When Mickey Mouse’s popularity began to wane in the 1930s, Walt Disney planned a big comeback short, which became The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, which grew into the full-length Concert Feature, which conductor Leopold Strokowski — who had offered his services at no charge — dubbed Fantasia.
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice was based on Goethe’s ballad Der Zauberlehrling set to the music of L’apprenti sorcier, a symphonic poem by Paul Dukas based on the same story. What’s interesting to Disney animation fans though is that The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is the first time Mickey Mouse appears with pupils in his eyes, introduced by Fred Moore.
The monumental design and animation process used more than 1,000 artists and technicians:
From November 1938 to October 1939, artist Oskar Fischinger worked on the Toccata and Fugue. He was a pioneer in producing abstract animation set to music, but Disney felt his designs were too abstract for a mass audience. Fischinger left the studio in apparent disgust and despair, as he was not used to working in a group and with little control. Disney had plans to make the segment the first commercial 3-D film, with viewers being given glasses with their programs, but this idea was later abandoned.
In The Nutcracker Suite, animator Art Babbitt is said to have credited Curly Howard from The Three Stooges as a guide for animating the dancing mushrooms in the Chinese Dance routine. An Arabian dancer was brought into the studios to study the movements for the goldfish in Arab Dance.
An early concept for The Rite of Spring was to extend the story from the first life forms on Earth up to the age of man, but it was curtailed by Disney to avoid religious controversy. To gain a better understanding of the history of the planet the studio received guidance from Roy Chapman Andrews, the director of the American Museum of Natural History, English biologist Julian Huxley, paleontologist Barnum Brown, and astronomer Edwin Hubble. Animators studied comets and nebulae at the Mount Wilson Observatory and observed a herd of iguanas and a baby alligator that were brought into the studios.
Stravinsky was the only surviving composer featured in Fantasia during its development. He visited the studios in December 1939 to see The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, hear Stokowski’s arrangement of The Rite of Spring and view the sketches, storyboards, and models for the segment.
For inspiration on the routines in Dance of the Hours, animators studied real life ballet performers including Marge Champion and Irina Baronova.
Béla Lugosi, best known for his role in Dracula, was brought in to provide reference poses for Chernabog. As animator Bill Tytla disliked the results, he used colleague Wilfred Jackson to pose shirtless which gave him the images he needed.
The Ave Maria segment was to provide “an emotional relief to audiences tense from the shock of Mussorgsky’s malignant music and its grim visualization.” Its sequence was designed for the studios’ multiplane camera, which provides the illusion of depth to the 2-D drawings. Fantasia used more multiplane footage than Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio combined. Ed Gershman, who worked on the segment, described how the animation of the procession figures was so closely drawn, “a difference in the width of a pencil line was more than enough to cause jitters, not only to the animation, but to everyone connected with the sequence.” Disney ordered many time-consuming and expensive reshots. A horizontal camera crane was built that could accommodate pictures four feet wide on panes of glass that were mounted on moveable stands, so they could be placed out of the way as the camera progressed through the film. Workers shot for six days and six nights, only to find the camera had the wrong lens on. They shot again for three days and nights before a small earthquake had rocked the wooden stands holding the glass panes. They restarted once more, and completed filming with one day to spare until the premiere. On the day of release, the last piece of film arrived in New York with four hours to spare.
Fantasia was also the first commercial film to be shown in stereophonic sound.