This is a review done at the time by a friend of mine:
LESSONS FROM FANTASIA 2000
By Peter Adamakos
Part 1
Now that FANTASIA 2000 has come and gone in IMAX, and come and gone on regular-sized movie screens, there are some lessons to be learned from the experience that reveals the state of the art and business of animation today as perhaps no other contemporary film does.
Most obvious is the choice of how to show the film. The original FANTASIA, once it was determined to be a feature film, was planned as a wide-screen stereophonic feature. This was a phenomenal undertaking since there had been only sporadic attempts at wide screen projection in the silent days utilizing differing approaches or techniques. In the end, costs being what they were, a wide screen format was abandoned, and Walt Disney would have to wait another 15 years to release what would become his first feature cartoon in wide screen, the Cinemascope production LADY AND THE TRAMP. He did get his second wish, however, and with the help of RCA, stereophonic sound was first heard in 1940’s FANTASIA. The world would have to wait another 15 years for someone to make a second stereophonic film. The new sound system, named Fantasound, was only available in a few theaters in the largest cities. The others got regular sound prints and did not have to rewire their theaters.
FANTASIA was a flop, and within a year the distributor, RKO, edited the film down in length and released it as the bottom half of a double feature with some long-forgotten western. Its publicity campaign, “Fantasia will Amazia” didn’t help. The complete feature was reissued in 1947 to no great business. When reissued in 1956 and 1964, it came back in “wide screen” as originally planned. Of course all they could do was in effect “letterbox” it by cutting off about one third of the top and bottom parts of the film, then stretching the rest so that the hippos looked like blimps (as one critic put it.) Not until 1970 did recent generations see the film as it was originally made.
So what did the marketing geniuses of FANTASIA 2000 do? Apparently they did not learn from the distorted showings of the first FANTASIA over the years and created a new mess for the new film, which was made in standard 35mm. They decided to release it in IMAX. It was not made in IMAX, the layouts were not planned for showing in IMAX, but hey, bigger is better, right? Wrong. If you saw the film in IMAX you saw what a disaster that decision was. The action at times was too fast to be seen, much less absorbed in the IMAX format. At most you could take in and process only a portion of what was happening onscreen, because you were not placed in a position to see the entire screen’s action in the number of frames each took to unfold. Even the slower sections were only glimpsed, as your eyes darted about to see every part of the screen then your brain tried to put the sections all together in a composite scene before it moved onto the next shot. There was no sense of perspective either as a humpback whale was now the same size as Donald Duck’s ass. It was like looking through a keyhole trying to take in the whole room inside while only able to see part of the room at any one time. It was the hippo blimps all over again. But today Bigger is Better and we were in effect being told that in IMAX, Fantasia will Amazia!
Of course not every city has an IMAX theater, so most people couldn’t or wouldn’t travel to see it. Then a couple of months ago the film was released to regular theaters, but only until July 13th we were told. My suspicion is that the theater chains, in the midst of the biggest movie summer ever, were not too pleased to take up screen time with what was now used goods. My guess is that Disney, using its clout dictated that they would have to take the film, but agreed it would only be for a short time. The film did not have the benefit of a huge new publicity campaign. That was done six months earlier. Critics were not going to review it all over again. There was even some confusion as to what this new release was. Our paper, in its weekend mini reviews of all the movies playing said “This is not to be confused with the recent IMAX version, demonstrating their own confusion, and that of the public. To the public that knew what it was, this was six-month-old news. It was an “old” picture that had no buzz left in it, and so it did dismal business. The take so far is about $60 million, great for the IMAX Company but a disaster for Disney? Even their animated clunkers usually earn about double that. Opening both the original and the new FANTASIA in only a few cities proved an original and repeated disaster. This should have been obvious; especially today when major films open on over 2,000 screens and the trailers blanket television morning, noon and night to achieve that all important first weekend gross. Good or bad as they are, is there anyone not aware of recent films like THE PATRIOT, CHICKEN RUN or THE PERFECT STORM? When it eventually comes to video it will likely be a poor seller, with little anticipation built in or reach beyond the market that buys every Disney animated video, whatever it is.
The saddest figure in all this is, of course, Roy Disney. This was his pet project for the last 15 years or so. The humpback whale sequence was the first completed, almost eight years ago. The film now becomes a footnote, an oddity, in Disney animation, just like the first FANTASIA did at the time of its release. Roy Disney is not the main loser, however. We are. We the audience, we the animation enthusiasts are. This film should have become a landmark film as revolutionary to animation as SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS or WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT and THE LITTLE MERMAID were. The first FANTASIA was truly state of the animation art, in many ways unequalled in the last 60 years. It showed what animation could be and hinted at what it could become. But its failure meant a different track for Disney, or rather a continuation of the past, and after the success of SNOW WHITE, to which FANTASIA was constantly (unfairly) compared, an eventual CINDERELLA, ALICE IN WONDERLAND, PETER PAN and SLEEPING BEAUTY became a no-brainer inevitability.
