*To begin, watch the side
by side comparison of The Pastoral Symphony on YouTube here.*
If you were to see the recent edition of the Disney film Fantasia, you would surely be marveled at the artistry of the film and leave pleasantly content. But, if you were to see the original edition of the film, I’m sure you would not come away from the film with the same feeling. This would be because the original film contained racial stereotypes, largely being in the short The Pastoral Symphony. The short features the character Sunflower, a young centaur who is the groomer to the older centaurs. Upon the films re-release for television in 1969 after the civil rights movement, the frame was cropped in the shots that had Sunflower in it. By sweeping the evidence of the stereotyped character under the rug, Disney has managed to pass the re-releases off as if the controversy never existed. In an Entertainment Weekly article in 1991, Disney editor John Carnochan said that he was appalled that the stereotypes were even in the film. Disney was re-releasing the film for its 50th anniversary for the first time on DVD, so Carnochan oversaw refurbishing the film. In conclusion, while some films might be viewed as masterpieces of their time, they could have dark pasts as such does Fantasia.
Before you read, I suggest watching the film here* on youtube.
Major Post 3, by Victoria Courchesne
The Firebird is a masterpiece retelling of the concepts of death and rebirth. It is featured in Fantasia 2000, Disney’s long awaited sequel to the first Fantasia. Walt Disney himself always wanted a sequel to Fantasia, as his original plan for the first film was to continuously replace different shorts so no one would see the same film twice. But the sequel was shelved until 1991. It took 9 years to create the film, but what came out of it was a marvel of 2D and 3D animation.
The Firebird’s concept was first thought of after the eruption of Mount St.Helens in Oregon. The event was so catastrophic the land was left completely barren. The Disney producers imagined what it would be like to witness a time-lapse of the rebirth of the land, and thus The Firebird was born.
Most of the scenes in the film relied on 2D animation, with a large amount of that being 2D effects. The technical team was called on to create many assets for the short, such as the particles, rotoscoping mesh that acted as the character’s robe, and more.
The Firebird concludes Fantasia 2000 in a fantastical demonstration of talent from the Disney Studio.
If you’d like to learn more, there is a video below featuring the making of Fantasia 2000.
*The video is kind of low quality, I suggest playing it without headphones to get a better quality of sound.
Major Post 5: Disney and Rotoscoping/Live Action Reference
Walt Disney did
more than just animate, he worked to make his audience believe that they were
part of the worlds he would create. To achieve this immersion Disney Studios
used live action reference and rotoscoping to inspire and create many of their
most memorable scenes and characters. Linked below is a shot of early live
action footage of Kathryn Beaumont, the voice of Alice from Disney’s Alice in
Wonderland, which was referenced and rotoscoped by animators.
Rotoscoping is when an animator will
draw over live-action footage of an actor for an animated film. This technique was created by Max Fleischer,
the creator of the Out Of the Ink Well series. Originally, it was referenced
to as the Fleischer Process when it was first implemented into animation. Rotoscoping
can be a good way to make a character feel much more realistic since you are
able to capture fine details and emotional shifts that can be hard to see when
you are merely looking at references. However, sometimes rotoscoping can have
an uncanny and creepy feel to it since it can walk the line between realistic
and over exaggerated.
Because I had a lot of left over material from research for my last post on Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) and can’t stop stressing how great and important Lotte Reiniger is. Being the first feature animation is sure to make Achmed become a source for many of its successors.
By deduction I imagine it was a very early film produced in the Western world using ‘Arabia’ or Orientalism as its only visual and narrative theme. It was adapted from two stories of the ‘Middle Eastern’ fairytale collection Arabic One Thousand and One Nights, one of which is the now very familiar story of Aladdin and the Magic Lamp, made popular by its circulation in book form and by Disney’s adaptation in 1992. There is actually a ‘Prince Achmed’ in at the very beginning of the film, and I’d like to think the name is a reference to Reiniger’s Achmed, even if it isn’t confirmed.
This Achmed is definitely not Aladdin’s friend.
The harem is a common Orientalist theme, and I think we were all not expecting that scene with Achmed and the servant/entertainer girls entertaining each other in a room. It is worth mentioning that European countries never had an equivalent of the systematic Hays Code that banned ‘immoral’ content. But it seems that Reiniger just has a penchant for racy or sexual more-than-undertones, as also seen from her later short film Papageno (1935). In the handout interview Reiniger admits as much when asked directly about that Achmed scene. What a lady.
Horniness aside, this is a very cool adaptation of Papageno’s story from Mozart’s The MagicFlute; in the original opera the character Papageno is more a sidekick than a main character.
Though I have not surveyed a list of the earliest films (including live action), Achmed might be the earliest feature with a wizard or magic duel sequence, and is most definitely the earliest example of a duel that shows the characters shapeshifting. According to the TVTropes page on ‘Shapeshifter Showdowns’ as it is titled, this is a theme that has existed in human myths and folklore even before the printing press was invented. I was reminded of the Disney film Sword in the Stone (1963) which also involves a witch and a wizard/sorcerer throwing down in magical animal transformer style. Something about turning into different creatures, especially because of our associations with certain animals being good/evil or more or less powerful than other animals, is very entertaining to watch. At least it was the case for child-me, who still re-emerges when to relive watching this sequence.
A duel for the ages (of animation).
It’s noteworthy that the animation technique for changing between animals in Achmed makes more use of morphing, perhaps because of the limitations that come with cutout/silhouette. In Sword in the Stone, and also in another Disney example of a shapeshifting sequence, The Emperor’s New Groove, there is more use of special effects like sparks and jump cuts to show a character has changed animal. Arguably it makes for more interesting pacing and varied rhythm, and as we saw in today’s class (Class 6), synchrony with music was established early on as a Disney trademark method. In the promised future post on Michel Ocelot, I could talk about how this lively rhythm/music accompaniment was brought back to silhouette morphing in Princes et Princesses, but it will be for another day.
ANIM223 - HISTORY OF ANIMATION - FALL 2019 