Fantasia Overview:

Fantasia (1940) was a Animation - Family Film directed by Bill Roberts and Ford Beebe Jr. and produced by Walt Disney and Ben Sharpsteen.

SYNOPSIS

The movie many consider Disney's greatest animation achievement is a series of eight animated fantasies set to classical music conducted by Leopold Stokowski. Swirling, surrealistic, colorful, it's long been considered a classic.

(Source: available at Amazon AMC Classic Movie Companion).

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Fantasia was inducted into the National Film Registry in 1990.

Academy Awards 1941 --- Ceremony Number 14 (source: AMPAS)

AwardRecipientResult
Special AwardTo Leopold Stokowski and his associates for their unique achievement in the creation of a new form of visualized music in Walt Disney's production, Fantasia, thereby widening the scope of the motion picture as entertainment and as an art form.Won
Special AwardTo Walt Disney, William Garity, John N. A. Hawkins and the RCA Manufacturing Company for their outstanding contribution to the advancement of the use of sound in motion pictures through the production of Fantasia.Won
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BlogHub Articles:

Fantasia 2000 (1999)

on Jul 20, 2013 From Journeys in Classic Film

I reviewed the first installment of Fantasia last September (shocking that this feature closes by the end of this year) and felt that the 1940s experiment in music and animation was a “pretty screensaver;” so I wasn’t too excited to watch the failed continuation of the series, Fant... Read full article


A special Fantasia birthday at Radio City Music Hall. (1)

By Brandie on May 21, 2012 From True Classics

by Dorian Tenore-Bartilucci My very first moviegoing experience turned out to be simply a warm-up, a dry run: I was about five years old, and I went to the Interboro Theater in the Bronx, where our family lived at the time, to see The Sound of Music (1965). It would have been great, except that I wa... Read full article


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Quotes from

No Quote for this film.

Facts about

The 1947 re-release was distributed with Peter and the Wolf, which was originally a segment in Make Mine Music, shown as a featurette, much the way the first two or three Disney "Winnie the Pooh" shorts were shown before the main feature in theaters. This was the closest Walt Disney ever got to continuously updating Fantasia with new segments, although the "Peter and the Wolf" cartoon was not actually incorporated into "Fantasia."
The initial wide release was a dismal box office failure. In later years, some theater chains, which would normally run any Disney release, would not book the reissues of this film. However, by the 1969 reissue, the film attracted considerable interest for its supposedly psychedelic imagery and Disney marketed the film according to take advantage of it. The reissue was successful and the film's reputation and popular appeal grew from that point to where its first home video release in 1991 broke records for sales.
Walt Disney originally wanted to re-release the film each year with new music segments, but this proved over-ambitious. Among the pieces that were at least storyboarded for insertion were Jean Sibelius's "Swan of Tuonela," Richard Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries," Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's "Flight of the Bumblebee," and Carl Maria von Weber's "Invitation to the Waltz" (a new concept that would have starred Peter Pegasus from the "Pastoral" segment). Some of these ideas, however, were incorporated into Fantasia/2000.
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Special Award Oscar 1941



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National Film Registry

Fantasia

Released 1940
Inducted 1990
(Sound)




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Also directed by James Algar




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Also produced by Walt Disney




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Also released in 1940




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