the Nutcracker Suite, but the imagination is no longer quite innocent. Led by naked cupids, the male and female centaurs retire to secluded bowers. As the evolution sequence implied a literal animal nature to mankind, here the centaur forms metaphorically suggest the same and the easy-going sexuality of that nature. While the centaurs embrace, the cupids pull curtains, then peak voyeuristically through the cracks. Originally, the centaurs were drawn totally naked, but the Hays office objected to the females’ bare breasts (Culhane 23).
After the consummated courtship, various mythic creatures tread wine. Even two-and-a-half-heads tall (i.e., infantile) fauns soon have faces flushed by inebriation. A rotund “Bacchus” (actually Silenus) flirts with a centaur, despite their being of different species. Drunkenly, he kisses a donkey. Rather than damn these sinners for eternity (or deem them unmentionable as Victorian Christianity would do), Fantasia mildly chastises this polymorphous perversity. Zeus hurls thunderbolts as quickly as Vulcan can forge them but simply to frighten, not kill. When the storm ends personified sun, rainbow, night, and moon close the segment in an ambience of easy forgiveness.
Cartoonists’ imaginations that conceive cranberry purple trees
and flying horses shift toward sexuality, then punishment and atonement—beginnings
of a moral consciousness, though playfully presented. Vladimir Tytla (Animation Supervisor
for Night on Bald Mountain/Ave Maria) objected that his colleagues in the
Pastoral Symphony segment had turned the centaurs into “castrated horsies”
(Culhane 138). Certainly, the tone of each segment depended on who was assigned to
draw it. Nonetheless, evisceration of sexuality in the pastoral segment suits the
overall structure of Fantasia, life as a chaotic drifting between stereotypes
of masculine and feminine. A truly passionate ephithalamion would resolve inter-gender
tensions physically, while the film’s finale envisions the culmination as religious
sublimation, not coitus.
Menagerie of the Hours
Preparatory to that consummation, the next segment (Amilcare Ponchielli’s ballet
Dance of the Hours) releases resentment of femininity. As noted, Disney described
being “lazy” as feminine and here other stereotypes appear as well. Not only do the
female characters lounge and idle their time away but they try to mask their greedy
gorging with pseudo-refinement. They are all animals (ostriches for morning hours,
hippos and elephants for the afternoon and evening ones). Although ostensibly allegories
of time, they are more obviously satiric metaphors for vain women, and they travesty
that paragon of feminine elegance the ballerina.
As usual, darkness, death, and evil are associated with one another
and with masculinity. The night hours appear as male alligators, complete with satanic
cloaks like the cape of the black lord of Bald Mountain. Their jaws snap open and
shut hungrily at sight of their plump prey. Suddenly, however, love transforms the
“dog-eat-dog” imperative of nature into a more-tender impulse. The artists emphasize
how the male suffers from this change. In one spectacular scene, a hippopotamus in
tutu sails through the air, falling on an alligator, who tries chivalrously to catch
her. The reptiles are completely outmatched by their large, amorous partners. Then
the whole palace set collapses—the anarchy traditionally associated with feminine
dominance, while the last section overcomes the opposite but equal threat of repression
from masculine tyranny.
Finale
To the strains of Modest Moussorsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, Chernabog,
a “black god” of pre-Christian, Russian religion, wakes and summons the damned, including
the ghosts of witches on flying broomstick and goat. Souls dance on his palm, simultaneously
nude women and flames. Then he changes them to pig, goat, and wolf walking on their
hind legs, and finally to seemingly male devils. Even more directly than elsewhere
in Fantasia, the manic (male) power drive overflows in this Russian devil
(perhaps chosen at some level because of American fears of the red menace, godless
communism).
Then, Chernabog is defeated as a candlelight procession of nuns banish the mania. At first, Disney planned to conclude with the Virgin materializing in the sky. Thematically, this would have been perfect: heavenly femininity contrasted with the chthonic masculinity of Chernabog, who metamorphoses into the mountain peak—dead rock. But, due to Protestant/Catholic controversy over the status of the Virgin, Disney probably feared denominational friction as well as the difficulty of portraying the materialization.
Culhane comments, “as a Christian artist, he [Disney] chose to place in opposition to the god of evil, not Byelobog, the pagan god of good, pictured in Slavonic mythology as an old man with a white beard, dressed in white, but instead a procession of worshippers, seeking the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary” (Culhane 182). After presenting fairies from European animism, Graeco-Roman paganism, and Darwinian evolution, Disney does not sound like the most orthodox “Christian artist.” One would expect the latter to show Satan versus Christ, not the Slavonic god Chernabog vs. the Virgin Mary.
Through decidedly pluralistic religious imagery, Fantasia does as much as it can to ensure that the final Christianity will appear as one more metaphor (contrasted with the literal science of Rite of Spring). To address all humanity, the movie emphasizes the importance of multi-religious imagery to give hope and faith in a world that is otherwise dinosaur eat dinosaur—to extinction. As a “psychedelic” wash of tropes and music, it installs its conformist vision. Like that bastion of stage five, Sigmund Freud, Fantasia does so by adjusting sexual fantasies to what it deems the scientific norm.
Continuje to THE BIG PICTURE Chapter 3 Part 5
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