Fantasia 2000
Short description
Fantasia 2000 is an animated anthology built around classical and orchestral music, pairing each piece with its own visual sequence. It revisits the Sorcerer's Apprentice segment from the 1940 original, with Mickey Mouse as the apprentice, and surrounds it with new shorts set to works by composers including Beethoven, Gershwin, Shostakovich, Saint-Saëns, Elgar and Stravinsky. The segments range from abstract imagery to a day in New York, a story after Hans Christian Andersen, and a sequence featuring Donald Duck, introduced between pieces by live-action hosts such as Steve Martin, Itzhak Perlman, Quincy Jones, Bette Midler and James Earl Jones.
The film is a large collaborative effort, with James Algar, Don Hahn, Gaëtan Brizzi, Paul Brizzi, Eric Goldberg, Hendel Butoy, Francis Glebas, Pixote Hunt and others sharing directing duties. Algar had directed the 1940 Fantasia, and the sequel came roughly six decades later; Hahn went on to direct Howard in 2018, while Goldberg's later work includes Oswald the Lucky Rabbit in 2022. The screenplay is credited to David Reynolds, Don Hahn and Perce Pearce, and Donald W. Ernst produced.
Released in 2000, the film runs 74 minutes and carries a reported budget of 80 million US dollars against a worldwide box office of about 61 million. On IMDb it holds 7.1 out of 10 from over 40,000 votes, and on TMDB 7 out of 10 from more than a thousand votes. A critics' rating of 7 out of 10 from 86 reviews places it in similar territory to the audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- In the étude “Rhapsody in Blue,” George Gershwin himself (1898-1937) appears – a slender man playing the piano in the window above Rachel.
- With the exception of Pixar films, the étude “The Steadfast Tin Soldier” was the first instance in the history of Disney animated cinema where tin characters were a product of computer technology from beginning to end. The humpback whales in the étude “Pines of Rome” are also computer-generated, but their eyes were hand-drawn. This was done because the equipment available to the filmmakers at the time did not allow them to create sufficiently expressive eyes for the animals. By the time it came to creating “The Steadfast Tin Soldier,” this problem had been solved, and all the computer characters in this episode have quite expressive facial features.
- A special computer program was written to depict the water in the episode "Pinewoods of Rome".
- It took 9 years to create the animated film.
- The original “Fantasia” cartoon from 1940 was created all at once, whereas in this case each étude was created separately in between working on other projects. Work on the first étude, “Pines of Rome,” was completed in 1995, and the last was the étude about Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (1770-1827).
- The first full-length animated film in IMAX format. Disney sold exclusive screening rights to IMAX theaters only on the condition of a limited release (4 months) and for half of the box office revenue. Since not all IMAX theaters were willing to agree to these terms, the film was not shown in all of them. One such refusal came from the California Science Center in Los Angeles, so Disney built an IMAX theater there specifically to showcase this film, and then demolished it after 4 months.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
