It was VHS that helped bring Fantasia 2000 to the screen. In 1991, Walt Disney’s original animated masterpiece Fantasia was released on VHS and sold 14.2 million copies worldwide.
A sequel to Fantasia was a passion project for Walt’s nephew, Roy E. Disney, son of Roy O. Disney. One day, over lunch, Roy E. Disney brought up the idea to Michael Eisner shortly after he joined Disney as CEO.
“I saw a look in Michael’s eye when I told him about Fantasia, and he said, ‘Yeah, that’s kind of an interesting idea,’” remembered Disney in a 1999 interview. “So, I tucked away his reaction and thought, ‘That was interesting, I can’t imagine previous administrations reacting that way.’”
After Fantasia’s successful release on VHS, Roy seized an opportunity: “I wrote Michael a little note and said, ‘Not only should we do the second Fantasia, but now we can afford it!”
The follow-up to Fantasia was put into production, signifying a true realization Walt Disney had for the original film. Fantasia, released on November 13, 1940, was unlike anything accomplished in film.
The film was released in a non-traditional motion picture format as a “roadshow attraction” (released to a limited number of theaters for a certain period). It also came with an intermission, was released in “Fantasound” (an early version of stereophonic sound), and programs were even provided to audiences.
Walt also had other unique plans for Fantasia, as author John Culhane noted in his book Fantasia 2000: Visions of Hope:
“’It is our intention to make a new version of Fantasia every year,’ said Walt Disney in 1940. ‘Its pattern is very flexible and fun to work with – not really a concert, not a vaudeville or a revue, but a grand mixture of comedy, fantasy, drama, impressionism, color, sound and epic fury.’”
However, when Fantasia didn’t fare well at the box office, these plans for future Fantasias were put aside. But, as years went on and Fantasia went through re-issues at theaters, the film gained renewed appreciation from many who saw it as innovative. By the time Fantasia had its successful home video release, it was appreciated as a masterpiece.
The sequel, initially entitled Fantasia Continued, before eventually being retitled Fantasia 2000 for its release at the start of the new millennium, was initially to include several segments from the original along with new sections.
In the end, however, only the iconic “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” with Mickey Mouse would return, surrounded by all new musical animated moments.
The film would open with Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Symphony Number 5,” a surreal sequence directed by Pixote Hunt that featured triangular shapes that mimic butterflies and bats, swarming against a backdrop of light that drips and flashes through clouds.
This was followed by “Pines of Rome” by Ottorino Respighi, which is the backdrop for whales being summoned by a nova, bursting from the water, and taking flight into the night sky.
“I said, ‘I don’t know what we’re going to do, but let’s just think about it. Let’s make it a fantasy of some kind.’” recalled director Hendel Butoy in 1999, discussing how the concept came about. “One of our artists then went and drew what a child might see in the shapes of clouds in the sky. She drew one sketch that had a whale in the clouds. From that sketch, we said, ‘Well, that’s an image that we’ve never seen before.’”
“Rhapsody in Blue” by George Gershwin was next on the program. Directed by Eric Goldberg, the animation here was in the style of legendary caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, who influenced Aladdin, thanks to Goldberg, a great admirer of Hirschfeld’s work.
Set in 1930s Manhattan, the segment focused on four characters trying to realize their dreams. Goldberg, who worked on the segment with his wife Susan, who served as art director, said that it turned out exactly how they conceived it. “We got something on the screen that really feels like our vision,” noted Goldberg in ‘99. “And we did it with the studio’s blessing.”
The next segment was set to “Piano Concerto No. 2,” by Dmitri Shostakovich, and it tells the tale of The Steadfast Tin Soldier by Hans Christian Andersen.
Disney had almost adapted the story in the late thirties and early forties, and conceptual artwork created for this unproduced film was still in the Studio’s Animation Research Library.
“Roy brought in the music and asked, ‘Is there anything worthwhile here?’” remembered Butoy, who also directed this segment, adding, “We put the sketches together as a story reel, and everybody looked at it. It was unanimous: we should do this. It was just kind of serendipitous that those sketches were done back then, and now it’s come around. It’s one of those happy coincidences.”
Next up was “The Carnival of the Animals” by Camille Saint-Sans as the backdrop for the tale of a flamingo who gets a hold of a yo-yo. “I needed a reason for [the flamingo] to have a yo-yo,” said Goldberg, who also directed this sequence. “Originally, he just finds it, and all of the other flamingos chase him, not unlike the ostriches chasing the one with the grapes in ‘Dance of the Hours.’ I felt that it was too similar to ‘Dance of the Hours,’ so I decided to change the dynamic and just make him the goofball that just doesn’t want to get in line. He just wants to do his yo-yo tricks and be left alone, thank you very much. Of course, the others don’t like that because they have a mob mentality.”
This was followed by the return of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” after which a segment served as a vehicle for Donald Duck, set to “Pomp and Circumstance” by Sir Edward Elgar. In this section, Donald plays Noah’s assistant and tries to get two of each animal onto the ark before the flood. But, in the process, he and his true love, Daisy Duck, get separated and try to find one another.
“The whole thing being done in pantomime really lent itself to Donald,” said the segment’s director Francis Glebas in 1999. “It was actually like doing a silent film, only it was much trickier because if we made a little change, the music didn’t change, so you had to come up with new ‘bits of business’ to stick in where the old ‘business’ was.”
The conclusion for Fantasia 2000 was the dramatic “The Firebird Suite” by Igor Stravinsky. The segment, about a sprite who accidentally wakes the Firebird, a mammoth bird made of flames and lava, emerging from a nearby volcano, was directed by twin brothers Paul and Gaëtan Brizzi, who had helmed segments of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, at the Studio’s Paris facility.
Just before the film’s release, Paul Brizzi said, “Our goal was to create a visual poem, using the expressions of the characters to convey this. It’s a tribute to nature and how it can be so beautiful and so powerful and dangerous and unpredictable. It’s really a message of hope, especially at the end of the millennium.”
Throughout Fantasia 2000, each segment was introduced by a different guest star, including Steve Martin, Itzhak Perlman, Quincy Jones, Bette Midler, James Earl Jones, Penn & Teller, and Angela Lansbury. Don Hahn directed these sections.
Like the original Fantasia, the sequel had a very unique release. It premiered on December 17, 1999, at Carnegie Hall as part of a five-city concert tour. Fantasia 2000 then opened on New Year’s Day 2000, exclusively at IMAX theaters, where it played for a four-month limited engagement through April 30. This was followed by a brief hiatus, after which Fantasia 2000 opened in theaters everywhere that summer on June 16, 2000.
Now, as it’s about to celebrate its 25th anniversary, Fantasia 2000 can be seen as a movie that brought Disney’s incredible animation renaissance period to an impressive crescendo and carried on a rich history and legacy that began with Walt.
It certainly was a shining moment for Roy E. Disney, who we sadly lost in 2009. He had shepherded the production throughout its journey, as so much changed at Disney. Just before the release of Fantasia 2000, Roy reflected on the comeback Disney animation had just experienced during the 90s by saying, “Maybe the public wanted it to happen, in a way. I think, maybe, they missed it.”
Michael Lyons is a freelance writer, specializing in film, television, and pop culture. He is the author of the book, Drawn to Greatness: Disney’s Animation Renaissance, which chronicles the amazing growth at the Disney animation studio in the 1990s. In addition to Animation Scoop and Cartoon Research, he has contributed to Remind Magazine, Cinefantastique, Animation World Network and Disney Magazine. He also writes a blog, Screen Saver: A Retro Review of TV Shows and Movies of Yesteryear and his interviews with a number of animation legends have been featured in several volumes of the books, Walt’s People. You can visit Michael’s web site Words From Lyons at: 
I was very excited to learn that Disney was making a sequel to “Fantasia”, but I had mixed feelings when I found out which musical selections were to be included in it. As it turned out, in general, the segments that I expected to like least, I liked best, and vice versa.
I honestly didn’t think that “Rhapsody in Blue” would work in a Fantasia movie, as the piece itself doesn’t tell a story, and its form is too, well, rhapsodic to lend itself to one. Yet Eric Goldberg managed to match it with a complex and heartfelt story about four compelling characters, all strangers to each other, whose lives intersect as they strive to attain their dreams — and without cutting or altering a single note of Gershwin’s music. It’s a perfect union of music and animation, and the emotional core of the film.
Likewise, I didn’t expect to like “The Steadfast Tin Soldier”, as I had read that the filmmakers had decided to adapt Andersen’s story before deciding on a piece of music to go with it. The chances of finding a preexisting musical work perfectly suited to the plot and character of a predetermined story, especially such a famous one, are practically nil. Yet that’s exactly what happened. Shostakovich’s concerto fits the story so well that it almost seems tailor-made — and again, not one note of his music needed to be changed.
On the other hand, I had high hopes for “Firebird”, a vividly evocative piece of music that tells a bizarre and fanciful story, but the movie’s finale was a big disappointment for me. Stravinsky’s music was so thoroughly mangled and butchered that I simply couldn’t enjoy it; and while the CGI technology of the time was a good match for the animated toys of “The Steadfast Tin Soldier”, this “tribute to nature” just looked freakishly unnatural.
Michael Eisner, who has as much appreciation for great music as a sack of cement, conceived the idea of using Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance” after hearing the march played at his son’s high school graduation ceremony. No one else wanted to use this pompous and overblown cliché, but unfortunately they were stuck with it. I fully expected to hate the segment, and I did, but I found that the artists actually showed great ingenuity in crafting a solid story to accompany the dud of a piece that their boss had saddled them with. Still, it troubles me that Fantasia 1940 had a wonderful segment showing the pageantry of life’s evolution on Earth, while the 2000 film had Donald and Daisy Duck on Noah’s Ark. I wonder if Disney hires out the film to Christian schools for use in their “science” classes.
I also wish that Disney had engaged any orchestra conductor other than James Levine, whose sexual peccadillos involving teenage boys were common knowledge in the classical music world even then.
I’ll say that “Fantasia 2000” was very impressive on the Imax screen, and despite its faults I enjoy watching it occasionally at home. I wish it had done better at the box office, and I wish Disney would come out with an all-new Fantasia movie every year. But that’s not going to happen, at least in the foreseeable future. In the meantime, we can do what Disney’s artists did in 1940 and in 2000: listen to great music, close our eyes, and let our imaginations run away with us.
The “Pomp and Circumstance” sequence was originally, in Eisner’s idea, going to be a cross-over sequences involving Donald help deliver the Disney princes and princesses their bundle of joy. Needless to say, a lot of Disney animation people objected to this, even after a story reel of this was made (which has been shown to the public in producer Hahn’s “Rare Disney” screenings), and it ended up as a Noah’s Ark piece with Donald and Daisy. I think they made the right choice despite the studio having already tackled the Ark story twice before (including once in stop-motion).
The arrival of Fantasia 2000 in the year 2000 was a memorable event to say the least. I will never forget seeing it on a gigantic screen in downtown Sacramento. And we got a backstage tour afterward to witness how the magic of IMAX was carried out.
The big question that this film begs is this: Is Fantasia 2000 a worthy successor to its venerable parent film? While I am well aware that there are those who would say that it doesn’t come up to the mark, for my money it strikes many of the same chords as the original, as well as embarking off in some bold new directions. I enjoyed the variety of hosts for the various segments, especially the first time watching, when each guest artist was a surprise. The intros were brief yet meaty and served as decent appetizers for the various dishes that were served up.
As with the first Fantasia, the water-motif is ever present in each segment. Plus, its themes of (this is my own construct) the mysteries of life and the secrets of the universe are carried out to some degree or another in each piece. The whales flying through the air was as unexpected as it was well-executed. Rhapsody in Blue, in my book, is the biggest winner, with its Depression era setting and its cast of colorful, vibrant, and totally non-speaking characters. The Steadfast Tin Soldier–is that Maureen O’Hara as the ballerina? I ask that because she bears a strong resemblance to Miss O”Hara’s appearance in “Dance Girl Dance.” The likeness has struck me every time I have watched it. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is, as always, a feast for the eyes and the (mouse) ears, and Pomp and Circumstance certainly serves as an unusual but not necessarily inappropriate background for the story of Noah’s Ark as seen through the eyes of Noah’s assistant Donald Duck. The pathos in the final scene between Donald and Daisy is so profound it’s easy to forget that they are cartoon ducks. And the Firebird is a powerful if offbeat segment with which to end, perhaps not quite as iconic as Bald Mountain/Ave Maria, but a worthy piece all the same.
So, the answer I would give to my own question is a resounding Yes! I believe Fantasia 2000 more than lives up to its promise. And as far as a film that best represents the millennium year, I would choose Fantasia 2000, with the first Gladiator film as a close second. Thanks for remembering a film that deserves to be remembered. And Roy E. Disney certainly left behind an important legacy.
I still want to have a third edition especially if it would mean some new traditional animation segment done by some recently trained animators (who helped with the studio’s centennial short).
The other interesting thing about Fantasia 2000 is that there were additional segments being worked on with the thought that it, like Walt’s original plans for Fantasia, would have a sequel with new segments added in place of others. Unfortunately Fantasia 2000 didn’t do as well as hoped and those plans were scrapped. However 2 shorts were completed and released as DVD/Blu Ray extras, The Little Matchgirl directed by Roger Allers and One by One directed by Pixote Hunt. The former was released with The Little Mermaid and the latter with DVD release of The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride Special Edition.
I saw it long ago before I was into all this; can’t remember if I hated it or loved it. I’d probably enjoy it more nowadays.