Film
A true watershed film that opened the door to a new experimental era. The idea of producing a sequel to Fantasia was already in Walt Disney's plans, but after the disappointing box-office result of the first film it was decisively shelved, only to be revived with the arrival of the new millennium. Like the previous 1940 Classic, Fantasia 2000 is divided into eight musical segments performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and establishing a continuous dialogue between music and images. In the soundtrack we find Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, Sostakovic's Piano Concerto No. 2 in F major and the return of Paul Dukas' The Sorcerer's Apprentice, which accompanies the same short film with Mickey Mouse already present in the original film and which has become the symbol of both.
Art
Among Vasily Kandinsky's best-known works is Composition VIII (1923), a set of geometric elements and lines drawn as precisely as possible. So precisely that they seem to take on a life of their own and interact with each other. The combination of shapes and colours was the one studied by the artist in 1911, who published 'Spiritual in Art' at the time. In that book Kandinsky writes:
It is easy to see that certain colours are strengthened by certain shapes and weakened by others. In any case, bright colours are intensified if they are placed within sharp shapes (e.g. yellow in a triangle); colours that like depth are strengthened by round shapes (e.g. blue by a circle).
Thus each line takes on a meaning: triangular lines represent tension, horizontal lines represent calm, circular lines represent movement, and so on. Any reference to reality is absent and the real protagonists are the colours. This is the key work for understanding Kandinsky's art, abstractionism and also Fantasia: no logical connection to what is around us is possible, so the viewer can have a vision of the painting that is entirely his own and individual.
We seem to find the same representative concept as in the 1940 film, but in 1999 it is taken to the extreme with geometric figures that come to life and become beautiful butterflies (as dear Heimlich, the friendly and greedy caterpillar with a strong German accent in A Bug's Life, would say). Colourful butterflies that nevertheless look like paper, origami like those made by the young artist Bruno Cerasi, who from the paper butterflies of Human Needs (2018) that you see in the photo, has moved on to NFT with the fascinating project that we invite you to discover on his website. A project and a personal experience in which, by monitoring his visual field (transformed into colours by an algorithm), he links the image of a butterfly with the slow decline of his sight. A butterfly like those in Fantasia 2000 hovering over the notes of Ludwig van Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, or, in a way, like those in Encanto (2021), which will be discussed in the appropriate space.
Even when the tones darken and the atmospheres turn grey, Disney does not lose its artistic vein. In the last segment of the film, Igor' Fëdorovič Stravinsky's The Firebird, after the destructive eruption of a volcano, we find the same atmospheres as in Caspar David Friedrich's The Abbey in the Oak Grove.
External links
Watch Fantasia 2000 on Disney+
Works of art:
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