Behind These Castle Walls, Part III: Fantasia (1940)

Behind These Castle Walls, Part III: Fantasia (1940)

It’s been clearly too long since the last installment and I blame today’s movie for it. Fantasia is a difficult movie to approach because it has no larger story and is also not as well known today as all the other movies. Yet again, it is clearly a technological achievement with astonishing visuals and an unusual concept for its time, mixing animation, classical music and live action footage for what must have been really confusing to audiences in 1940. I had never seen it before but only the Fantasia 2000 sequel. I thought about talking about the original version that includes the racist scenes that have been removed since 1960 and while this is interesting, I decided not to because a) this problem is obvious and has been dealt with by Disney (with only a 20 year-delay) and b) I’m doing this to discuss the effects these movies still have today, so I might as well go with the current version. There are still enough issues to look at in this one and I can’t wait to move on to get to the next ones (of which there are still officially 53 left).

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